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Daily Photo: The view across Lake Wānaka
Driving south from Makarora on State Highway 6 is a curious exercise in New Zealand’s habit of making ridiculously spectacular scenery look entirely effortless. You start out among modest pockets of silver beech forest, where sandflies assemble in organised unions to plot your immediate demise the moment you open a car window, before the road abruptly swings alongside Lake Wānaka.
For the next 24 kilometres, the scenery becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. To your right, the lake stretches away in an almost absurd shade of blue, the sort of blue that makes you wonder whether someone from the local tourism board comes out before breakfast with a paintbrush and touches it up. The highway hugs the shoreline with alarming intimacy, winding beneath towering rock bluffs and passing places with wonderfully understated names like Camp Creek.
Eventually, the road climbs towards The Neck, that narrow strip of land between Lakes Wānaka and Hāwea where a glacier appears to have taken one look at the landscape and decided that filling both valleys was probably easier than choosing between them. Then comes the Lake Wānaka Lookout, which is one of those places where the sensible thing to do is pull over.
So you do. You step out into the biting Southern Alps breeze, camera in hand, and look across the water towards jagged, snow-dusted peaks. For a few minutes, there isn’t much to do except stand there and take it in. And, perhaps, feel slightly smug that someone had the foresight to build a paved road through all of this in the first place.
Daily Photo: The Guinness Factory & The River Liffey
For a long time, I didn’t particularly like this photograph. I was in Dublin, wandering around with a camera, and somewhere along the way I had the opportunity to cross the River Liffey and photograph the famous Guinness gates. I didn’t. At the time I was with extended family and the idea of making the effort seemed slightly unnecessary. I had already seen plenty of photographs of Guinness, and I was quite happy wandering the streets on my own side of the river. Sometimes, apparently, I can be remarkably efficient at talking myself out of taking a photograph.
It was only later, when I looked back at the images from the trip, that this one started to grow on me. There is something almost ridiculously Irish about the combination of the Guinness brewery and the Liffey. If someone had asked me to put together a photograph that summed up Dublin without resorting to leprechauns, shamrocks or a man playing a fiddle in a pub, this would probably have been somewhere near the top of the list.
The photograph itself is a little more complicated than simply pointing a camera at a brewery. The Guinness buildings sit behind the old brick wall, while the Liffey provides the reflection in the foreground. The bare winter tree sits almost perfectly in the middle, tying the two halves together, and for once the river was actually behaving itself. It was still enough to give me a reflection without requiring me to do anything clever.
I suppose that is why I’ve come back to this photograph. It reminds me that photographs don’t always reveal themselves immediately. Sometimes you take one because the opportunity is there, forget about it for years, and then discover that the photograph you almost didn’t bother taking has quietly become one of the better reminders of where you’ve been.
And, in this case, it is difficult to get much more Dublin than Guinness, the Liffey and a tree that looks like it has been standing there wondering what all the fuss is about. It also gave me a reason to visit the Guinness Factory next time I was in Dublin.
There are times when a photograph is carefully planned, and there are other times when you simply happen to be in the right place with a camera in your hand. This was probably somewhere in between. I was out on a 30-degree Brisbane summer’s day, which, coming from Dunedin, seemed less like pleasant weather and more like someone had accidentally left the oven door open. It was the sort of heat that makes you walk a little slower, look for shade a little more carefully and wonder why you had decided that wandering around outside was such a good idea in the first place.
I had no particular plan beyond seeing what I could find. That’s often how I prefer to explore somewhere new, because once you start looking for a particular photograph, you can easily miss everything else going on around you. I was moving through the Brisbane CBD, taking in the heat, the light, the changing scenes and the shade when I came across a square covered with shade. There was something about the way the covered shade made me stop and take a second look. It wasn’t a famous viewpoint or some grand Australian landmark, just an ordinary piece city design that happened to look right at that particular moment.
I took the photograph, although I wasn’t thinking about photographic theory or trying to capture some profound statement about Australian architecture or Brisbane as a city. I simply liked what I was seeing. The whole scene was framed with interesting shapes and sections that moved my eye around yet drew me in at the same time.
That’s one of the things I enjoy about wandering around with a camera. You don’t necessarily go looking for a photograph. Sometimes you just keep walking until something makes you slow down, look twice and decide that it is worth stopping for. On a 30-degree Brisbane afternoon, finding a reason to stop in the shade probably wasn’t a bad thing either.
Daily Photo: The Phoenix Hotel on Brunswick Street
I doubt you’ll ever see this building in an advertisement for Melbourne. I came across it while wandering in drizzling rain along Brunswick Street in North Melbourne. Curious about its history, I did a quick Google search under an ageing veranda to shelter from the rain and discovered that the pub had been built in 1866 and was originally known as Austin’s Hotel. It was apparently named after a man called Thomas Austin, a local landowner who is famously remembered for importing 24 rabbits and releasing them onto his property so he would have something to shoot when he was bored.
