Most of our time over the short Xmas break at Victor Harbor was spent cleaning up the weekender so that friends could spend their two week Xmas break there. We are now back in Adelaide amidst the heat, arriving midday Tuesday.

We did, however take the odd break from the cleaning and painting. We spend a couple of hours walking around Granite Island along with lots of Indian and Chinese families for whom Xmas Day had no significance other than as a secular public holiday. We Anglo-Saxons were in a minority that morning, and that highlighted just how much Adelaide had become a multicultural society in the last decade or so.

Despite all the cleaning I managed to find some moments to do a little bit of photography --snaps of the coastal landscape and the beach architecture with my digital camera:

I even managed to do a little thinking about photography----specifically about Saul Leiter's use of colour as form in photography when I was briefly exploring the possibliites for abstraction in the rock forms along the shoreline.

The backdrop is that I have tossed in my Canberra policy work to devote more time to photography. Though the money I was earning was good it felt more like compensation than pay, despite some modicum of creative output. The experience of satisfaction was minimal as the job became increasingly one of the sausage-factory abstract writer in the knowledge economy.

Over Xmas I wondered about how Edward Hopper's beach work--lighthouses, architecture and landscapes would translate to coastal South Australia. I'm struggling to find a visual language to represent this coast beyond my standard point and shoot whilst walking around.

These consideration have become important as photography is now becoming more into the centre of my life in an effort to address the challenge of creativity