🌞   🌛
John Arthur Nichol

  • In the late afternoon a big fluffy cloud appears from nowhere, hanging like a space ship in my window.

  • A small girl dressed completely in pink crosses the road with her mother, but frees her hand as they reach the footpath. She shades her eyes and points at right-angles to the direction her mother wants to go. A discussion ensues. The girl peers up, pulling sunglasses from her forehead and replacing them many times, and quickly. Finally she changes hands, and points in the opposite direction to her first choice.

    They could be there a while.

  • On Sydney’s hottest day in two years, the 199 from Manly has no air-conditioning. The windows are sealed. The emergency exit hatch that must never be opened is open.

    A red-faced mother with sunburn mimes ‘Oh it’s hot!’ to the contents of a pram, fanning her face, puffing her lips out and smiling. She has blonde hair topped with sunglasses, and pale blue eyes.

    Another woman leans conversationally over the barrier to the cross-seats, and the mother replies with an American accent:

    ‘Ya. Hottest day of the year. I’m just …’ She pauses and drags her palms down sweaty cheeks … ‘We don’t have far to go.’ She’s out of conversation, and lifts accusing eyes as new boarders squeeze in - schoolboys with white shirts, black bags and no sense of personal space, or of anything much.

    As the bus grinds on she makes constant maintenance probes and water bottle offerings inside the pram. Her face grows redder, her eyes more tired. No smiles for the baby now, just a silent, red and sweaty frown of concern. She yawns suddenly. Uncertain whether to roll her eyes or close them, she does both.

    Many stops later she escapes, backing the pram down onto a sun-blasted footpath, and an older woman follows with a shake of the head. They stand together, close associates of some kind but not friendly. Or perhaps the 199 has leached them of the will to try.

  • Engineering

    Long-Term Shade Engineering at Manly Beach

    A small Norfolk Island Pine Tree stands within its protective timber fence on a walkway overlooking a beach filled with umbrellas, gazebos, deck-chairs and people. In the foreground, a man and a woman walking towards each other are about to pass the tree in opposite directions. In the distance, swimmers stand or bob in a small surf. Beyond the white of breaking waves, the ocean matches the sky’s blue intensity.

    March Photoblog Challenge Day 6

  • Knitters Run Wild

    The lower stretch of a telegraph pole is completely covered by five lengths of knitting, each with different colours and patterns. The display includs a trio of big, three-dimensional knitted flowers with long green knitted stems - two flowers on the middle swatch and one on the bottom. The top swatch has a pink heart on a green background.

  • Two parents join their little boy on a train ride at the Mall, circling slowly in a moment of peace without dignity.

  • A woman’s face in red looks down on Liverpool Road. Her hair flows along the lane, framing huge block letters that say ‘Art B.C. Jewellery’, and smaller capitals underneath saying ‘Exclusive Designers of Handcrafted Jewellery’. Blue sky glares above, shadows clutter the lane below, and a streetlight becomes an eye-liner touching her brow.

  • On the main road of Ashfield stands a tiny cottage with brick walls and a slate roof, with terra cotta ornaments all along its crown and the crowning glory right at the very front. The roof’s front slope stops short of the peak, leaving a neat little triangle of timber slats to circulate air beneath the tiles. There’s a chimney, too, that widens all around in four stepped courses underpinning a columned chimney pot, like a tiny Japanese shrine, with a pinnacle of its own.

    From the garden, steps lead up to a small verandah with a low brick wall, timber uprights and a curved roof of corrugated iron trimmed with elaborate, pressed metal seams. The corrugated iron is holed in the middle and rusted to a deep reddish brown. The garden is full of long, dead, long-dead grass, and the little house, trapped within the same industrial fence that protects the countless-storey building site next door, is doomed.

  • A young father’s eyes are everywhere, intense and challenging, hard to meet. He pushes one of those vehicles that’s more than a stroller and less than a pram, which faces backwards so you can only see in once it’s gone past. It does this, and the cargo is a clutch of shopping bags.

  • On the 199, three dark-haired, dark-eyed, olive-complexioned women are talking. One sits and the others stand in front of her, clinging to pieces of the bus and jostled by fellow-travellers. When space opens up on the cross-seats the three friends claim their together-space, and the young one hands out Ferrero Rochers.

  • Tile

    This is my bathroom tile: it's full of pictures

    A large, square, glazed ceramic tile fills the frame, with grouting visible round the edges. The tile is dull yellow ochre in colour, and its surface is covered with lines in dark ochre and grey which appear to be random. As you study the tile, the lines resolve into odd little figures and scenes, like a cartoon dog with one eye in the middle of an oval head, or a princess in elaborate head-dress being attended by a dwarf in a robe and hood.