It was a disastrous mistake. The rabbits multiplied, spread rapidly and caused enormous damage to the Australian landscape, creating a problem that Australia has been dealing with ever since. Their introduction is now regarded as one of Australia’s most damaging biological invasions. And here, quite unexpectedly, I had stumbled across a building apparently connected to the whole unfortunate episode.
The excitement wasn’t to last. On the way back to my accommodation, as I sat on a tram gently rocking from side to side, I discovered that Thomas Austin had absolutely no connection with the building. What I had found was nothing more than a piece of common folklore that had made its way into walking guides.
The building actually came into existence thanks to a man named William Austin, who was no relation to Thomas. He was a Melbourne property holder and publican who acquired the Sydney Road allotment in Brunswick in the early 1860s and built the hotel, opening it as Austin’s Hotel in 1866.
Before arriving in Dublin, I’d been given a vague rundown of what we’d be doing and an even vaguer idea of where we’d be staying. So, to fill the time on the very long flight from Singapore to Heathrow, I decided to work my way through a bit of Dublin’s history in a book I’d brought with me, rather than sitting through the seemingly endless selection of inflight movies, which always appears to consist of romantic comedies, love-filled dramas and Mamma Mia on almost permanent rotation.
I figured a little reading might be more useful, although I use the word “useful” rather generously. Most of what I was reading would probably never come in handy unless I found myself in a local pub quiz in some small Irish village. Among the random bits and pieces was a mention of George’s Street Arcade. I’d been told about the arcade because it was one of the vague places that might be worth wandering around while we were in Dublin.
So imagine my surprise when, two days after Christmas, I was wandering the streets of Dublin, quietly humming the well-known tune of “Cockles and Mussels”, when I turned a corner and there it was.
George’s Street Arcade.
The entrance seemed to guide me in through a collection of carefully placed Christmas trees, and inside there was a quiet, post-Christmas lull. Overhead, Victorian ironwork framed a soft glow from the lingering festive lights, while the red brick walls provided shelter from the passing drizzle. The whole place had a slow, agreeable rhythm to it.
People drifted between stalls piled high with faded vinyl, pre-loved clothing and paperbacks whose pages seemed to smell faintly of someone else’s history. The smell of coffee filled the chilly air, footsteps echoed softly across the worn tiles, and the muted chatter of shoppers gave the place the sort of atmosphere that encouraged you to slow down and have a look around, even if you had no particular idea what you were looking for.
I wandered around for a while, taking it all in, before eventually heading back out onto South Great George’s Street. I stood there for a moment, looking around to see if anything else caught my eye, then headed off in the direction of St Stephen’s Green and hoped, as I often do in unfamiliar cities, that I wouldn’t get lost.
Although I did manage to misread a sign across the road. At first glance, I thought it said Brassière Sixty Six, which seemed like a remarkably large and rather upmarket shop devoted entirely to bras. The window display seemed a little odd, but then again, I wasn’t entirely sure what the Dublin lingerie market was like. It took me a moment to realise that it actually said Brasserie Sixty Six, a popular Dublin restaurant.
Which suddenly explained why the clientele appeared to be overwhelmingly male.
Of all the things that took me by surprise in the sensory overload that is, or perhaps was, Hong Kong, the one that has stuck in my mind the longest is the scaffolding. Made out of bamboo.
It first came to my attention while wandering along Nathan Road, although this was, of course, before I got disastrously sick, spent three days in bed convinced I was going to die, and eventually had my wife virtually dragging me through the airport for our flight home. I did manage a few strolls before all that happened, and on one of them I couldn’t help noticing that the scaffolding covering the buildings was made from bamboo.
This seemed both strange and slightly bizarre to my Western eyes. I had grown up with the idea that scaffolding was supposed to be made from steel, or at the very least something that looked as though it had a reasonable chance of holding up a building. Bamboo poles lashed together seemed a rather optimistic approach to structural engineering.
As it turns out, they work remarkably well.
Here at home, if I started erecting a structure along the side of my house made from sticks, tied it together with rope and announced that it was scaffolding, I suspect the local authorities and one very unhappy wife would have something to say about it. In Hong Kong, however, bamboo scaffolding is a long-established part of the city’s construction industry.
So there I was, wandering along Nathan Road, surrounded by the sights and sounds of Hong Kong, trying to take in the businesses, the glowing lights and the older architecture squeezed in among the giant towers, while all around them were these enormous structures made from bamboo. There was something wonderfully strange about the contrast. At night, with the lights glowing through and around the scaffolding, the city seemed to turn into a sort of enormous three-dimensional checkerboard.
