Absence

The empty nest,

The silent forest,

The dry creekbed.

Missing something,

Waiting for something

To happen.

Elsewhere,

Not here,

Far away,

Beyond.

-A.S. 6/12/22, Lenah Valley

Lake Mackintosh, Pentax MX, Cinestill 50, Nov 2022.

Afternoon light in forest, Pentax MX, Cinestill 50, Nov 2022.

Lake Mackintosh, and two peaks named by Henry Hellyer in 1828. Pentax MX, Cinestill 50, Nov 2022.

Patience

If we are patient, we accept and resolve the problems we encounter in a calm and effective manner.

The echidna must be a patient creature, given its diet consists of eating lots and lots of ants . Pentax MX, Jan 2022.

When our patience is tested, it’s because things are not going the way we thought they might go. When our expectation finds its demise in the reality of the situation, this is the moment when our patience is called upon. The future we have imagined can be quite different to the future that makes it to the present. Patience endows us with the ability to accept this disparity without working ourselves into a frenzy.

White moth. Pentax MX, Jan 2022.

Patience is when we wait for our cup of tea to cool down a little bit so that we don’t burn ourselves upon attempting to drink it. Patience is when we choose not to react to a sub-optimal outcome. Patience is waiting for the morning to arrive, no matter how long we perceive the night to be.

Pointy mountain, rainforest, open plain. Pentax MX, Jan 2022.

-A.S. - Lenah Valley, 28/11/22

Blizzard on the plateau

The storm doesn’t always come when we expect it.

Kitchen Hut, with only the top door showing. Aug 2015

I am happy to report my return from my most recent solo mission. I managed to walk, crawl, wrestle, wriggle, stumble and drag my way from Tullah to Cradle.

My objective for the trip was to follow the route of Henry Hellyer’s desperate journey from November 1828 in which Hellyer and his men got hit by a blizzard up near Pencil Pine Bluff and were left with no alternative but to descend into Fury Gorge.

Kim Ladiges braking trail for his clients, July 2016.

The details of this trip I will save for a feature article I intend to write for Wild Magazine. For now, let’s just say that I am happy to have returned. It was a big trip, and I have taken a lot away from it. The country that I walked through is wild country, thick, steep and merciless to the unprepared, but also incredibly rewarding to those who are willing to persevere in the face of many difficulties.

Windy conditions near Pelion Gap, July 2016.

The two rolls of film I shot on this trip are currently in the lab, being developed and scanned. So the images you see in this post are not from my recent trip, but from winter trips I have guided on the Overland Track in the past. I simply thought I would include them here because the conditions they display are not unlike the conditions I experienced in the last two days of my journey. They were also not unlike the conditions Hellyer and his men experienced 194 years ago.

So this one is just a quick memo to say I made it out in the nick o’ time.

-A.S. 26/11/22, Lenah Valley

Clear dawn, Waterfall Valley August 2015.

Old friends and short poems

“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learnt in school.” -Albert Einstein

Lookout over valley. Pentax MX, Ektar 100, Oct 2022.

Memory Furnace

Red hot coals

Burn in the furnace

Forgotten memories

Float to the surface

-A.S. 26/8/21, Lenah Valley

Afternoon light on summit plateau of kunanyi. Pentax MX, Ektar 100, Oct 2022.

Stream Prowling

Far more frivolous than a jester in court

Reaching further than the widow in her grave

Foraging for lost buttons on red dessert highway

Forlorn blackberries barring their thorns

Salvaging broken vinyls from musical ponds

Bettering technical elements in octagons

Scraping the spatula clean of all the batter

Freezing the peas one by one in a cup

Screeching banshees stealing the roof above our heads

Moaning hooligans restless in the city of neon

Fresh roadkill waiting for the midnight prowler.

20/4/22, A.S. Lenah Valley

Mizzly mist over lake and hill. Pentax MX, Ektar 100, Oct 2022.

Half a ton

Half a ton of coal

and half a ton of fog

Both weigh the same

But only one turns the cogs.

27/4/22, A.S. Lenah Valley

More scattered rocks. Pentax MX, Ektar 100, Oct 2022.

Friends

A friend is one who listens.

Southern Skyline. Pentax MX, Ektar 100, Oct 2022.

