Tulitha King

Category: Our Family

  • Camping

    What drives us to camp?  Is it a cry back to our primal days?  A chance to live as we used to? To absorb nature? Is it the dream of rest and relaxation? Because all these things seem to exist more in either the anticipation or in the reflection of the actual event.  The actuality is full of modern contrivances so that we do not have to live as ‘primitively’ as we might like to think ourselves capable of. In part I might welcome the opportunity to sleep out in the open and live off bush berries for a few days if it seriously cut back on all the cooking & cleaning I had to do!

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    But, the memories make it worth it…

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    The Australian bush is beautiful and it was fun to cook on the fire, build sandcastles, collect shells, discover our own ‘Mermaid Cove’, swim with the fish, dive in the surf.  And we saw a lot of wildlife, from crabs to possums, a red-bellied black snake, a very friendly goanna and of course kangaroos and a wallaby.

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    We slept to the scratching and scrounging of who-knows-what animals, and gum leaves and sticks falling on our tent, in fact it was an area prone to trees falling and we saw one suddenly & entirely collapse only a hundred metres from our campsite.  Which kept me awake at night! In the morning it was noisy!  So many birds just having a party.

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    I felt absolutely exhausted by the end, cooking & cleaning in makeshift conditions, dragging the kids around the beach and back, but times like these call for extra effort and the memories will always be special.

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  • Corinbank 2012

    A photo blog post of the Corinbank 2012 festival held in the beautiful Brindabellas near Canberra.

    This was one of the best festivals I have been to.  I tried to make the best of it, dragging the kids around from the wee small hours to the early night hours, but kids move slowly and they do not tolerate too many and varied adult type activities, so…? What can you do.

    Things I didn’t manage to photograph:

    Nudist in the nudie hot tub

    Swimming in a secluded (freezing!) bush pool early in the  morning

    Swagging it

    Getting henna tattoos

    In the chai tent, where we spent a bit of time each day! (This was the best chai most of us had ever tasted, by the way.)

    The smells

    The sounds

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  • Home Grown

    It is sadly, satisfyingly novel to cook from your own garden.  Sadly because, really, it should be the norm to gather our own food rather than pay for it. Satisfying because there is a real sense of acheivement (though one does so little!) in watching a seed that you have planted grow into a tiny sprout, into a bigger plant and finally fruit to make its way to your dinner plate.

    A few days ago I harvested Broad Beans, Garlic bulbs and Garlic flowers and Thyme to make a Broad Bean Casserole. (I will not include the recipe as I’m not a particularly fussy eater, and though I enjoyed it immensely, others may not, and really you would probably have the same results if you just played around with your ingredients as I did!)  The total list of ingredients were: Broad beans (pre-boiled), green beans, one garlic bulb, a few garlic flowers (with stems), sprigs of thyme, onions, mushrooms vege stock, cornflour. Short & simple. Everything could collected from the garden, it’s all in the timing. In fact I have all of these things in my garden a times

    Speaking of garlic flowers, have you ever tried them?  The first time I ever ate one was in New Zealand whilst being hosted on the property of a woman who had the most incredible permaculture style garden I had then yet seen.  They are…sublime! The flowers are unbelievable exactly like a very young garlic bulb, without the dirt, a lovely subtle flavour.

    Growing veges is easy peasy, I would encougage anyone to try it.  Sometimes all you need to do is push a few seeds under the earth, water them a few times a week, and wait and watch.

    Glorious.

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    Garlic Flower Head

    Dandelion Head among Rocket Flowers (I like to grow Dandelion in my vege ‘patch’, they are edible and good for the soil, they aren’t given enough of a chance.  Great for the liver!)

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    Leek Flower Heads

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    All from my garden Garlic Cloves, Thyme, Garlic Flower Heads

    The assembled dish! Don’t you just love my orange counter top!
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  • Summer Snowmen

    We did some Christmas decorating today. Very early, yes, but in my defence it was entirely unpremeditated. In an effort to keep the kids engaged & amused – a daily challenge – we began making paper chains. One thing led to the next & suddenly we were on to snowflakes, that led, naturally, to snowmen. Then before I knew it these things were up on the windows & ceiling looking suspiciously Christmassy. Well.

    To be honest I’m not so sure of these lurking summer snowmen. They are highly inappropriate guests at an Australian Christmas, and stink of longing for what can not be (dreams of a white Christmas, anyone?), however the kids enjoyed making them and seem to be enjoying wrecking them, and so I don’t think they’ll be around for long. In the end I think I will replace them with a branch full of perching red-browed finches, a sweet bird which has been visiting my garden recently. Christmassy? Sure, why not. Seasonal. Australian. Appropriate.

  • By the Creek

    This is a snippet of Sutton Country Living that I’d like to remember: our dapples in the creek.  There are some stunning waterholes around this little village.  This is a favourite one as it’s so close to our house.  The day I took this we were ‘fishing’ (with sticks) in this little pool & Soph tried very hard to go swimming in it, but resisted as I urged her to think about how cold it was – and it was that day.  It’s so pleasing to see ones child use their brains and set their own limits, limits that vary from, though are not so very far from your own, and I’m happy with that. I’d rather she use her own head than do exactly as I say.

  • 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.

  • 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.