My photographs are my life. The famous adage is that 'a picture is worth a thousand words.' For me it is more than that. When I return to a photograph from my life, it opens a portal to a series of stories, memories and feelings.

It is like the photo itself stores metadata. Frequently, the story revealed has nothing to do with the content of the photo. Take, for instance, the photograph below. It is a photograph of a posse of Aboriginal youth dangling on a temporary camel enclosure. Yet the memory it unveiled was watching videos with an Old English Sheepdog as a pillow. That is because when I looked at it the first time, I didn't see the camel in the shadows. I just saw the kids on the fence. Trying to recall where it was taken my brain produced the Aileron camdraft I attended with my mother and our friend, Ronnie Huriwai-Hawkes. Ronnie is delightful Maori woman who has been a family friend since 1981 and over the years has owned several Old English Sheepdogs. The two I remember best were Boo and Breeze. Ronnie was one of the first people we knew in Alice Springs that owned a VHS player. For a year or so, we had a Friday Night routine where our family would rent some movies, truck up to the North Side of town and watch movies with Ronnie, or 'babysit' Boo and Breeze while Ronnie went bowling. As an 11-year old, I found that the Old English Sheepdog made a pretty good cushion for video viewing. (I don't recall many of the movies we saw except for 'Harold and Maude' and the incredibly strange 'Quintet')

I wish I could remember more about the Aileron campdraft because it was such an outback experience. Aileron at that time was a small roadhouse on the Stuart Highway between Alice Springs and Darwin over a thousand miles away. Along the 'highway' - I use this word loosely as the Stuart is a single lane in each direction but at least it is paved - there are roadhouses every few hundred miles. The Great Aussie Outback roadhouse served a variety of functions. In addition to being a place to fill up with petrol, beer and ice there would usually be an attached ramshackle pub and kitchen, perhaps a stationed police officer and usually a few rustic trailers or sheds in the back if you needed to sleep for a couple of hours. (Beer served a more important function on Northern Territory roads than a simple beverage. Distances were actually calculated by the number of beers likely to be consumed between two points. 'Ya're not far, mate, that's about six cans from here ...')

Not surprisingly, the outback roadhouses were pretty rough and ready affairs populated by the floatsam that washed up in these isolated areas, but most of the folks were passing through and very few actually lived at or near the roadhouses. Once a year, many of these remote outposts would put together some sort of get-together and for a couple of days the population would swell with visitors. The most famous of these are the Birdsville Races in one of the most remote corners of the country. Aileron staged a campdraft, which is a contest of horsemanship unique to Australia where jackeroos demonstrate their mustering abilities.

We must have presented quite a trio their in Aileron: a Yank woman from New York, her scrawny son and the always-laughing Maori woman - all camping in Ronnie's little station wagon. It is a shame I don't remember much - only small swatches of walking through the red dust kicked up by the horses and the cattle, climbing up some scaffolding for a higher look and I think trying to take a solar shower. I'm sure my mother took several rolls of photos and when I find them hopefully I can fill in some of the blanks.