Helen Stephenson's Australian Holiday Pictures - January 1999

This page contains clickable images.

Here are some of the photographs I took while visiting Australia.

These pictures were taken with my Pentax KM SLR camera. I was using 200ASA film most of the time, but a few shots are on 400ASA film as that was what was in my camera when I arrived in Australia and I finished it off before reloading with 200ASA. The prints were originally scanned using an OpticPro 4830P flatbed scanner, but rescans from the negatives using a CanoScan FS2710 are gradually replacing the original scans.

If you want to see a larger image of any of these pictures, please click on the picture.

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Let's start this page off with some pictures of a white sandy beach.


This particular white sandy beach is to be found at Normanville on the Fleurieu Peninsula. The day I went there, before swimming at the beach, I went for a horse ride further along the beach. In fact, if you click on the leftmost picture and look closely at the larger image, you can see two specks in the water, and they are actually horses, although not from the same place as where the trail ride I was on came from.


Let me now move on to some images shot in the Mount Pleasant area.


My brother said that he knew where there was a shed which resembled a parachute coming in to land when viewed from the right direction. On the day when we went for our drive, we actually got there at sunset and the light conditions were wrong for photographing it from the appropriate angle, but I returned on another day at a different time and was able to capture the "parachute" look.


On the day of my original visit, this photo had to be the pick of what I took. I used my standard 50mm lens and I pointed the camera towards the shed with the sunset behind it and exposed the film exactly as the light meter told me to, and was extremely gratified with the result.

 

I also shot with the sunset behind me, and captured some delicate sky tones to the East.


On the same day as I photographed the shed at sunset, our drive also took us past a rock which resembles a bear, and which someone has painted bright orange so that it stands out when viewed from the road.

 

For this shot I put on a telephoto lens. I used a wide aperture which threw the background out of focus and made the rock even more spectacular. I have to admit that although I do things like that deliberately at times, on this occasion, it was a lucky accident and I had the aperture wide open because the light was fading and I didn't want to slow the shutter down any further in case I shook the camera!


Gratified with my sunset shot of the shed, I went looking for a windmill my brother had told me about. It's probably rather a cliche to photograph an Australian windmill at sunset in silhouette, but I decided that I wanted to. Unfortunately, on the day I picked, a thunderstorm was brewing, and there just wasn't sufficient light to get a really good shot.

 


On the whole, I found that photography in the middle of the day wasn't as successful as photography at dusk. The sunlight was so intense and the contrast between sunlight and shadow so great that it was difficult not to overexpose areas in sunlight while leaving areas in shadow underexposed.

Here are some shots taken around Red Creek at dusk. They did benefit from a rescan of the negatives, which produced vastly better results than the original scans of the prints.



Primary industry has changed in Australia since the 60s and early 70s when I was brought up. The property where I spent my childhood, where we ran sheep and cattle, is now mostly under vines. When I visited Mount Pleasant the second time, I drove past what I remembered to be a dairy factory. The buildings have now been converted for use as a winery. Ostrich farming and deer farming both take place, and those with a redundant shearing shed appear to prefer keeping alpaca these days.


 

 


The rural industries of Australia aren't the only area to experience progress. The South Eastern Freeway, which forms part of the main Adelaide-Melbourne highway, is undergoing a major rerouting at present. Twin 480m tunnels have been made through the hills, and the roads are being built at the moment to carry the traffic to them, and away from the current series of switchbacks, some of which have 25kph advisory speeds.


A briefing centre has been set up close to the site of the new tunnels and I joined an organised party for a site visit. It was not possible to get closer to the site than an observation platform, from where I took these photographs.
The entrance to the new tunnels is visible in this photograph. Each tunnel will take three lanes of traffic and will also have a stopping lane. Radio and mobile phone transmissions will work within the tunnels. The building under construction to the right of the tunnel entrances is the control centre.

 

Looking up the gulley above the entrances to the tunnels is this somewhat unusual view of the rear of The Eagle on the Hill Hotel.


