Some photographs mark a destination. Others capture the moment when you begin to imagine a completely different life.
We had just driven thousands of kilometres from Darwin to Canberra to begin a new chapter. But almost immediately, things didn't feel quite right.
The house the Air Force had allocated to us was small, and after the space and freedom we had become accustomed to in Darwin, we weren't ready to return to suburban life.
Then we saw a sign advertising rural blocks just outside Googong.
A week later, we were standing in an empty paddock being shown where future building sites would be. There were no houses or established gardens, just land, enormous skies and the possibility of something different.
Three days later, we reserved ten acres.
It was easily the biggest impulse purchase of our lives. Somehow, it felt completely right.
Daring to imagine something different
Buying the land was the easy part.
What followed was the reality of turning an empty paddock into somewhere we could live. There were plans, approvals, finances and seemingly endless decisions about a house that didn't yet exist.
Whenever the process became overwhelming, we would drive out to the land in the late afternoon. There wasn't much to do, so we simply watched the light move across the hills and waited for the kangaroos to emerge as the day cooled.
Those evenings became our way of managing the stress. They reminded us why we had taken the risk.
Keeping the dream alive
This photograph comes from one of those evenings.
The last light pours across the countryside, turning the dry grass gold as a mob of kangaroos moves through the paddock.
At the time, this landscape represented possibility.
Somewhere among those paddocks was the life we were trying to build. We couldn't see exactly what it would become, and there was still an enormous amount of work ahead.
Watching the kangaroos at sunset gave us a chance to forget about builders, paperwork and money for a while. We could simply stand on our patch of countryside and imagine the future.
Photography helped me hold onto that feeling. Through the camera, I wasn't looking at an empty block of land or another difficult project. I was looking at the reason we were doing all of it.
Five years later
We have now lived here for five years.
The empty paddock became our home. The country roads became the roads we travel every day. The hills, fog, frost, kangaroos and enormous skies became part of the rhythm of our lives — and an endless source of inspiration for my photography.
It is difficult now to imagine living any other way.
Photographs like this take me back to a time when none of what we have today was guaranteed. We had arrived in Canberra expecting one kind of new beginning and, almost immediately, decided to create another.
It was impulsive, ambitious and at times incredibly stressful.
But this photograph reminds me why we kept going.
It isn't simply a landscape of the countryside outside Canberra. For me, it is a photograph of the moment a place began to feel like home — long before we had actually built one.