That’s when I took this photo, the whole thing was quite fascinating. At the time I even thought it might be something I’d like to try at home, although my ambitions were rather short-lived. I became sick not long afterwards and never got the opportunity to look closely at how they actually put the stuff together. Which is probably just as well as I’m not sure there’s a great supply of bamboo in Dunedin, and somehow I suspect my wife would have had a few questions if I’d arrived home with a large supply and announced that I was going to start experimenting with it.
I was staying with relatives in Shepparton for a few nights when someone suggested I take a walk around Victoria Park. I had no particular expectations, but a local recommendation is usually worth following, so I went to have an explore.
The area that would eventually become Victoria Park was once considerably less inviting. Before it was developed as a park, the land was used for grazing, including by local dairy farmers who would let their cows graze there between milkings. It was probably a perfectly sensible use of the land at the time, although it doesn’t immediately sound like the sort of place where you would go for a pleasant afternoon walk, unless you happened to be a cow.
The area was named Victoria Park after Queen Victoria in 1901, and at its centre was a body of water that was, to put it generously, more swamp than lake. By 1928, someone had decided that the swamp had probably done enough, and clearing work began to create a proper lake suitable for boating, swimming and general recreation.
As I walked around, it became obvious that Victoria Park had gradually accumulated the sort of things you expect to find in a well-used local park. Over the years a swimming pool, playground and skate park were added, while a wetlands area connecting towards the nearby Goulburn River became another feature. Today the park covers about 43 hectares, with nearly two kilometres of walking tracks winding through it.
What had once been an unsightly swamp and a place for cows to spend the hours between milkings had become a surprisingly pleasant part of Shepparton. There was the lake, established trees, open grassed areas, walking tracks and plenty of people making use of the park. It had the comfortable feel of a place that belongs to the locals rather than somewhere designed to impress visitors.
I walked around the lake, stopping occasionally when something caught my eye and taking photographs as I went. This is generally how I explore somewhere unfamiliar. I don’t particularly need an itinerary. Give me a walking track, a camera and somewhere I haven’t seen before, and I’m usually quite happy to see where it leads.
Victoria Park wasn’t somewhere I had planned to visit before arriving in Shepparton, and I probably wouldn’t have found it without that recommendation. But that’s one of the things I enjoy about travelling. The places that stay with you aren’t always the ones you’ve been told you must see. Sometimes they’re simply somewhere a local tells you to go for a walk.
Although, where people who live in town let their cows graze in between milking is quite beyond me.
I’d been wandering around Brisbane’s South Bank on a summer’s day when the temperature had pushed past 30 degrees, which is about the point where walking around a city begins to feel like an unnecessary test of character. I was looking for somewhere to escape the heat for a while when I suddenly found myself looking at something I hadn’t expected to see in the middle of the city. A beach. Not a river beach, not a stretch of sand beside the sea, but a proper swimming beach sitting among the South Bank Parklands, complete with sparkling blue water, white sand and enough subtropical greenery to make the whole thing look faintly tropical.
This is Streets Beach, Australia’s only man-made inner-city beach, and it’s a rather clever bit of urban planning. Nearly 80 tonnes of white sand surround a lagoon of clear blue water, with palms and subtropical plants completing the illusion that you have somehow wandered away from Brisbane and ended up somewhere considerably closer to a tropical island. I stopped for a while and watched people swimming, sitting in the shallows and doing the sensible thing on a hot Brisbane afternoon: not walking around unnecessarily. I, of course, was walking around unnecessarily, although I was beginning to question the wisdom of this decision.
There was something wonderfully odd about the place. Behind the beach were the buildings and traffic of Brisbane, while in front of me people were lying on the sand as though they had spent the morning travelling to the coast. It was one of those unexpected city discoveries that made me stop and look twice.
And, naturally, I took a photograph.
This was slightly more complicated than photographing an old building. Standing on the edge of a busy inner-city beach with a camera pointed towards the water required a little more thought, mainly because I was keen to photograph the beach without looking like a middle-aged bloke with entirely the wrong intentions. I spent a few minutes trying to find an angle that showed the sand, water, palms and surrounding city without accidentally making myself look like I should be explaining my presence to security.
Eventually I found a spot that made sense, took a few shots, and moved on.
This is probably one of the reasons I like wandering around unfamiliar places. I rarely know exactly what I’m going to photograph when I set out. I just keep walking until something catches my attention. Sometimes it’s an old building, sometimes a forgotten corner of a town, and sometimes it’s an artificial beach in the middle of Brisbane that requires you to think carefully about where you point the camera.
On a day when the mercury had passed 30 degrees, finding a beach without having to leave the city seemed like a pretty good discovery.
I’d been wandering around the South Bank in Brisbane, doing what I usually do in a city I’ve never quite gotten around to knowing properly, which is walking without much of a plan and seeing what turns up. Brisbane is a difficult place to wander through without eventually finding something involving water, gardens, restaurants or people wearing considerably less clothing than you are.
Then I came across this.
