PHOTOGRAPHY/QUOTE

Sunset from a cow paddock at Woodford

Photography by Jemma Darlington

"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

- Joseph Campbell

PHOTOGRAPHY

Sunrise at Lake Cootharaba

Photography by Jemma Darlington

ART

LIVE art [BY Jem.]

Photography by Jemma Darlington

The above painting was created as a Live art piece for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society fundraiser, Ocean's Rhapsody at Melba's on the Gold Coast.

This above picture is of the half completed piece, and features a Minke Whale, a specied which is the main target of the illegal whaling activities within the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

Funds raised from the auction of this painting (when completed featured contributions from Sea Shepherd crew members answering the question "What does the sea mean to you?') went straight into Sea Shepherd's 9th Antarctic whale defence campaign, Operation Zero Tolerance.

FILM

Kiwi's Against Seabed Mining

www.kasm.org.nz

MUSING

A POPPY Before Rememberance Day

10th November 2012

Image by Jemma Darlington

My Mother's first ever planting of Poppy seeds, has birthed it's first stunningly elegant red Poppy. This still, grey morning; the morn' before the day we stop to pay respects to the men and woman (and children, animals and the Earth) who have suffered at the hands of war.

It has only just in the last few weeks, after reading a personal, historical record of an Australian's experience of World War I as a child, that my heart has come to understand the burden and sacrifice of such makings of man. Previously war had just been a thing that they made us learn about when I was in school. 

But I am at a point in my life where I am begining to understand such things as leaving ones life, love and home to answer the call of the Country, to then go and undertake huge personal sacrifice (often of limb and life), to murder and pillage in the name of life.

A poem by Judith Wright:

Soldier's Farm

This ploughland vapoured with the dust of dreams,

these delicate gatherings of dancing trees,

answered the question of his searching eyes

as his wife's body answered to his arms.

He let the whole gold day pass in a stare,

walking the turning furrow. The horses drew

his line straight where the shakesword corn should grow.

He, lurching mooncalf, let his eyes stride far.

They stooped across the swell and sink of hill;

made record of the leaves that played with light.

The mist was early and the moon was late,

and in between he stared his whole day full.

He asked for nothing but the luck to live,

so now his willing blood moves in these trees

that hold his heart up sunwards with their arms.

The mists dissolve at morning like his dreams

and the creek answered light as once his eyes;

and yet he left here nothing but his love.

Image by Jemma Darlington