Author: Tulitha

Camping

Our mindset is adapting to a nomadic lifestyle we will be taking up in April/May next year. We are preparing ourselves to ‘rough it’, albeit in a Solar Powered Motorhome complete with kitchen, toilet, shower and beds, glorious beds! I feel like last weekend was our first taste of what this will be like, as, though we’ve camped out before, this time we undertook it with the full understanding that this lifestyle was coming upon us very quickly.

It was glorious, truly, glorious, to cook by our campfire, by gas lamplight, to put the kids to sleep in their car bed (a brainwave, as one of our swags was unusable), to wake up from my dozing by Henry shooing of the biggest fox he’d ever seen, who left reluctantly, to eat some chocolate together by the campfire under the stars while the kids slept and finally to wake in the cold in the middle of our patch of temperate rainforest. It was such a refreshment to me, as I have been struggling with our morning routine at home for a while. It brought me back to the reality of family life, love, life experience, exploring through my childrens eyes while being able to show them new things about the world.

I do just love, deeply, intrinsically, the natural world and I can not imagine living without access to the great natural regions of our planet. Regions that have thankfully been saved by conscientious governments and those fringe & passionate greenie groups. We stopped off at the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park in Tasmania on our honeymoon, and I am grateful for the effort of those initial Greens for their persistence in saving such a beautiful natural sanctuary. I wish there was more of such landscape and less of our offensive modern edifices and contrivances.

October 2, 2012
Sutton Hall

We were married in an old woolshed. It had a history and reeked of Lanolin and the ingrained dirt of a working sheep station I loved its ‘realness’. When we moved out to Sutton once we were married I was thrilled to see a woolshed type building just across the Sutton Reserve, which we lived directly opposite. Having been married in one I considered myself to have some affinity with woosheds everywhere. However, I soon found out that this one is and never has been a woolshed. As far as I know it was built purposely as the Sutton Village Hall a place to get married, celebrate birthdays, vote & hold the monthly Sutton District Community Association meetings. The Community Association is an industrious one. I have gotten to know several of the members through playing tennis with the local tennis group. It is the one community sport which I can find and is open to all, so join it I recently did, though I knew nothing about tennis at the time. I now know something, but not much.

The Community Association has managed to tremendously improve the hall and the Sutton Reserve while we have lived here. The hall has sprouted a new staircase and deck, trimmings have turned a dark burgundy, trees have sprouted around the hall in strategic locations. All results, I suppose of the Community Associations biddings.

The hall has a resident population of rabbits and the entrances and exits are found all around the underneath of the hall embedded in the vibrant red clay on which it sits.

My children and I love the rabbits and watch for them when we go walking. I love how children are always excited by such simple sightings. The wonder of such things seems to, too often, escape adults. I often think about how large the Halls rabbit population is, I wonder how extensive their warrens under the hall are. This is not Peter Rabbit soil, they are lucky to make a dent in it with their long claws, so probably their living spaces are much more cramped than flopsy, mopsy & cottontails were.

July 21, 2012
The Burley Griffin

My husband is in this band (on the banjo), it’s a good one!

Find them on facebook and go to a gig if you can and if you have the inclination. They’re quite good on a stage! You can hear them here.

They played at a ‘secret gig’ at the You Are Here festival this weekend and I had the chance to take a few photos, even though the kids were hanging off my legs.

March 13, 2012
Domestic Scenes

How easy it is to glamourise life. Life seen through a photographers lens is often more reminiscent of a rose-coloured memory than the vivid reality. And in imagining life lived through misty visions we are often misled to think that in order to live life well we must be earning the mega bucks or traveling the world (while burning huge amounts of fossil fuel!) or being anywhere other than ‘here’.

This is a tribute to the domestic. The backyard that remains in our memories as we grow and that provides a place for our families to congregate and for little ones to learn about life. The backyard that dries our washing, houses our chooks, fences in our dogs, grows our veges. It can never be understated in its importance. And I feel its the place where most of my most wholesome living takes place, as unglamorous as it is. Though ‘glamour’ is a fallacy, I believe, and in fact its original meaning was ‘enchantment or magic’. And it is generally through the enchantment of film or photography that a false life of glamour is created, and we must force ourselves to remember that, firstly, the lens often lies, and that most of the time life is lived away from the camera, in backyards everywhere. And it is in our own backyards that we must make our own lives.

February 28, 2012
Sutton Mist

How very fortunate I am to live in this village not too far and not too close to Canberras border. Although it has taken me this long (four years) to get used to it, these days I find it hard to consider living anywhere else, and I only wish we owned our house for the certainty of settlement. We don’t, and so I am forced to enjoy this rural village a day at a time, which I am thankful to be able to do.

I hope you enjoy these photos as much as I enjoyed being behind the camera for them. Early morning walks can provide the best light and altered vistas. I am loving how light transforms!

Images Copyright of Tulitha King

February 20, 2012
A Tree

I saw here a potential picture that beckoned from across an empty campground. I am forever thankful that I did not pass this by, but instead walked my pregnant self the few hundred metres to take a couple of pictures. They are photographs that I will never grow tired of.

November 7, 2011
Trent & Julie

Trent and Julie had a laid back wedding, held in their own backyard, they wanted very few posed portraits, so it was almost purely documentary, which is a very fun and challenging way to photograph a wedding. I truly enjoyed photographing them and was so glad they trusted me with their day. It was such a beautiful, relaxed wedding, it really seems to be the way to go about it!

April 19, 2011