Tucked away among the greenery was this wonderfully ornate building, looking as though someone had accidentally transported a small piece of Nepal into the middle of Brisbane and then decided it was probably best not to mention it.
I stopped.
There was something about the contrast that appealed to me. Around it was modern Brisbane, busy paths, landscaped gardens and the general movement of a city going about its business. And here was this intricate little world of carved timber, pagoda roofs and details that demanded you stop for a closer look.
So, naturally, I took a photograph.
I don’t remember setting out that morning with the intention of photographing a Nepalese Peace Pagoda, I didn’t even know it even existed. But that’s one of the things I like about wandering. You can have a destination in mind, but the best part of the journey is the thing you didn’t know was there.
Daily Photo – Australian women killed through violence since Jan 1, 2024
Tucked within Melbourne’s iconic, graffiti-covered Hosier Lane, I came across a mural wall of silence amid the urban hustle. Scores of red-framed portrait posters created a memorial grid, bearing the names and faces of Australian women killed through violence, punctuated by a stark banner line beneath them. Like many passersby, I paused along the alley, drawn in by the powerful simplicity that turned a famous tourist thoroughfare into a raw, haunting space for collective memory and the ‘She Matters’ campaign. If like me, you have only no idea what the ‘She Matters’ movement is, well after some research, I can tell you that it is an Australian public activism campaign founded by activist Sherele Moody to honor women lost to violence. Featuring red-bordered portrait paste-ups across public spaces like the one I came across in Hosier Lane, the evolving memorial continuously adds new posters to make the stark reality and ongoing scale of femicide visible to the community. Further to the post campaign, there’s also a podcast series to go along with it. Although rather than framing stories through the traditional true-crime model, it centers on the human lives lost to femicide, domestic abuse, and intimate partner violence across Australia.
To find out what the podcast was all about, I listened to the episodes telling the story of Amy Bowden, and I have to say, they’re very good. Although that feels like something of an understatement.
If you’re interested search: Amy Bowden: Coercive Control, Death and a Mother’s Fight for Answers – Part 1 Amy Bowden: Coercive Control, Domestic Violence and a Death Police Failed to Examine Properly – Part 2 Please be aware that these episodes discuss coercive control, drug use and death – not suitable for children.
By the time I arrived in St Bathans, the temperature had climbed to a positively tropical three degrees, although thanks to the heavy snow that had fallen several days earlier, it still felt like the sort of day where a thick pair of socks was an essential item of clothing. The tiny gold-mining settlement was only just coming to life and while it wasn’t completely deserted, it’s quietness wasn’t particularly surprising. St Bathans has a main street of roughly 500 metres, a handful of historic buildings and the general atmosphere of a place that has never been particularly interested in keeping up with the modern world.
At the centre of it all is the Vulcan Hotel, a building that looks as though it’s been sitting there quietly watching Central Otago change around it. It is also reputed to have a resident who has been around for considerably longer than most of the current guests. Her name is Rosie, and apparently she is a ghost.
The story most commonly told is that Rosie was a young prostitute who was murdered in Room 1 of the hotel for her small amount of gold in the 1880s, supposedly by a client. Her ghost is said to haunt Room 1, where guests have reported seeing her, feeling her presence or experiencing the sort of unexplained disturbances that are particularly easy to explain, except for the fact that you’re staying in a 19th-century hotel in the middle of nowhere. There is, however, a slight problem with the story. There doesn’t appear to be any contemporary newspaper report of a woman being murdered at St Bathans in the 1880s.
There is an even more awkward historical detail. The famous building known as the Vulcan Hotel wasn’t actually the Vulcan Hotel in the 1880s. It was the Ballarat Hotel. The original Vulcan was a different building altogether and was destroyed by fire in 1931, after which the Ballarat became the hotel we know today. So Rosie, if she really was murdered there, was technically murdered in the Ballarat Hotel, which makes the whole thing rather harder to put neatly on a tourist brochure and kind of spoils the Room 1 story.
However, there is another version of the story, one that is considerably more elaborate. It all starts with an anonymous, hand-sewn booklet called The Tragic Tale of the Vulcan Ghost, by a Lady who tells the story of a woman named Rosie O’Dowd. Rosie supposedly came from an impoverished family and began working at the hotel when she was only twelve years old. The years passed and she eventually fell in love with a wealthy traveller named Piers Osmond, who regularly stayed in Room 1. Osmond gave Rosie a snow globe, got her pregnant and then disappeared, which seems a particularly efficient way of destroying someone’s life.
Rosie then lost her baby during childbirth and, overcome by grief, apparently went mad outside Room 1 before disappearing, never to be seen or heard from again, well in living form at least. Her body was never found, but her spirit supposedly returned, leaving the Vulcan with at least one permanent resident.