The material brought out of the tunnels is being used to build up the road nearer to Adelaide so that the eventual gradient of the road will be much more constant than it is at present. Much heavy equipment is used in the transport of this material. Here I have captured a water truck damping down a site road to control the dust.
I particularly like this photograph because of the way the vehicle is completely framed by greenery.

 

Here is a 50 ton dump truck, which is used for the transportation of the material excavated from the tunnel. It is described as only being "little": on mining sites, 200 ton dump trucks are common.
(CanoScan FS2710 rescan: March, 2004.>)


I took the next few photographs in 1996 on an earlier trip to Australia. The one on the left is a semi trailer. The other two are examples of the B-Train. I think that in the intervening three years that such vehicles have become even larger, and the ones that regularly climb up and down the switchbacks of the current Mount Barker Road have nine axles, 34 wheels, and weigh 65 tons when laden. They differ from road trains in that road trains consist of a series of dog trailers (with wheels at each end) connected by A-frames, whereas a B-train consists of a prime mover with a turntable, onto which a trailer is hitched. This trailer has another turntable on the rear of it, to which a second trailer is attached, resulting in a double-articulated vehicle. You have to admire the drivers of such vehicles when you realise that they are able to drive them on such winding roads.



The photographs I am now going to show you are scenes from my home town, Mount Barker, in South Australia.


This is my old school. ....sigh It hasn't been used as a school since 1965, when a new primary school was built, but it was in use until recently as an Adult Education Centre. However, there is now a new building for that purpose and the old school building is for sale or lease.

 

Down on Cameron Road is The Mountain Pool. I have many memories of vacation swimming classes in this pool. They used to take place in the morning, and they were cold! Later in the day, when the sun had been on the water, it was much more pleasant, and I have spent many after-school hours in this pool. Now it's a much more civilised place to go: the water is heated. During my month in Australia, I took many an early morning swim in this pool. It was a great time to swim: the sun was still below the fence, so there was no need to mess around with sunscreen, and as the local club were training in about half the pool, everybody else had to do laps as well, which is what I like doing anyway.


Mount Barker has it's own example of Art Deco architecture. During my schooldays I remember being fascinated by "The Round House", which the school bus passed every morning, as it is at the other end of the same block as the old school. Now the building is no longer painted in tasteful pastel colours, nor is it a private residence any more:



This is the War Memorial Monument. It was relocated to Mann Street some years ago and now stands in the grounds of the local government offices.

 

Prior to its relocation, the War Memorial Monument was at the top of Gawler Street. Now the view up Gawler Street is of Auchendarroch.


A few kilometres west of Mount Barker is Hahndorf. This town was the destination of German Lutheran settlers, and they named their new town after Captain Hahn, the captain of the ship they arrived in Australia on.


The Hahndorf Academy is of particular interest to me, as my grandfather, Percy Stephenson, received his secondary education there. In the 1880s, if you progressed beyond primary school, you were considered to be well educated. The building is now used as a gallery.

 


The Old Mill has been a restaurant for a number of years. I used to work there in the late 1970s when the whole atmosphere of the place was decidedly German. Entertainment in the front room was provided by an accordian player, while in the rear room, there was an "Oompah" band. The waiters wore lederhosen and the waitresses wore traditional dirndl skirts. I went there for a meal during my 1999 visit to Australia and I found that there is now a room full of poker machines and the restaurant is self service. It is still high quality, but it could be a generic restaurant anywhere in the world. I was rather disappointed in the disappearance of the atmosphere I remembered, although a themed restaurant probably has a limited life span, so it was probably inevitable that changes had occurred.

 

The Hahndorf Inn is another eating place where I worked in the late 1970s.


 


 

These days the main industry in Hahndorf seems to be the tourist one. You can make the trip up from Adelaide on a historical bus, and when you arrive, there are plenty of buildings in the old German style to see. Everything is in much better repair than twenty years ago, but somehow it manages to look older anyway!

 



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Last Revised: 6th March, 2004.