Rams, birds, a book and a garden.
There are three rams in my garden. Try as I might to keep them out, they always find a way back in.
Even though they are the same size in stature, one has a set of remarkably large balls. So much bigger than those of his colleagues. And I call them colleagues because they are at work out there, destroying my garden.
Yesterday Ed looked out the window and saw one of them in the swimming pool, its head bobbing just above the waterline. It wasn’t exactly drowning – its front legs were resting on the underwater step – but it couldn’t work out how to get out either. It must be the ram with the big balls, I thought.
One of Ed’s domestic jobs is to look after the pool. He’s not very good at it. The water is brown and sometimes has ducks in it. I think it's the consistent maintenance that kills him.
But he was right on it when it came to pulling the ram out of the water. A cloud of lanolin tainted with sheep poo fanned out from around the ram on the pool's surface, like an oil spill. Ed is glad the ram is no longer in the pool.
I am not glad they are still in my garden.
Annabelle
After calling last drinks on the print magazine with Issue 14, I spent a few months in conversation with an interested (and talented) group who were considering taking it over. Nothing concrete has come of this so far. Hope springs eternal, but there is no more print mag on the horizon, at least for now. If anything changes I'll let you know. Until then, assume Issue 14 is the last.
In other (wonderful) news, Galah Press continues. In March next year I am publishing a beautiful hardcover book A Garden is not a Painting written by a gardener, for gardeners.
A garden of a lifetime takes, well, a lifetime. Carolyn Robinson has made two.
Her book A Garden is not a Painting is a collection of lessons from a life in the garden. It's full of practical wisdom, but it's also about what a garden actually asks of the person who makes it. It's a book that I want to exist in this world and I am extremely proud to be publishing it.
We're going to launch the book at the Australian Landscape Conference in Melbourne in March next year, but before then Carolyn is going to open her private garden Eagles Bluff to the public for one weekend only.
It's a garden that's worth the drive. All the details are here. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reply to this email.
New books Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason and Whistler by Ann Patchett are brilliant. And did you know that authors Mason and Patchett became friends in early 2021 after a repeated exchange of thank-you notes, and now they send each other voice notes every day?
This date and lemon salad dressing on repeat. So good with cabbage or fennel or radicchio. Or even by the spoon.
There is so much great photography going on right now. I loved looking at the 2026 Bowness finalists and the 2026 Australian Photography Awards selections online. Then there are two exhibitions I want to visit in person – Olive Cotton and her contemporaries in Sydney and the Max Dupain and Ansel Adams exhibition in Victoria. Also, I'll be very interested to see the finalists in the photography section of the National Emerging Art Prize (entries are open now).
I asked gallerist Michael Reid, who represents leading Australian photographers including Tamara Dean and Petrina Hicks (and who established the National Emerging Art Prize), to paint a picture of where contemporary Australian photography is at now.
"The contemporary Australian photographic eye is evolving," said Reid. "There is a movement away from the Decisive Moment, the photographer being in the right place at the right time; away from the National Geographic school of big nature in close-up; and away from peering down at the planet through drone photography.
"In their place is something more personal: photographers bringing emotion and their own life stories to their work.
"This distinctively Australian flavouring of our images sits alongside the equally individual perspectives of contemporary photographers overseas. In the end, it is our very villageness – the intensely local nature of how we see – that proves to be truly universal."
Can't wait to crank up the Galah Regional Photography Prize again. Date to be decided, but I see outstanding photography from regional Australia in our future.
In the meantime, I'm having fun on my own photography project, inspired directly by Stephen Gill's brilliant The Pillar, in which he set up a motion-sensitive camera facing a wooden stake in a field near his house in rural Sweden. His photographs of the birds landing on the pillar are completely mesmerising – ghostly and beautiful and strangely heartbreaking (at least for me). I wanted to see what birds were in my neck of the woods, and this is how the project is going so far.
Scenes from my home photography project so far, inspired directly by Stephen Gill's brilliant The Pillar.
