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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. |
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. |
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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. |
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. |
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: |
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. |
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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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Australian Index (Pictures Page)
Last Revised: 6th March, 2004.