Photo Friday: Living in a giant’s world

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Hampstead Heath, London; Summer 2005 An art installation in Hampstead Heath in London in the summer of 2005. I love this – it really plays to the idea of living in a magical world. I feel like we are all miniature people, like Borrowers or Lilliputtians, and a giant is going to come along any [...]

Return to work and Jane Goodall

My babies with Jane Goodall

Now that the babies are nine months old and becoming more sociable and independent, I am able to turn my mind to my freelance journalism career once again. I have negotiated with my husband so that I can have some time mid week to work and if things work out, we may end up hiring [...]

Botanic Gardens from a pram

Pram view of Botanic Gardens

For most of my Camera Craft II course at the Australian Centre for Photography, we studied the rules of photography – exposure, tonal range, colour theory, composition, and so on. For one of my previous assignments, I played with shadow profiles in black-and-white photography. But in the final week, our assignment was to break the [...]

City by the bay: Best of San Francisco

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Chic, cosmopolitan and with a relaxed, happy-go-lucky vibe, San Francisco has much to offer visitors, as Caitlin Fitzsimmons discovers. When gold fever struck in 1849, San Francisco was transformed from provincial shanty town to thriving multicultural city. As much an idea as a place, it has seduced fortune seekers ever since – from the wide-eyed [...]

Rhyolite, a ghost town in Nevada

Rhyolite, a ghost town in Nevada

The idea of a ghost town has always enthralled me. There’s something about the emptiness and the weird relationship with time that fires my imagination. You don’t get the usual modernisation and general change that comes with the forward progress of time but it’s not quite like travelling back in time because of the decay [...]

Snake tracks at Mesquite Flat Dunes

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We left San Francisco in the evening and arrived in Death Valley at dawn. It was a thrill to be in the desert after the night’s journey – and a relief to be able to stretch my legs. (The seats on the Green Tortoise bus convert to beds but I was still feeling pretty crunchy). [...]

Green Tortoise trip to Death Valley

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When Woody Guthrie sang of redwood forests and diamond deserts in “This Land is Your Land”, his lyrics suggested his roaming and rambling was entirely on foot. But the reality is that the United States is so vast and diverse that these days, motorised transport of some kind is needed for serious exploration. When I first moved [...]

Mother’s Day and baby pandas

Twins

Sunday was Mother’s Day in Australia and my first one as a mother. My twins were born exactly three months earlier. They are obviously very advanced babies because they brought me breakfast in bed – scrambled eggs on toast with coffee – and gave me money to treat myself to a massage. Clever babies! Being [...]

Missing the Point, or, Listening to What the Stones Have to Say

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This is a guest post by Steven Lang, award-winning author of novels such as An Accidental Terrorist and 88 Lines About 44 Women. Steven’s website is www.stevenlang.com.au and his blog is Unexpected Consequences. My friend Ross and I spent four days walking on the Great Ocean Walk in Victoria last month, starting from just south of [...]

Get your motor running with a different sort of scenic drive

Steven Roll

Running in Rock Creek Park, Washington DC. This is a guest post by Steve Roll, the creator of Travelojos, a blog about traveling to and living in Latin America. Follow him on Twitter @travelojos. It was a cold Sunday morning in winter and just as I accelerated through a curve on a wooded road overlooking Rock [...]

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