A moving target

One of my great joys is photographing from a moving platform.   A car, a train a ferry perhaps.  There is an extra adrenaline rush from having to work fast.  Seeing compositions develop and trying to time them right.  There is always the disappointment of missing many too.  As in life, when you take bigger risks the rewards may be greater but the falls are bigger too. 

Here I am shooting from a small boat on the Donaldson River in The Tarkine Wilderness deep in the West Coast of Tasmania.  It’s one of my favourite places.  Three meters of annual rainfall means it is wet and very very green.  This is one of my highlights from my Tarkine Photography Tour.  I have slipped it into this years program in the hope that I can go again. 

For me this is Dr Suess’s Truffler Tree.  My favourite book to read to kids and start the conversation about deforestation, the need for conservation and for healthy logging practices that maintain biodiversity.   

I ask our boat captain if the Tarkine is safe and he tells me it is.   But unfortunately it isn’t.  Only a very small area is preserved in National Park, while the rest may have a fancy name that sounds like it is, it clearly isn’t.  Logging continues as does mining.  Most is gazetted waiting for further resources to be removed.  Unfortunately the fight for the Tarkine isn’t over.  

There is a sense of urgency for me to record this beautiful place just in case a politician decides its fate with a signature and a careless motion.  There again is this sense of urgency, the moving target. Capture it before it’s gone.

“I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues” said the Lorax

Donaldson River, Corina, Tasmania. Photograph and text copyright © Len Metcalf 2018