It is a wonderful story, but there is very little evidence to suggest that Rosie O’Dowd or Piers Osmond actually existed. There are no obvious historical records confirming the romance, the pregnancy, the snow globe or Rosie’s disappearance. In fact, there are several different versions of Rosie’s story, with different names, different occupations and different accounts of how she died. The more you look, the more the historical Rosie seems to dissolve into folklore.
But standing outside the Vulcan in a tiny settlement at the end of a long Central Otago road, I found that I didn’t really care. St Bathans is full of stories from its gold-mining past, and Rosie is simply another one that has survived because people like having a ghost attached to an old hotel. The miners have gone, the goldfields have disappeared beneath the tussock and the streets are now so quiet that you can stand in the middle of them without having to worry about traffic.
Whether Rosie O’Dowd ever walked into Room 1, whether Piers Osmond ever stayed there, or whether a snow globe ever sat on its bedside table is impossible to say. But somewhere along the way, somebody gave the Vulcan Hotel a ghost, gave her a name and gave her a rather tragic story. And now, more than a century later, Rosie remains in St Bathans, haunting the local hotel.
Which, for a ghost, is probably about as Central Otago as you can get.
The road from Ophir in the Manuherikia Valley headed up over the Raggedy Range before dropping down into the Ida Valley, and that’s where the weather really changed and the scenery shifted dramatically. The sharp blue sky vanished, and a ghostly white, low-lying mist and fog took hold, slowly dissolving the landscape into it.
I drove on and on into the mucky white gloom, the temperature slowly dropping into negative numbers before settling at a freezing −5°C. The heavy hoar frost drained every trace of colour and sound, leaving only absolute silence. By the time the side roads crossed the Idaburn, trees and bridges were merely shapes in the haze, sitting on the edge of the world.
I rounded a corner, and the quiet settlement of St Bathans came into view. I rolled down the hill into town, following its single street that runs through the middle of the settlement for no more than 500 metres before disappearing around a bend and continuing out into the countryside. It’s a tiny place, yet for all its smallness, St Bathans somehow manages to contain multitudes of soul.
When I finally arrived, I parked beside the old stables, swapped my shoes for gumboots, walked past a few historic cottages and the famous Vulcan Hotel, and set off through the snow towards the Blue Lake for a look around. As far as I could see, there was little more than snow, hills and the occasional fence post poking through the white snow. Below me, the lake was a deep, tranquil blue, reflecting the rugged, snow-covered hills beneath a perfectly clear sky. A touch of mist lingered around the far shore, while the still water reflected everything back with such clarity that the whole place seemed almost unnaturally quiet. It was one of those winter scenes where the cold gets into everything, but you don’t particularly care because the view is worth freezing for.
I drove to St Bathans from Ranfurly on icy roads, with snow banked on either side and my tyres crunching over the frozen surface to the steady flapping of the windscreen wipers. Heavy snow drifted through the air, and I became increasingly convinced that I was going to hit a patch of black ice on some lonely back road, spin off over a bank, and eventually be buried beneath the snow, only to be found several months later in the thaw, with the story of my strange disappearance left to be told on some random podcast years later.
Just then, the clouds parted, the sun broke through, and a vast, pristine winter landscape stretched beneath a clear blue sky. Mounded, pillow-like formations of snow blanketed the uneven ground, occasionally broken by frozen streams. In the distance, the Hawkduns showed themselves as a majestic range of snow-covered mountains at the edge of the serene, snowy expanse. I rounded a corner, and the quiet settlement of St Bathans came into view.
Today I take you inside the State Library of Victoria and, more specifically, into the rather impressive La Trobe Reading Room.
It really is quite something.
The moment you walk in, your eyes are drawn upwards. There’s the enormous octagonal dome, balconies disappearing off in every direction and, far below, row upon row of desks where people sit quietly getting on with whatever important things people do in libraries. Of course, being there as a photographer, I had other concerns. Mainly, how on earth was I going to fit the whole thing into one photograph?
The skylight high above pours daylight into the room, while down below the old wooden desks sit in much deeper shadow. Cameras, unlike eyes, tend to get a little upset by this sort of thing, so there was a fair bit of stopping, starting and fiddling about with the exposure. Then there was the geometry. The room is full of lines, circles, balconies and angles, all of which seem determined to go slightly crooked the moment you point an ultra-wide lens at them. Finally, there’s the people, they’re truly everywhere. Most of them are just like me, trying to get a photo from an upper floor balcony. Still, after a bit of patience and a considerable amount of lining things up, I got there in the end.
And really, with a room like this, it would have been rude not to try.
On my way through Melbourne on one of my trips, I’d been in the Central Place mall, I think it was called, photographing an old brick building tucked inside the mall itself and sitting beneath a dome. It was only as I was leaving that I remembered I’d wanted to check out the Victoria State Library.
I’d read that it was one of those grand old Roman-style buildings and figured it might be worth a look. As it turned out, it was.
