A Special Place
While I was staying with the Ellis Brothers, I thought I would take the opportunity to visit one of my favourite places. Many people walk past these falls without knowing it as the track is not marked and is fairly overgrown in places.
First time I had been here in about 10 years and I had always wanted to get some newer images of the place.
Situated on the Pencil Pine Ck which is the Northern boundary of the National Park, it is a special little spot that has always filled me with a sense of what wilderness is all about!
Your Family & Friends are important subjects!
Hi Everybody,
Apologies for the long absence from the blogosphere although I have been checking you all out occasionally!
The reason for my absence is that my father of 92 years of age passed away about a month ago down in Tasmania. Luckily, I did get to see him before he went although he was not concious at the time.
It was while we were putting together some photos for his service that I realised that I didn’t have any images of him that I had taken and there were only a couple of images of us together that thankfully another family member had taken. There was also a long period of his life where there were very few photos of him at all which effectively meant that most photos were happy snaps taken in his early years or his later years!
After his service, I thought about this and came to the conclusion that peoples memories of him were his best legacy and it also made me realise that although I have been a photographer on & off for many years, I had always put people in the ‘too hard basket’ for various reasons.
So, I have resolved to try and become a better people photographer because most of us are guilty of taking our family & friends for granted and they won’t be there forever!
A couple of good friends of my father’s invited me to stay with them up at Cradle Mt. while I was there, so just to put things in perspective, I took them up on their offer. The Ellis brothers who I have posted about previously, are men from a different age. Tough as nails and with a body of knowledge in their heads that is slowly disappearing as one by one they pass on. While I was there, I had an opportunity to capture them in their environment and hopefully try to bring out there personalities on “film”.
Mort & Alec live in a couple of spartan cabins right on the edge of the Cradle Mt Nat. Park. Along with their late brother Ossie they had extensive land holdings in the area which they have subsequently sold for tourism development. Surrounded by tourism accomodation, most visitors to the area don’t even know they exist.
Mort is the oldest brother, 95 yrs young and still keeps himself occupied with making his own cheese and ínventing’ perpetual motion machines! He has a great singing voice and is convinced that all the woes of the world are caused by man’s greed for money. To listen to he & my father passionately debate this issue was an education in itself!
In spite of his advanced years he is still as sharp as a tack with a healthy sense of humour and a twinkle in his eye. Still drives his car down to the nearest town, which is an hour drive for most people, along steep winding roads at a very healthy pace!
Alec, his younger brother lives semi-permanently in a cabin separated from Mort’s by a large machinery shed. Alec is the ‘entrepeneur’ of the family, he , along with Ossie saw the opportunities in the Cradle Mt. region many years ago and together they built the first commercial accomodation, built in the area, Pencil Pine Lodge.
At heart, Alec is most happy when he is at the controls of an earth-moving machine of some sort and is always tinkering with something along those lines. His cabin is a single room shack that was an old Hydro shack he saw on the back of a semi-trailer one day and later bought for around $100.
One of the worlds great talkers, (heaven help you if he calls you on the phone!) he knows everyone, has a great fund of stories and is always seeing new opportunities and has a heart of gold as well!
One day these two great old men will be gone, I am proud to have met them through my father and the world will be less for their passing. In the meantime, I hope I have captured them in a way that shows the essence of these two ‘old timers’!
Cradle Mt.
Only made it up to Cradle Mt. once this time around. True to form, the weather was cold,blustery and RAINING which is the norm rather than the exception in this part of the world. I sat in the car for a while cursing my luck and eventually a break in the rain came through so hopefully I set off to a couple of spots that I wanted to check out.
Of course, 100 meters away from the car and a light rain started. I pulled out the camera gear a couple of times in the hope of getting a shot that wouldn’t have water spots on the lens and this was the only useable image.
I call this an environmental portrait of Cradle Mt. with the mountain taking a backseat to it’s surrounding environment of buttongrass plains which cover a large part of the surrounding area.
Anyway, hope you all like it!
Myrtle Mystery.
Of all the forests and bushlands I have wandered through over the years, I think the type of forest that gives me the greatest pleasure would be the Myrtle Beech forests of Tasmania.
To me, they are places of magic and mystery. Cool damp forests mostly found along alpine streams, the only sounds you hear are the burbling of the stream or the occasional thump as a wallaby scoots off into the brush.