A friend is one who makes a cup of tea.

A friend never wants to hurt another friend.

A friend is one who helps things grow.

Not much shelter around those tarns… Pentax MX, Ektar 100, Oct 2022.

A friend comes when a friend is needed.

A friend can keep secrets.

A friend never dobs in another friend, unless the other friend really had it coming.

Some rocks that used to be together and now are not. Pentax MX, Ektar 100, Oct 2022.

Each and one of us is a friend in need,
So let’s be friends in deed.

That rock perches as if it was a head on a neck. Pentax MX, Ektar 100, Oct 2022.

-A.S. 12/11/22, Lenah Valley

Scribbles and things...

“There are more things…likely to frighten us than there are to crush us, we suffer more in imagination than reality.” - Seneca

Huon Valley. Pentax MX, Portra 800, Sep 2022.

Real time pondering

I took the dog for a walk

We followed the rivulet upstream

Listening to the cascading dream

The trees swayed gently side to side.

At one point, I sat and wondered

Simply letting it all be.

The quiet observer, amazed

At the world unfolding.

Being present, I find contentment

Giving up ambition, I find peace.

When I think of her, I am grounded

Grateful that she is, and exists.

-A.S. 23/11/21, Lenah Valley

Misty morning countryside. Pentax MX, Portra 800, Sep 2022.

Worry not

Relinquish the obsession to control, to rule

to determine a certain outcome.

Be free, be innocent, be unwilling to admit

That you know what will happen next

Even when you think you do.

Worry not of what will be

for it may not

Worry not of what once was

Maybe it was not.

-A.S. 28/12/2021, Lenah Valley

Rolling hills. Pentax MX, Portra 800, Sep 2022.

Where does fear go?

One moment it is there

Gripping us with despair

Then a moment later

All that’s left is thin air.

-A.S. 6/1/21

The lone cow on the hill. Pentax MX, Portra 800, Sep 2022.

Crossing the Abyss

There are at least two ways to cross a bottomless pit.

A sinkhole in the South-West. Hasselblad 500C/M, Portra 160, Feb 2022.

Sometimes in life, we can see the place we need to go, but between us and our destination lies an abyss, which could simply be a chasm, or it may be of metaphorical meaning, which at first appears to be impossible to cross.  

The idea of an abyss comes from Greek mythology, in which this is the place where demons are banished to. It’s dark, it’s deep and it’s probably a place we would rather not go. But cross the abyss we must, if we are to end up in the place where we wish to be.  

Glacial Lake in the South-West. Hasselblad 500C/M, Portra 160, Feb 2022.

And so the first and preferred method of crossing the abyss is to find a bridge, a link between this side and the other side. This allows us to avoid the abyss altogether by simply walking over the top of it and we end up on the other side. The only problem with this method is that it requires a bridge.

Some places, we’d just rather not go. Hasselblad 500C/M, Portra 160, Feb 2022.

There isn’t always a bridge. So in this case, if we wish to get to the other side of the abyss, there is only one way to do it. We must descend to the bottom, then climb up the other side.  

This presents a number of difficulties. An abyss is generally a dark place, where we can’t see very well, so it will be nearly impossible to gauge our progress. It will feel as if we are making no progress at all. Our mind may be overcome with fear of this unknown that we cannot see, and we may imagine monsters that don’t actually exist. Then again, we may be brave but fail to see the actual monsters lurking in the dark and fail to return from our noble quest. The abyss is not for the faint-hearted.  

Afternoon light. Hasselblad 500C/M, Portra 160, Feb 2022.

If we are determined, and keep going down, eventually we will arrive to the bottom. This, by no means is the halfway point. It is actually past the halfway mark. For now we have reached the point of no return and we will naturally continue. Even though the hard task of climbing is ahead of us, we are aided by one fact: we do not want to remain in the abyss. We want to find our way out. And so we climb, one little step at a time, until we see light again, and eventually return from the underworld, and find ourself on the other side.

-A.S. 27/10/2022, Lenah Valley

When all the lemons line up…

Accidents and miracles are rarely the result of a single decision.

Prepare for battle! Pentax MX, Portra 800, September 2022.

‘All the lemons are starting to line up, Sloz’. a friend of mine told me once.

