Near Coffin Bay, Eyre Peninsula / Nauo Country
How do you photograph a place that is deeply familiar - that’s etched into your memory so clearly, that it can be sometimes hard to see it afresh. Each scene is laden with a thick fog of moments in that same spot that have come before - sometimes long ago.
I spent 18 years of my life here - still more than half. And each summer I come back, borrow a ute from my parent’s farm, and drive to the same spots we went over and over again when were kids and teenagers. It’s been surreal, flying in from Sydney and its densely packed beaches (at first it was a novelty, being at a busy beach, like those scenes from tv shows growing up), and then suddenly you’re back here driving along dirt tracks between dusty paddocks filled with headers, to arrive atop vast limestone cliffs overlooking empty magical beaches. And that water! Which glimmers, more clear and crisp than any ocean I’d seen on the east coast (or in the world, which any local already knows).
I tell people about this place, so far away from where they are that most will never visit - “it’s far enough from a capital city it’s still got this beautiful wildness,” I explain.
For a few years living next to the Sydney Harbour, in one of the county’s densest suburbs, I’d go and sit on the seawall in the night-time - a ledge separating expensive art-deco apartments bright with night-time lights, and hundreds of bobbing, whirring boats. But the sound of the inky water sloshing below, the briny smell, and the small wooden jetty I could glimpse over to the right (protruding from some millionaire’s fenced-off property), my senses so vividly evoked a deep familiarity, from within the context of the unfamiliar. For a brief moment, this snippet of Sydney felt just like Coffin Bay.
Living in dense urban spots, I’d sometimes find myself reflecting, “I was reared by nature” - it’s impossible to avoid being immersed in it here, where the land and coast expansively exceeds the rows of streets. The EP, it might not ever be home for me again, but it will always be my ‘homeland’.