Townsville Part 1
Once again, I haven’t blogged in a while, this time because I’ve been too busy in Townsville (although I have reserved the time to Twitter copiously). I’m going to talk about some of the stuff I’ve been up to here now, because my sister’s mangled her knee so we’re pretty much housebound today at least.
Now that I’ve been in Townsville a little longer than the 2 days I’d been here last time I blogged, I’ve had more time to reflect upon the city and how it works. I’m still not excessively impressed with the CBD itself – compared to Darwin (or Melbourne, but that’s a given) the centre of the city seems very dead. There’s quite a number of buildings around the CBD itself that are empty, and seem to have been so for some time. Once you get out of the city, though, the impression improves a lot. There’s lots of walking tracks and gardens around, and although my opinion of Queensland’s road design department doesn’t have a lot of positive aspects getting around isn’t too bad, if only because the city’s small enough.
My week of housesitting was fairly uneventful, mostly taking some photos (some of which are on my flickr account) and exploring Townsville on my own. I went to my brother’s for dinner on all but one night and even managed to find a shortcut to their place that nobody else had figured out yet! On my photo trips, I visited all three of the botanical gardens in Townsville (in what ended up being the reverse order of preference) – Anderson Park, Queens Gardens and the Palmetum. I haven’t fully explored any of them (least of them Anderson Park, so it would probably grow on me if I visited it more extensively) but from what I’ve seen of them and the area around Townsville more generally the whole thing is a photographer’s dream.
If you look at the gallery you’ll probably notice that I’ve been very preoccupied with leaves since I’ve been up here, and that the vast majority of the photos are just leaves. It wasn’t an intentional thing, it just sort of happened when I visited the Queens Gardens the first time and noticed how amazing the interaction between tropical leaves and the sunlight is up here. So much more than the plants in Melbourne, the light shines through in interesting ways revealing textures and patterns which you can’t properly see without the light. The government decided to give me $1000 (well, lots of people $1000) so I saw that as a sign – an invisible voice said “Go and buy a macro lens” so that’s what I did, so then I took a whole lot of macro shots of the back of leaves. Anyway, not much of an excuse, but I’ve really enjoyed looking at the leaves of Townsville, so I don’t need to make excuses. That said, I’m going to have to look more carefully in Melbourne to find some of this stuff happening because it makes for some pretty amazing photos if I say so myself (even if I haven’t quite mastered the new lens.)
After my week of relative solitude, things got busy and more packed quickly. I’ll talk about Xmas and New Year a bit more in my next blog post, but I just thought I should check in and say that I am still alive. If you want further proof, follow my twitter feed, which I actually update semi-regularly.