Archive for the Landscape Photography Category
Work took me up to Cooktown in Far North Queensland for a week. Although it’s a short flight from Cairns to Cooktown I decided to take the more leisurely drive up there. I don’t mind flying but when work takes me away from Brisbane I prefer to drive, take in the scenery and have a look around.
The road from Cairns to Mossman follows the coastline, with some spectacular views over the sea and, as such, it’s a pretty slow road, full of Sunday drivers admiring the scenery. From Mossman there are two options; keep going on the coast road through Cape Tribulation and Wujal Wujal or take the inland road. As the coast road is 4×4 only, with my hire car I only had the choice of the inland road, the final section of which was only sealed in 2006.
The road runs through the hills across to Mount Molloy, and then arcs northwards through Lakeland to Cooktown. The road is pretty fast unless you get stuck behind caravans, RVs or trucks, all of which struggle for speed on the hills. As the road is windy and has a lot of dips it can be difficult to overtake slow moving vehicles. In the end, both the trip up and back took almost 4½ hours to cover the 327km as opposed to about a ½ hour each way if I had flown.
I recently dusted off my laptop and switched on my laptop for the first time in over a year – I normally use my desktop at home and work laptop if away with work. Whilst looking through the drives to remember what I had stored on their I re-discovered some of the photos I took on my 3½ month drive around Australia in 2005.
I did a warm-up for the main part of the road trip in early January 2005 by driving up the coast from Sydney as far as Brisbane before heading back to Sydney. During this time I hooked up with the best-band-that-should-have-been, The Hauntingly Beautiful Mousemoon, and hung out with them in Byron, Brisbane and the Gold Coast. The band then stayed with me in Newtown after a Sydney show at the Hopetoun in February 2005 and I started my road trip by following them down to Melbourne where they were playing a few gigs, including playing at The Espy during St. Kilda Festival. I think there are some photos from that time that I developed but that have never seen the light of day. I might have to dig them out and scan them in.
But then the real adventure started, with me saying my farewells to the band before they headed back to Newcastle and heading out on the open road.
My trip then took me along the Great Ocean Road to Adelaide, over to and down the Eyre Peninsula to Port Lincoln, back up and across the Nullabor, down to Cape Le Grand near Esperence, along the coast to Perth, all the way up to Exmouth in north WA, back down to Geralton, across via Mount Magnet to Leinster, down to Kalgoorlie, back across the Nullabor to Broken Hill and finally back to Sydney. The original plan was to do a figure-of-eight and keep going from north WA up to Darwin and back down via Uluru and Coober Pedy on the way back to Sydney but in the end I had nowhere near enough time and probably not enough money. And there are some that would have doubted that my $1,900 car would have made it that far…
It’s getting near the time of year when work takes me out of Brisbane – I’m off to Cooktown for work (and staying up in North Queensland for a few extra days holiday) in mid-July and will then be in Melbourne and probably a couple of other places in rural Victoria for much of September. I’m also taking some proper holiday in August, so expect less band photos and more travel/landscape photos in the coming months…
Some more photos on Flickr.
Was working down in Mildura for a couple of weeks at the start of December, so took a 300km each way trip up to Broken Hill for the middle weekend. Been there before during my big 2005 road trip round a large chunk of Australia and liked it - it was more what I was expecting from the Outback as opposed to the Nullabor, which was just boring scenery. Having been there twice now I think I’m pretty much over the place.
Drove up on the Friday along the Silver City Highway. Would have liked to have taken the slightly longer scenic route as opposed to the main road, but even though had a shiny new hire car was put off by the 103km of unsealed road that it would have involved, especially as there had been some recent rain. Wandered around the town and then headed up to the Sculpture Symposium on the edge of town for sunset. Timed it a bit badly as didn’t realise that the park shut at 8:30pm and only got there at about 7:45pm, with a 20 minute walk to the sculptures meaning that I didn’t get much time to photograph before I had to head back to the car.
Saturday headed over to Silverton and spent most of the afternoon there. Left for the sculptures earlier this time so that had plently of time to watch the spectacular sunset.
Some photos here and more on flickr.