    March Photoblog Challenge Day 5

  • Zip

    With these handles, I used to zip and unzip

    Three shiny zipper handles, no longer attached to zippers, lie jumbled together on a soft, mottled brown background. The camera has zoomed in so the zipper handles seem big, and detailed. Illumination is from the side, lighting some surfaces and throwing others into shadow.

    March Photoblog Challenge Day 4

  • Three Histories of Ashfield

    A set of three terrace houses viewed from the front, identical in form but different in colour and state of repair. Each has a brick fence with a tiny yard, and French doors to a balcony on the upper level with elaborate wrought iron railings. Thick concrete walls separate the balconies, curving up to meet rendered fascias topped with sandstone urns. Both end houses appear well-maintained, but the middle house needs refurbishing: it has different, peeling colours top and bottom, cracks and moss in the brickwork of its fence, and dark stains on its fascia.

  • Hunters and Gatherers

    A wide, flat rock platform stretches from sand at bottom left to the ocean with small breaking waves in the middle distance, and a line of headlands on the horizon. The sea is dark blue. The sky is pale blue with white clouds: fluffy clouds high up and flat-topped clouds below them. A line of human figures spreads across the platform, stepping and fossicking in shallow pools and reflected there along with the sky. Children crouch, and a woman in a bikini carries a bucket.

  • Self-Portrait in Shadow

    A shiny, dark blue gate meets the rough concrete of a sunlit footpath, where a thick, irregular line of white paint runs along the concrete. The gate’s horizontal slats angle sharply up the left side of the photo. A shadow covers half of the gate and half of the footpath, an amorphous shape beginning at th ebottom edge and tapering right to the top where it suggests the head and shoulders of a person wearing a hat. On the gate’s second slat down from the corner is a small, luminous red rectangle with sharp edges.

  • A man with short, dark, wiry hair pushes a stroller containing a small red-haired boy. The boy sits with his hands in his lap, looking disconsolate. His hair flutters in the breeze. The man doesn’t once look up from his phone, whose screen he is reading with close attention.

  • Two old women are swapping war stories. One has a huge, thick plaster cast encasing her entire arm, with just a hole at the end for her fingers to breathe.

  • A bunch of teenage boys dawdles past, accompanied by two basketballs bouncing in monotonous rhythm. The sound has been heralding their approach for some time.

  • A thin woman in the distance, just a shadow, mounts the footpath with four little wheels and contemplates the path ahead.

  • A tiny girl flies past on a bright pink scooter, a riot of colour in rainbow-striped crocs, dark blue shorts and a jumper covered in flowers. Pink sunglasses dangle from her neckline, and her blonde ponytail flies beneath a maroon helmet with air holes and thick black straps.

    She glides to a halt, turns back to rendezvous with her mum, and they continue together.

  • An older woman is crossing Pittwater Road with terrifying slowness, smiling, utterly engaged in a conversation on her phone. The lights change as she reaches the pedestrian island in the middle but she doesn’t stop. She just keeps walking at the same unhurried pace, chatting away, crossing the murderous traffic lanes unchallenged.

  • Solitude

    March Photoblog Challenge Day 3

    A lone figure, seen in silhouette from behind, sits beneath a black umbrella on a steel and timber bench overlooking the surf. The sea and sky are both grey, but the water is darker. Waves break on the tip of a rocky outcrop in the middle distance and sweep round onto the sand, which is littered with seaweed. A two-storey yellow building and a swimming pool extend out onto the outcrop. A silver railing separates the bench and walkway from a short drop down to the beach.

  • Entropy in Red

    A close up of rust on a red street posting box. The rust has eaten right through the metal of the mail box, creating a series of layers beginning with bright red paint, then broken corroded metal in shades of brown and orange and red, and finally flakes of almost pure red oxide lying at the mouth of a black cavern.

  • The End of an Autumn Day

    A street half in darkness, with long shadows slanting across a tiled footpath. In the foreground, four silhouetted bicycle stands in the shape of horse-shoes are joined to the stretching loops of their own shadows. A yellow building on the left runs into the distance with bins and a pile of milk crates out the front and shadowy, glinting cars on either side of the street.

  • Our Mysterious Planet

    The lines on this footpath look like slinkies, but in my day we called them tumblebugs.

    A grey footpath is scored across with broad, pale marks that look like three-dimensional cylinders. The shapes are composed of regularly-spaced, spiral lines, and the end of each shape forms an angled cross-section of a circle.