Summer Bay

If Ireland is green then Australia must be blue. It's Autumn but the sun is bright and the air is as balmy as one of our best summer days.

She left Ireland 30 years ago to go and live down under. She described her choice as the only option left to an Irish girl, still unmarried and without a good excuse to leave home. The plan was to advance her career, the result was a lifetime here.  There is a long story, about a very long journey, but it's hers.

She's one of my oldest friends. We shared the ups and downs of all the teenage years. You don't ever forget this kind of bonding, it's just a given that it's always going to be there.

She stands on the beach staring into this incredible Australian blue. Now I see her with fresh eyes. Making that epic journey to a new continent on the other side of the world. Leaving everything familiar far behind in time. It was a very long way from home on a quiet suburban street in the cosseted southside of Dublin. She has always had courage.

Only one other of our classmates has made it out here to visit her, and that was many years ago. We are not drawn here like the next generation. What must it be like to live so far away from Ireland for your whole life? 

I can see how much she loves her chosen home. I keep saying to her that I "get" Australia having visited here. It is so beautiful, easy going, idyllic.

Next month I will attend the wedding of a young friend also on an Australian adventure. There's a new generation of women making similar journeys to find their own groove in the world. If I had my life over again? Yes I would go in a flash, but something else has kept me here and that is another story.....


PS  Dear friends next week will be my 200th blogpost so I'm planning something special........if I don't get totally distracted by the heatwave that is!

PPs And yes most of these photos were actually taken in that "Summer Bay"of tea-time soap fame.....

~Light and shade~

The light is different here. In the fields and forests around me in Ireland I am mostly under muted grey skies, downright dark grey skies and bleached out light grey skies. (I won't even start about the rain!)

Here in Australia while the sun is clear and strong, it is gone by 5.30, so from early afternoon shadows grow long and people move in and out of darkness. Everything flickers. The huge trees filter the changing light, and then suddenly it's dark.

I know there are so many iconic sights I could share today but instead I find myself looking at the light, seeking the light, forever mooching around in the small shadowy stuff. It's where I breathe.....




Written in Sydney last week.

~In the Dreamtime~

A Kamilaroi story tells of a magnificent male Kangaroo, so overtaken by the dancing of the locals that    he joined the circle and danced a special dance that is still celebrated today.

The Dreaming of Aboriginal Australia, ed Jean A Ellis, 2006

I am learning about this concept of Aboriginal Dreamtime and after so many hours at 28,000 feet above the earth, here I am in my own. I blame it all on the final day in Sydney when I looked into the eyes of these amazing creatures, saw the Hobbit film and began to recite the WB Yeats poem The Lake Isle of Inisfree in my sleep.

"I will arise and go now and go to Inisfree and a small cabin build there of clay and wattles made....."

This is usually a signal that it's time to go home. I learned it as a very young girl, the one poem that has stuck and it comes to me at these times. Combine this with my over active imagination, the strangeness and magic of long distance flying and Dreamtime overtakes reality.

To add to it I saw Eddie Izzard in Dublin on my way home. I mention this because of course if you want surreal hysterical comedy, he is the man, and Dreamtime would be his usual abode. So somehow I found myself merging it all together with my jetlag and experiencing such discombobulation that I simply can't tell which way is up, who's who, or what's what.......

I'm not at all sure how long I will remain in Dreamtime, for a while at least! Meanwhile normal service should resume one of these days.....


PS I usually resist making clickable links but wowsers the Dreamtime has me confused and while my brain was busy writing my hands went and made those links in a flash! If you ever struggle with computers the Eddie link is really funny......

Also posted on Vision and Verb a global gathering of creative women today

~Transported by a plush French cafe~

Was it the purple upholstery or the gold painted furniture? Was it the light streaming in from the early morning Sydney streets? Was it the perfectly coiffed French waitress, all the way from Brittany? 