‘What do you mean, Lou?’

‘Well it’s a bit like this.” he explained to me.

“Imagine you’re at the pokies machine. You drop your coins in and you wait. If one lemon appears on the screen, nothing happens. If two lemons line up, still nothing happens. But if all five lemons line up, that’s when you hit the jackpot!”

I was borrowing Lou’s paddling equipment at the time, which included the sea kayak, pfd, paddle, the whole lot. Lou is a more experienced paddler than me and he was going through his check list to make sure I wasn’t going to drown using his equipment.

“Did you check the weather?”

“Are you taking a plb?”

“Are you gonna take the paddle float?”

When I answered ‘no’ to all these questions that’s when Lou said that the lemons are all starting to line up.

So I checked the weather and I did take a paddle float in the end. Three lemons down to one. And the trip went surprisingly smoothly. Thanks Lou. Thanks for teaching me about the lining up of the lemons! It’s an invaluable analogy when it comes to outdoor leadership.

Not sure what happened here, but I doubt the cause was a single lemon. Pentax MX, Portra 800, September 2022.

If it takes a series of bad decisions for an accident to happen, then the flip side also must be true. To achieve anything truly great must come from a series of outstanding decisions. It isn’t enough to fluke something once. We must consistently make a series of good decisions in order to arrive at a magical result.

The classic example that springs to mind is the amazing ability of any expert in their field. They say it takes about ten thousand hours of dedicated practice to become an expert at something. That’s about three hours of practice a day for nine years!

It’s so easy to jump on youtube, instagram or tik tok, and watch an amazing performance by someone who has been practicing that specific skill for an entire lifetime and think gheez how inadaquate of a human being am I, my skills don’t come even close!

The thing that’s easy to forget is that an accomplished expert, be it a musician, athlete, scientist or artist, has spent a lot of time practicing. Consistently, day after day, year after year. That’s how they got good at their skill.

Light and power. Pentax MX, Portra 800, September 2022.

On a final note though, it is worth acknowledging that there is always going to be an element of chance in our daily life. Chaos is always lurking just around the corner. Although it is rarely the case, accidents and miracles do happen, and our decisions have nothing to do with them. Sometimes, there are no lemons, then we get five of them dealt in a row. And if that’s case, we better simply grab that jackpot and run.

A.S. Lenah Valley, 21/10/2022.

The Original

It is difficult to think of an idea that nobody has thought of before.

Early morning light in the Channel. Pentax MX, Portra 800, Sep 2022.

Original thought is becoming rare indeed these days. Lucky for us writers, thoughts are mostly unshared and therefore unknown. But even if we only count the ideas that are written down, there is already a formidable array of published or communicated ideas out there. Writing anything original amounts to conjuring up creative energies which we didn’t know we actually possessed.

Advice I’ve received from more experienced writers than me is that if you’re about to write a cliche, don’t. If you haven’t got anything original to say, then don’t say it.

Cirrus and cumulus. Pentax MX, Portra 800, Sep 2022.

But what could ever be considered to be original? The idea of originality is that it can be traced back to a single source. Like a quality coffee bean, or a spring that bubbles up from the earth, an original idea simply arises from its creator, unique, fully formed and ready to quench the thirst of the seeker who has not yet found what it is they’re looking for.

Being original does not necessarily mean coming up with an entirely new concept. Any idea that we have is bound to be inspired by a bunch of stimuli we have experienced previously. Therefore it is impossible to conceive an idea in isolation. An original idea is actually an amalgamation of a bunch of experiences which we have processed. Ideas are not so much new as they are recycled. To claim ideas as our own is to display an inherent arrogance, a lack of humility in acknowledging the true source of our genius: everything other than our self.

Kunanyi, from Old Station Rd. Pentax MX, Portra 800, Sep 2022.

Nevertheless, it is possible to be original. It needs not be a new idea entirely. It simply needs to be a new idea for our audience, for the beholder, to whom it matters not if the same revelation occurred to a citizen of ancient Rome two thousand years ago. Things and ideas get lost, and they also get found. Coming up with an original idea may not be so much about finding something new, but rediscovering something very old indeed.

A.S. 15/10/2022, Lenah Valley