archive.

I’m what they call a late bloomer. I didn’t love AC/DC until my 30s. I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. And I didn’t watch Round The Twist until I was proper OLD. In early 2018 a mate who I went to art history school with in Canberra got in touch to see if I was interested in working on an archiving project for the Australian Children’s Television Foundation.

Ahhh… YEAH! 



The brief was to organise 40 years of the photographic history of the foundation and get it ready for digitisation and storage. I was pointed at a row of filing cabinets bursting at the seams with press kits, set photos, event photos, slides, brochures, flyers, contact sheets, staff and puppet portraits and original art works. My new boss said the best way to get acquainted with the contents was to watch the whole back catalogue of shows. 

The plan was to pick a show, grab all the folders and loose bits and pieces associated with that show, put in my headphones and hit play.

While I watched I would sort and weed and clean and accession all of the associated items. Many of the images were from set photographers who were covering all the action during scenes as well as getting behind the scenes and shots of the actors all dressed up. Others were shots of famous faces visiting the office or a set. Some were shots of artists at work. It was such a privilege to see the creative machine behind the shows.

The closest thing to a problem were the duplicates. Back in the day instead of digital files we would expect today press kits and marketing images would be mailed out to promote the show so this meant many many copies of each item - usually slides - were made. Over the years those folders were raided for this or that image so many of the folders were not complete. I might have 1 copy of one image or I might have 23. 

The most straight forward scenario started with contact sheets that I could use to put the collection back in order to reflect the photographer’s workflow on the day. Once I was satisfied I had everything straight I could easily identify the duplicates and prepare them to be destroyed.

More complicated scenarios were mixed media items - so brochures, posters, slides, printed photos etc… that would take a little bit more thought into how best to order the items as well as house them. The next step was to clean, label and then send them off to Michael’s in Melbourne to be digitised. Once returned the images were housed in gorgeous black Mylar archive boxes and put on a shelf for easy access. Which is an incredibly satisfying thing to do. My toes are curling just to think of it.

It was archive nerd nirvana.

SUMMER 2024

manray/dupain.

In my head I had filed Manray under ‘Greats’ and didn’t think all that much more about him until the Manray/Dupain exhibition at Heide in October 2025. I knew he was surrealist and experimental and I knew he was a bit of a diva and, of course, he did appear tangentially in the discourse around Lee Miller with the release of Kate Winslet’s extraordinary film. So the exhibition was an opportunity to have a look at his photographic work on what was probably the closest to his own terms as I will get. 



Dupain I knew from my time at the NLA where a few of his works hung in the hallway into Pictures branch and in the archive drawers out back. I loved his Sydney nightscapes best. The water and the lights were incredibly beautiful. Perfectly executed long exposures causing lines of trailing light from a car here or a boat there. I’ve always wondered if Brett Whitely’s trailing lines arcing over Sydney Harbour behind birds and boats were inspired by Dupain’s nightscapes. Surely there was a connection?



It was a vast and beautifully curated exhibition. Thoughtful. Broken down into key themes where we experience Manray and Dupain’s works enhanced by being placed side by side. Commercial work. Portraits. Ladies in hats. There was only one of Dupain’s nightscapes and it reminded me how much I loved them. His work is elegant and considered. The whole frame is curated and the prints are meticulous. Beautiful. 

Manray’s work was… there. I know the technical and academic value of his work and ideas but better people than me have written about that. I’ve now got the luxury of judging things based on how they make me feel. Perhaps because creatively my mind is turning towards the Australian landscape that Manray’s work didn’t really hit in the same way as seeing Dupain’s work again did. It left me thinking about lifting my own editing and printing standards.


And as often happens after such experiences I come away wondering why do exhibition shops not sell posters anymore?!

SUMMER 2025

women in trees.

Pinterest has been responsible for a lot of crimes in its time… introducing me to a small picture book called Women In Trees was not one of them. It only took one or two random pics to appear in my feed before I was obsessively on the hunt to find out more. A few clicks here and there led me to one of my favourite places on the internet The Marginalian where I found out the full story.

I ordered a copy of the second volume (the first was sold out at the time) and was delighted to find out how tiny and perfect it was when it arrived in the mail.

The editor of the books had been gathering found vintage photos of women in trees for years and at some critical point decided it was time to share. The images rarely have names or dates on them and the books reflect this simplicity allowing us to imagine the stories that may have been brewing behind images. This simplicity inspired me to start shoving mates into trees and seeing what we could create… but I’ll get more into that soon…

SUMMER 2025

hands.

Hands can be like sun flares.

Expressions of energy and want.

Conducting. Holding. Sharing. Mixing.

Foraging. Instructing. Plucking. Making. Protecting.

A mother’s hands.

A forager’s hands.

A rider’s hands.

A biker’s hands.

A musician’s hands.

A gardener’s hands.

A midwife’s hands.

A ringbearer’s hands.

The grooms hands.

SPRING 2025