Whilst walking for 7 days on the various trails at Wilsons Promontory National Park in Victoria with the Retire Active SA Bushwalkers group I tried to link walking with photography. It had been 20 years since this group had been to Wilsons Promontory, so it was a big occasion for them. About 65-70 people went and they walked in the 4 different grades of walking in terms distance and difficulty. I was in the C grade to allow myself time to do photography whilst bush walking.
It had been about 10 years since I’d been to Wilsons Promontory and I didn’t remember that much as I was a day tourist then, rather than a bushwalker /photographer We stayed in a farm cottage just outside the park’s entrance and made day trips into the park. I remember going to Tidal River and Squeaky Beach and photographing the rocks along the side of the road up to Mt Oberon.
The inspiration is Eleanor Dark’s bushwalking in the Blue Mountains as well as Manning Clark walking almost every line in his A History of Australia. So is the historian Tom Griffiths, a keen bush walker, who like Clark, is keenly aware that the past is alive and shifting in the present. Their quest for historical understanding helps to inform a contemporary photography.
It is difficult to successfully combine walking and photography with a bushwalking group because their emphasis is on walking, rather than a creative walking art project. So the photography is necessarily limited to digital snaps whilst walking or making photos (digital and film) before and after the daily walks. My photographic emphasis was on the latter.