Leading up to the library is this great set of broad steps, which added another dimension to the photograph and gave me something interesting to work with. The only problem was that the steps were absolutely packed with people. There was no shortage of subjects, just rather too many of them. So I waited. Eventually, a gap appeared, the crowd thinned just enough, and I managed to get the shot I was after.
If you step off the track, it’s not hard to see why you might easily get disorientated and lost. There are many stories of people wandering off into the bush never to be seen again. One of the more famous is that of 10 year old Damian McKenzie. The story goes that in September of 1974, 10 year old Damian was attending a popular youth camp near Marysville in the State of Victoria where one of the activities was a walk to the popular Steavenson Falls, one of the state’s highest waterfalls, with a drop of at least 84 metres. The group, which included Damian, set off around 11:30am on Wednesday 4th September. Damian, a good natured and responsible young lad was said to have excitedly run ahead of the group up a track that eventually lead to the top of the falls. However, shortly after it was discovered that Damian was missing, two boys and an adult chaperone went to search for him. When there was no sign of him, the police were contacted. Over the preceding hours and days, the search party expanded to include the State Police, a trained Rescue squad, the Federation of Bush Walkers, Civil Defence, Australian Red Cross, Volunteers, 4wd and Helicopter patrols. In total upwards of 310 people were involved in the search across the landscape and into the rivers. All possibilities were considered: lost in the bush, drowned in the river, abducted, taken by natural predators, the possibility that he might have fallen down an old mineshaft was considered – even though they had mostly been filled in long ago. The search continued day after day with volunteers staying in the area for ten days after he went missing, yet no trace of Damian was found.
Fifty-one years later as the mystery had been labeled a ‘cold case’ and due to the fact that a coronial inquest was never conducted The Victorian Coroner re-examined the case in May 2026. On June 1, 2026 it was announced that the formal finding was that the definitive cause of death was exposure – legally ruling out any other long-standing theories. Among the evidence looked at was the fact that Damian went missing in an area surrounding Steavenson Falls consisting of incredibly dense, near-impenetrable scrub, steep slopes, and rugged bushland, wearing only jumper, jeans, and school shoes. Soon after the search commenced, the conditions turned nasty with freezing weather hitting the region including heavy mountain snow which heavily obscured tracks and disrupted search efforts. With no physical remains or items of clothing belonging to Damaian ever being recovered, he remains a missing person.
As far as man-made lakes go, the Blue Lake at St Bathans is small but impressive, thanks to its striking colour. That’s due to the natural drainage from the surrounding hills filling the lake and mixing with all the leftover bright white quartz sediments, which reflect sunlight back through the clear, mineralised water, resulting in a stunning bluish-green colour.
It all started back in around 1863, when the search for gold brought miners to the area, which was known at the time as Dunstan Creek. Now called St Bathans, a bustling town of more than 2,000 people quickly grew.
One of the main ways to search for gold in the area was by sluicing, where powerful jets of water were blasted at banks of earth, washing gravel into sluice boxes. The boxes then trapped the gold at the bottom. In St Bathans, this method was so popular that the nearby Kildare Hill was transformed into a 168-metre-deep pit. It was only when the pit started getting too close to the town that mining was halted in 1934. Once mining stopped, the huge hole filled with water, creating the beautiful blue lake that we see today.
This is one of the many bridges that span the Yarra River in Melbourne. I think it’s called the Seafarers Bridge. Now, while the rest of today’s post has nothing to do with the Seafarers Bridge, simply mentioning both the Yarra River and bridges enables me to share with you the fact that Melbourne once had a morgue built into a bridge.
In the 1850s, Melbourne had a rather unpleasant problem. The Yarra had a habit of giving up its dead, and someone had to deal with the bodies when they appeared. So, beneath what is now Federation Square, at the eastern end of Princes Bridge the city built a morgue into the riverbank. It contained a deadhouse, an inquest court and even a laboratory, all tucked away beneath the bridge. The planners apparently thought this was best kept out of sight and intended to hide the whole grisly business behind shrubs, presumably so pedestrians could cross the bridge without having to contemplate quite how much death was passing beneath their feet.
When Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek formed the band The Doors in 1965, Jim Morrison proposed the name ‘The Doors’ to symbolise breaking through everyday reality into the unknown. However, it wasn’t an entirely original concept. Morrison was blending two of his favourite literary influences, William Blake and Aldous Huxley. In his poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” Whereas Aldous Huxley borrowed Blake’s phrase for the title of his famous book about psychedelic experiences, The Doors of Perception.
So, when a name for the band was needed, “The Doors” immediately came to mind. While they weren’t talking about physical doors, but rather how the mind receives, filters and processes reality through the cognitive filters of human consciousness, it’s still fun to wonder what might be beyond the random ones that pop up unexpectedly. In this case, I like to think a Dragon named Droofus but it’s more likely to be a stack of chairs.