Whatever it was, the shadowy interior of this cafe transported me to where the coffee was perfect, the home made marshmallow "incroyable" and the city life fantasy complete. 

Just one cup of coffee in the right light in a plush French cafe. 

~The eyes behind the lens~

Far from familiar meandering lanes, I am here in the midst of the dramatic lines of Sydney. Strong diagonals on the Bridge, soaring curves on the Opera House, tiny human forms a reminder of our presence.

A woman tied to a harness sets out on the climb. It will take three hours and 189 dollars to complete a walk to the top of the bridge and back. I savour planet earth, sit back and soak it up, from below. I didn't understand it before, why so many of our young people live, work, settle here? But Australia is beautiful and I am beginning to get it.

Although moved by the effort and imagination, I am intimidated by the height of the Coat Hanger Bridge and go into frozen denial even on the lower pathway. The camera is a distraction which soon works it's magic and I get lost in the moment.

From nothing they made this place and dreamed large. I study old photographs of the 1400 men who worked on the Bridge with their bare hands. 16 of them died on the job. The white hot rivets of steel made their lives a misery and sparks shredded their overalls within days. No safety harnesses, no hard hats.

But it's the invisible photographer who I remember now. The one who carried that primitive equipment all the way up here to capture their faces, the see for the first time the view of the harbour, to marvel at the engineering and craftsmanship.

I think of the eyes behind that lens and in this moment I share the passion of so many who walked the path before me.

~Wish you were here ........a few postcards from Sydney~

Wish you were here, the surf's up.......

Wish you were here, life on the ocean wave.......

Wish you were here, tis a dreamy view......

Wish you were here, the flowers are so exotic......

Wish you were here, although it's autumn and the shadows are long it's still 23 degrees......

Wish you were here, you would never tire of looking at this.....

Wish you were here, cos just for no reason they have fireworks over Cockle Bay......

I give them the moon

This is a guest post I wrote for Vision and verb shortly after the very sad murder of Jill Meagher in Melbourne. By coincidence Tom Meagher, Jill's widower has this month become an advocate for the Irish White Ribbon Campaign. Tom has been writing about his experiences here on the White Ribbon Blog, it is both a chilling story and a powerful piece of writing. To support their work I am reposting this today. 




It's October and the evenings are drawing in. Like thousands of other Irish parents my sons are surfing under Australian blue skies, drinking coffee in the street cafes of Berlin or taking classes in a New York film school. Spreading their wings while I follow their adventures from my perch on the hill.

Tonight the random rape and murder of Jill Meagher in Melbourne, 12,000 miles from home weighs heavily on me. The fragility of life and the grief of others has stopped me in my tracks. My sorrow now is for her husband Tom, her father and mother, for the friends out there. How could any man be so isolated and cut-off from any sense of reality or care, to inflict such pain?

Most days in the grassy wetlands I head out alone with my camera to meet up with one of my best teachers and collaborators, Mother Nature. It's late now but still I pound up the hill towards the forest, muttering to myself about the world, about the fear. I don't pray but I carry all the young emigrants in my heart as I walk the land. I carry their questions and their anger.....

To the west the sun is setting and to the east the moon is rising. I am reminded of other nights when I travelled the world myself. When I slept under the stars in the Black Forest in Germany and a moon just like this one hung over it like a Max Ernst painting. When I wept with frustration at having no where to sleep in Paris until a kind Jesuit found me a room. When I travelled by subway in NY chewing gum as a strategy to look tough, the most innocent looking pale faced girl on that train. 

Vulnerable.

And here, with one foot in a rural haven and one foot in the global chaotic melting pot, with questions, confusion and anger whirring.......this moon soothes and distracts. Before long I am reaching for the camera,  besotted by the sky, engrossed in the tranquility.

As I walk home thinking about them all wherever they are tonight. I imagine them under this clear sky with the chubby clouds. And then I close my eyes and with all my heart I give them the moon............