My Views on Water
A Photographic Story

I grew up on a farm near the town of Culcairn in New South Wales. That's about 400km from the nearest ocean. Our experience of waterways included a swimming hole in the Billabong Creek, renowned as Australia's longest creek (which doesn't quite make the grade of a river), the farm dams and, thankfully the Hume Weir (later named Lake Hume) which is about 50km away and a great resource for boating, water skiing and fishing.

So the annual pilgrimage to the coast for a two-week holiday was highly anticipated, so much so that we would load up the car and the roof-rack and pack all five kids in with mum and dad and set off at 3am in order to get to the Victorian coast by lunch time.

The smell of the salt air was the perfume of excitement for my brother and me and we could hardly wait to get in and go body surfing, swimming through each other's legs and crashing through the breakers.

Since I turned twenty-five I've lived in Hobart, Tasmania, where they say 'if you go to a beach and there's someone else on it, you just go find another beach'. Our home is just a hundred meters from a little beach on the Derwent estuary. There are another three beaches in our suburb and five more within a few minutes drive.

So here are some (seven) of my views on water, a photographic story-poem of aqueous encounters over the last few weeks of Autumn, 2016.