I had to take this photo hand-held as I didn’t have my tripod with me, which created a few challenges. The least of these was waiting for the queues to clear so I could get the shot I wanted. Like yesterday’s post, it’s another photo of a human mask, but on this occasion, the person featured has a more sinister background and a story that is a tiny bit disturbing.
Tasmania resident Emma Williams arrived in Melbourne with her husband in 1893. Due to the economic depression, there was little work available and when Emma fell pregnant, it only added to their financial hardship. Once the baby was born, her husband left her, taking the baby with him.
With no form of income, Emma turned to sex work to survive. A second child soon arrived, but its incessant crying didn’t create an appealing atmosphere for men wanting a quickie, and having another mouth to feed didn’t make things any easier.
Unsure what to do, she could neither give the child away nor have him adopted. In August of that year, a young boy was found in the Port Melbourne lagoon with a stone tied around his neck.
Emma was hanged in Melbourne Gaol at 10am on November 4, 1895, for drowning her son.
Driving through the Ida Valley during a recent snow dump, the scenery shifted dramatically. About 15 minutes before reaching Oturehua, the sharp blue sky vanished, dissolving the landscape into a ghostly white.
I took this around 3 pm, but with the temperature hovering at a freezing −5°C, there was no warmth left in the air. The heavy hoar frost and low mist drained every trace of colour and sound, leaving only absolute silence. The icy fence line is the only anchor guiding the eye through the haze, making Central Otago feel less like home and more like the edge of the world.
There’s something deeply humbling, and slightly alarming, about rounding a bend to find a geological titan swallowing the horizon. Spread out before me was the Rock and Pillar Range, vast and imposing in a humble sort of way. The range didn’t peak in the sharp, dramatic fashion of the Southern Alps. Instead, it rose in a massive, undulating wall, with deep, icy gullies that looked from a distance like the face of a wrinkled old man, showing the weariness of time. Below this blanket of winter, the lower foothills rested in a desolate expanse of dry tussock, with weather-beaten rock formations littering the ground in every direction.
The contrast was striking. A clear blue sky above a frozen mountain range, and a prehistoric plain at my feet. I pulled the car over at a signposted rest stop, mesmerised by the sheer, unbothered scale of it all. Time seemed to stand still, frozen like the surrounding landscape.
Since we’ve had two photos already this week from my recent trip to Australia (which was really just hanging out in Melbourne and riding the free trams), here’s a third. This one, however, is from an earlier trip several years back. I ended up in Lindenow, a small country town about three hours’ drive east of Melbourne, but less than an hour from the lovely and ever-popular Lakes Entrance.
Victoria has a habit of punching well above its weight. Along with countless small towns and spectacular scenery, the state has produced more than its fair share of remarkably well-known Australians. Among them are Australian cricketing great Shane Warne, singer Kylie Minogue, actress Cate Blanchett, and global media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
It can also lay claim to Chloe Dillon, Harley Reid, Nick Daicos, Molly Dixon and Troy Candy. Now, I don’t know who any of those people are, but according to a website I stumbled across, apparently they’re pretty famous. Just what they’re famous for, well, I couldn’t say. My guess would be wearing very little and dancing on TikTok.
Daily Photo – An Evening In Shepparton Regional Park
An early evening stroll led me deep into the heart of Shepparton Regional Park, a uniquely captivating Australian landscape. I found myself completely surrounded by the magnificent, sprawling floodplain forests of classic River Red Gums. As the fading daylight dipped below the horizon, a warm, golden sunset drifted softly through the dense canopy. The ancient trunks cast long shadows across the forest floor, framing the Australian twilight.
Standing here among the monotony of the trees, it is easy to see how a single step off the track could leave you utterly disoriented and lost. It was precisely this unforgiving, vast wilderness that colonial bushrangers relied upon, vanishing into the dense scrub to escape the law and evade the police for months on end.
What Australians historically term a ‘bushranger’ is really what the rest of us would call a common thief or outlaw. The most celebrated among them include figures like Ned Kelly, Harry Power, Daniel ‘Mad Dog’ Morgan, and Ben Hall, a collection of deeply anti-social fugitives wanted for an impressively long list of offences. They had a knack for vanishing into the unforgiving landscape, occasionally emerging to rob passing travellers, stagecoaches, and wealthy landowners before melting back into the scenery, sometimes not to be seen for months or even years. As far as hiding places went, Australia was so bafflingly immense that the opportunities for disappearing were almost endless, requiring a genuinely heroic level of commitment from the local constabulary to track the outlaws down. Modern Australians seem to love these characters as beloved folk icons, when in reality they were largely a collection of bullies and murderous thugs looking out for little more than their own gain.
I took this photograph somewhere along Nathan Road, although I couldn’t tell you exactly where. To be honest, it hardly matters because there are countless buildings like this throughout Kowloon. They aren’t landmarks, yet together they define the city.
