This is a pretty poor photo, but it is significant to me. It was taken on a farm at Tammin, in the Western Australian wheatbelt. It shows the wing of a wedgetail eagle as it dives away from its perch high in a tree, probably a wandoo.
My friend D and I used to visit the Tammin farm often. We spent hours hunting rabbits and birds with our .22 rifles. Quite a lot of lead was wasted, but we bagged plenty of rabbits and reduced the bird population.
To this day, I am quite happy to kill a rabbit whenever I can. However cute and cuddly they are in their home eco-systems, they are destructive environmental vandals in Australia. In retrospect, we were wrong to target the birds. We shot pink and grey galahs, ringneck parrots and crows. We were told that the galahs and parrots damaged crops and the crows attacked newborn lambs. Line them up in the sights.
Wedgetail eagles were also regarded as pests and they were fair targets. They were said to kill lambs. On this early morning, D and I walked out into the frosty paddocks to check the rabbit traps we had set the night before. Yes, the nasty steel-jawed variety. We took our rifles and I took my camera.
I saw the eagle perched on the high bare branch you can see in front of the eagle’s wing in the centre of the frame. It watched us for a moment. I had my rifle slung on one shoulder and my camera on the other. I chose the camera. The eagle was just too magnificent to kill. At that moment, I took a step towards a conservation ethic, with a rifle by my side and my camera to my eye.
In the time it took me to meter and compose the shot, the eagle took off. This photo was the result. I took a second shot as it flew away, but the first shot is the defining moment.
It is not a defining moment in the Cartier-Bresson sense. I missed that moment, which would have been a fraction of a second earlier, with the eagle perched and wary, or spreading its huge wings to fly away. But the photo records a defining moment in my life.
In contrast to the poor photographic values of the top pic, this photo of D and his cousin has a nice balance to it. It reminds me of those frosty mornings when we would walk out with our guns to check the traps – and maybe take a photo that marked out a different course.
At some stage in this year, I sold my Praktica Nova to my older brother and upgraded to a Praktica LLC, with the wonderful sophistication of through-the-lens metering. No more handheld light meters for me.