The colour palette here is a lush emerald green as nearly everything is covered in a variety of mosses and lichens. Looking about, I nearly expect to see elves and faeries to be perched on a log looking at me quizzically.
Photographically, they are a delight, you could spend all day in one of these places and travel no more than 100 metres. Sunbeams,mist and the sheer variety of colour, texture and shape will engage your senses for hours!
Shot near Pencil Pine Creek on the edge of the Cradle Mt- Lake St. Clair Nat. Park.
Old Timer
While I am on the subject of Cradle Mt, I would like you all to meet one of my father’s closest mates. Mort Ellis, 94yrs young!
Mort and his brothers Ossie and Alec were the builders and owners of Pencil Pine Lodge which is now known as the world famous Cradle Mt. Lodge. Pencil Pine Lodge was the first “commercial” accommodation built in the area back in the early 70′s and I remember spending some great times there over the years! And a few that I am a bit hazy about as well.
Ossie was a bit of a legend in bushwalking circles before his untimely death. He built all the tracks and bridges around Cradle Mt Lodge that enable guests to go for walks in the different environments surrounding the lodge. A total opposite to my father in political persuasion,they were the best of mates and shared many adventures in some of the wildest areas of the Tasmanian wilderness. To listen to them having a passionate political debate over a few beers was highly entertaining and sometimes alarming as they always used to to stir each other up for the fun of it!
While Mort was not into bushwalking so much, most of his working life was spent in the bush on the rugged west coast of Tasmania. An area that is not known for it’s metro-sexuals and new-age men!!
There are not many people like Mort left nowadays and with each passing year, a wealth of knowledge slowly dwindles away. To listen to people like Mort, Ossie and my father with their knowledge of their environment and the old-fashioned bushcraft they used was fascinating!
On another note, this image was processed mostly in Lightroom using a technique that involves ramping up the Fill, Blacks and Clarity sliders to max, back off on the Blacks to suit your taste, desaturate to taste and put a vignette around it.
Not a great technique for aspiring model but for someone with a lived in face like Mort it works a treat!
Cradle Mt.
Andrew Brown & Jamie Patterson have been posting some great images of the Tasmanian Icon that is Cradle Mt, so I thought I would add my paltry efforts!
These have been lurking in my archive for ages and frankly they’re rather boring images compared to others that are out there.
These two images above were shot in my early days of digital photography, so please excuse the quality. A rare beautiful day up in these parts!
These last two illustrate the extremes of weather up in the Alpine regions. It can go from a beautiful warm sunny day to freezing cold and nasty in very short time! Many people have been caught out over the years, some with fatal consequences.
My father who lived at Cradle Mt for many years and knew the area intimately treated the area with great respect even if he was going for a short daywalk.
Many times i have driven up to the lake hoping for that moody, broken cloud pierced by the setting sun type of weather. So far it has eluded me but I will get lucky one day!
The Father of Cradle Mt.
These are some images of ‘Waldheim’ which was the home of Gustav Weindorfer, acknowledged as the spiritual father of the Cradle Mountain-Lake St.Clair National Park.
‘Waldheim’ was built in 1912 from local timber that was all manually split for shingles and used for furniture etc.
Considering there were no roads into this area then, it is usually cloudy and drizzly and it can snow in the middle of summer, you’ve got to hand it to the people who made the area their home. Tough buggers!
But when you look at the surroundings you can’t help but think what an awesome place to live!
It’s a far cry from modern times where the area is a tourist mecca and is very carefully managed by the Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service to ensure that the thousands of people who visit each year don’t completely wreck the area.
I was here early one morning, weather was crap for getting any decent images of Cradle Mt. Luckily it was too early for the tour buses so I had the place to myself for an hour, a rare experience!
Timeless
If you are heading to Cradle Mountain, chances are you will pass through an area called the Middlesex Plains.
This is one of my favourite drives, great road and the scenery has a haunting beauty to it that is unique. Skeletons of trees killed long ago by extreme weather and fire, among other causes, stretch their ghostly limbs to the sky.
The human history of this area is littered with tales of hardship,loneliness, folly and bravery although there is little evidence of it these days.
I have tried to capture what this place feels like on a few occasions but so far it has eluded me, Its a place that needs time to get to know. These are a couple of attempts that hopefully gives an idea.