At first glance it’s simply an ageing concrete building. Then the details begin to emerge. Washing hangs from balconies high above the traffic. Windows are propped open despite the humidity. Every floor has been enclosed, altered, repaired, extended, or adapted over the decades until the building has developed its own wonderfully untidy character. Air conditioning units cling to the outside walls in such numbers that they seem almost structural, as though removing them might cause the whole place to collapse.
The more I stood there, the more I realised I wasn’t looking at architecture. I was looking at thousands of ordinary lives stacked one on top of another. Homes above offices. Businesses beside apartments. Families, shopkeepers, accountants, students and retirees, all sharing the same block while Nathan Road flowed relentlessly beneath them.
It struck me that this was exactly the sort of thing I like about traveling. Not experiencing a famous attraction or a postcard view, just an ordinary building quietly getting on with the business of simply being. In this case, simply being Kowloon.
I spent an afternoon near the banks of the Goulburn River, which has the honour of being northern Victoria’s largest river. Yet this peaceful stretch of water was once one of the busiest crossroads in colonial Victoria. Long before Shepparton existed as the quiet city it is now, when gold was discovered and everyone went bonkers heading for Victoria’s northern goldfields, sooner or later every miner came to a single river crossing known as McGuire’s Punt. It was a simple and crude, yet effective, set-up, with a decidedly rickety and primitive punt that carried people from one muddy bank to the other by way of a rope.
That also made it an ideal place for the less respectable members of society to take advantage of the busy crossing. Miners carrying pokes full of gold dust, merchants with wagons of supplies, wandering gamblers, escaped convicts, bushrangers, and every variety of drifter all passed through here, while others looked for an opportunity to relieve someone of their possessions.
These days the Goulburn drifts quietly past towering river gums, yet it’s fascinating to think that this tranquil river once held up the entire traffic of the Victorian gold rush. Before there was a town, before there were bridges, there was simply a river, a punt, and a queue of hopeful souls waiting to cross.
Stepping inside St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne is a bit like walking through a time machine. One moment you’re surrounded by trams rattling along Flinders Street and thousands of commuters hurrying to catch a train. Next, you’re standing beneath soaring arches where the noise of the city simply disappears. It’s quite the contrast.
What I particularly enjoyed, though, was discovering that the cathedral has one of Australia’s more unusual traditions. Hidden away inside is a set of bell-ringing ropes connected to thirteen enormous bells housed in the tower. Rather than chiming automatically, these bells are still rung the old-fashioned way by teams of volunteers. It’s called change ringing, and instead of playing tunes, the ringers perform intricate mathematical sequences that can take hours to complete. To the untrained ear it sounds delightfully random. To the people pulling the ropes, it’s a carefully choreographed performance requiring remarkable concentration and teamwork.
I find something rather comforting about that. In an age where almost everything is controlled by computers, there are still people happily spending an afternoon hauling on ropes simply to keep a centuries-old tradition alive.
The cathedral itself is magnificent, but it’s knowing that somewhere above your head a group of enthusiastic bell ringers is quietly practising an ancient art that makes the place feel just that little bit more special.
If buildings could talk, Belfast City Hall would probably spend half its time gossiping about pigeons and the other half complaining about people climbing onto its lawns for the perfect photograph. Completed in 1906, it’s an absolute showpiece, built to celebrate Belfast’s brief but spectacular spell as one of the richest cities in the world. By day it’s impressive enough, but at night, when it’s bathed in coloured lights and reflected in rain-soaked pavement, it becomes one of those buildings that practically insists on having its photo taken.
The quirky part of its story, though, lies beneath your feet.
Hidden under the grand entrance is a sealed time capsule placed there when the foundation stone was laid in 1898. Packed inside are coins, newspapers and documents from Victorian Belfast, all intended for people who haven’t been born yet. It’s the architectural equivalent of stuffing things into the attic and hoping your great-grandchildren find them one day.
I rather like that idea. While thousands of tourists wander around admiring the domes, columns and Christmas lights, there’s a little snapshot of everyday Belfast quietly waiting underground. One day someone will eventually open it and discover what people considered worth preserving. Hopefully they’ll also find instructions on how to keep the pigeons off the statues, because judging by the evidence outside, that mystery still hasn’t been solved.
The plan for my first morning in Dublin was simple: a quick stroll through the city centre, followed by breakfast with a few friends. So it was that we soon found ourselves pushing through the crowds of Grafton Street, past the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, and continued along St Stephen’s Green before crossing onto Harcourt Street. We were heading for what I was reliably informed was one of the best spots for breakfast in the whole of Dublin.
Along the way, I found a nice bit of symmetry in the Dublin buildings, all decorated in Christmas cheer, before ducking into the Iveagh Gardens to work up an appetite.
