Starting Over
Thunder Bay, Victoria, Australia
Decades before anyone heard of COVID the places I most loved visiting, experiencing, and photographing were becomming overcrowded. One by one they dropped off of the list of places I wanted to go. As time passed I found new places, each less visited, less known, and more remote than the previous ones. In November of 2017 I discovered a large and incredibly beautiful area that few seemed to know about, but by 2019 I was reading about it online in photography forums. It was the last best place I knew that did not require overnight backpacking to access. I didn't know how long I could enjoy the kind of photography I had been doing for the previous 45 years.
In the meantime I began a project to digitize the best of my film based images. Initially I worked on this sporadically due to lack of time. Then the COVID pandemic stopped the world in its tracks. I retired completely that June and worked on the project full time. Through all of this my wife and I occasionally talked about moving to Australia after the pandemic. The main reason was our Australian family, though the anxiety and chaos filled Orange Jesus years gave us motivation to do it as soon as we could. Regardless, I can't say I thought about the move very much because we didn't even have a vaccine at the time. Nobody knew when the pandemic would actually end. It was "years" away and nobody knew how many.
My wife was finally able to make a trip to Australia in June of 2022. The project of digitizing my film based images ended on August 8, 2022 and delayed everything by a few months. Then It was suddenly time to figure out how we'd navagate the tangled mess of immigration and tax laws required to move our lives to a different city in a different country on a different continent in a different hemisphere. It was the most difficult and mind boggling thing we ever attempted. It took a month to learn enough to know it was possible, but many of the details remained mysteries to be stumbled over and figured out as things progressed. We put our house up for sale in early September, disposed of nearly everything we owned, and arrived in Melbourne Australia in early December, about 4 months after I digitized my last piece of film. The combined magnitude, speed, and disruptiveness of these changes and the problems that had to be solved simultaneously was nothing short of traumatic. I could not have gotten through it by myself. Things turned out as well as they did only due to the rock solid and steady perserverence of my wife, the beyond incredible support of our Australian family, and two of the best friends anyone could ever have in Ohio. I am forever in their debt.
At the time of this writing we have been in Australia for nearly two years. It took the first year for my head to stop spinning, to adjust to everything, make a few friends, and feel "at home". Now I spend as much time as possible walking, enjoying the parks, learning about everything from ants, flowers, parrots, and the oceans to echidnas, kangaroos, and the tall rainforests. I often hike, or even drive, for hours without seeing another soul. For me it's like heaven would be if heaven was real. I have yet to travel more than 4 or 5 hours from home but have experienced what I think are a great variety of places and things. Posting at the rate of one per week I probably have a 6 month backlog of images from Australia and more than that waiting from my days in America. Everything posted on the Australian landscape and wildlife pages of this site was captured in a 10 minute to 5 hour radius. I can't possibly live long enough to explore everything beyond. Occasionally at night before I go to sleep I think about how content and peaceful our lives have become. I want nothing more from life than we have.
In fairness I should say that Australia has its own unique problems. All countries do. Things are expensive. There are no graham crackers or spiral cut hams, and I've had to pay insane shipping costs to order camera equipment from New York that can't be found in Australia. On top of that the horror flick "Return of Orange Jesus" is not playing here so we'll have to miss out.
Dean