Summer arrived late, like winter before it. In the last decade the seasons have been less and less predictable, stretching out and bumping up against each other with no sense of order. Trying to track them by calendar months or even the natural markers of solstices and equinoxes feels impossible. I’m not even sure we experienced spring, the cooler days lasted into December with unbroken spells of rain and the second coldest Christmas day in Melbourne in the last two decades.
And then suddenly, around the new year, something changed and the temperature jumped into the high thirties and low forties, like nature had realised its mistake and flicked some kind of seasonal switch.
Usually, I put my camera away in summer, avoiding the bright and harsh light, but the mornings have been a golden pink glow, the evenings a warm gold with long shadows. At this time of year, the days are long and I’ve been walking at both ends, skirting the middle of the day heat and favouring the edges.
Over the last week, there have been significant bushfires across the state, something that has sadly become an almost unavoidable summer event in Australia. The winds carry the smoke, filling the air with the smell of fires and turning the skies hazy and yellow. We are lucky where we are this year, the threat is far enough away that we are in no immediate danger. But we still feel it. The loss of so much natural land, wildlife, and people’s homes is devastating, and we’re no strangers to the experience, having had fires much closer to home in past years.
I try to let my practice be driven by curiosity and feeling, so while summer is a quieter time for creating, there have been a few things I have noticed enough to want to capture them. Roses in the front garden of a house down the road, the same pink as the morning light with edges browned by the heat. The cosmos flowers in our garden, my first successful attempt to grow something from seed (with help from my husband who is the experienced gardener of the two of us). Watching the bees and butterflies. I took three weeks off over the holiday period, reading books, taking afternoon naps, cooking with whatever happened to be in the fridge, and letting things move at their own pace.
The combination of this time off and the sudden heat has made the first few weeks of the year feel somewhat like an altered reality. I’m writing these notes at a point that is only halfway through summer (less if the seasons continue to stretch out) but it feels almost like the peak is behind us. I think perhaps that’s what I was trying to hang on to in these images, shot almost all at once in a last attempt to hold on before the return to work and routine.
