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Study, study, study… and drive away. I spent the first half of 1976 immersed in study, but became dissatisfied with the course. It had a few teething problems, which culminated in a sit-in at the uni admin. In the end, I decided to defer and take a mid-course gap year. D and I drove away from Perth in his Datsun 180B and headed back to the big red north. It was a great road trip that ended in Derby when we got turned around by the police. It seems we kept some bad company at the pub that night and we ended…

The mid-70s was the beginning of Australia’s big expansion of tertiary education. A new university started in 1975 in Perth’s southern suburbs, Murdoch University, and I decided to enrol and do a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies. So I was a foundation student of the university, and this photo is from that first year when Murdoch had about 600 students. The most notable thing about the pic is the sheer absence of people. These days, the same scene would be crowded and lively. How quiet was it? At first, coffee in the ref was free – just help yourself. Student numbers…

Life changed suddenly after I finished school. In 1974, I took a gap year, which was not a common choice back then. In April, just a few days after my 18th birthday, I boarded a plane for the first time in my life and flew to the Pilbara to work for Mt Newman Mining. I went from the soft south to the hard north, stepping into a completely different climate zone and a totally different life zone. I left behind the world of childhood, adolescence and schooling, and entered the working world of adults. Long days, tough conditions, off to the pub,…

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.…

These days they’re called garage bands; back then, these fellas didn’t even have a garage to practise in, they just set up in the back yard. This is a school friend continuing his Saturday afternoon band rehearsal while chilling out on his back under the Hills hoist in a Manning back yard. I mention the Hills hoist because it adds some interesting context to the image. The full frame of the photo includes the Hills hoist with its peg basket. Back in 1972, I cropped it as above, taking out the Hills hoist. My intention then was to focus attention on my…

There is quite a different sense of composition in this photo compared to the others shown so far. In 1971, I bought a Praktica Nova single lens reflex camera for $65 and began to take photography a bit more seriously. No more square photos. This photo, of my youngest brother, is the first colour photo I can identify that I took with the new camera. It’s not perfect. There’s a bit too much of the chair. His eyes are just off the intersection of thirds that would make it a more satisfying composition. However, the parallax error is gone. Now I was…

This is my father, who was not actually dangerous when the bar was open, but the sign was irresistible anyway. I think this was taken at Moore River. In case you are confused, the sign refers to the sand bar over the river mouth. It closed over for much of the year, but dangerous currents would form when the river broke through to the sea. Apart from the memory in the silver grains, a lot of these moments are lost to me. It’s not so much that I remember visiting Moore River when I was 13, it’s more that I associate the…

I’ll start at the beginning: This is the first photo I ever took with a camera of my own. In April 1968, using the basic Agfa camera I received for my birthday, I took this photo and I reckon it’s not a bad effort for a first-timer. It has foreground interest, leading lines, no apparent parallax error, and the horizontals and verticals are well aligned. My older brother is on the skateboard and my youngest brother is watching. Black and white photos were the default choice in those days, not the artistic option they are now. It was simply a lot cheaper…