“I mean, you know this — the phrase, 'Travel broadens the mind'. We do quite a bit of traveling. But I think it also shallows the mind. But going back to the same place in a devoted way and in a curious way is a huge part of my life.”                       
       - Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, in an interview with Krista Tippett, reflecting on landscape and intimacy. 

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​Maybe variety and novelty risk asking too little of us. Perhaps something else is possible through the coming back, through a continual, attentive return.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently, in these months of isolation and staying in place, as I have, sometimes obsessively, walked the kilometres of pastoral fringe near my home in Woodend in Central Victoria. I have been walking these paths for some years now, but never so often as in this recent period. The landscape has been a solace. 

The images on this site are chosen from the past three years of walking and looking, of returning to the same places again and again, in most cases daily. As Michael Longley went on to say in that interview, there is no such thing as exhausting a place, just the continual invitation to look again, to see more.

All these images are iPhone photos, taken with standard phone camera lenses, and edited with the default phone image software. I edit in place looking at the scene I have just photographed, grading colour and saturation, cropping and shaping; looking back and forth from the phone to the world and back to the phone. I have in my mind a notion of a kind of fidelity rather than veracity … a faithfulness to the felt experience of standing there and seeing in that moment. 

These images are small, late gestures of love for a landscape that I have come to in mid-life. They are, always, for my wife, Pia, and for my daughter, Eleanor.

I know also that this country to which I have come so recently has been known for tens of thousands of years. It has a history of return that I can only just start to imagine: millennia of love, lived knowledge and mutual sustenance. This is Dja Dja Wurrung land. 
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I acknowledge the Dja Dja Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the country on which I live, and I recognise their continuing connection to the land, the waters and culture. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

I acknowledge that their sovereignty was never ceded, and I hope for the justice of a Treaty.

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July 2021. A year later, and we are in lockdown number five. More photos. My relationship with this country has grown more intimate, as I keep returning, especially after brief travels away. Homing is an ever deepening process, it seems. 

Mixed amongst these images of the Macedon Ranges are some of Merton, in the Victorian High Country, where there is a family property. We have been fortunate to be able to spend quite a lot of family time there between lockdowns, and that too has become a place of return and grounding for us. Merton is Taungurung country. 

Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.