The Story Behind…

“The Australian Outback”

Photographed near Coober Pedy, Australia, May 1989

The First Time I Fell in Love

I was 16 the first time I fell in love. It was 1988, and I was living in Australia. I was a Rotary Exchange student, and I spent my junior year of high school living in Alstonville, New South Wales, Australia. I was having the best year of my life, the adventure of a lifetime, the greatest adventure of my life to that point.
Alstonville is a friendly little town with a population of around 2,000 people. It sits nestled in the hills about a 20-minute drive up a winding highway from some of the most pristine beaches and glorious ocean views on the planet.
That magical year began in August 1988 and ended in July 1989. During that year and ever since, I call this my “Peter Pan” year. I was having incredible experiences, in a faraway land, with magical animals including emus, platypuses, kangaroos, koala bears and Tasmanian devils; Aboriginal native Australians with a magical culture that has existed since before time; and people who looked like me and spoke English but talked like no one I had ever heard before, with an accent and words that I could barely understand.
I was making new Australian friends through my host families and through school, and I was also creating incredibly deep and profound friendships with other Rotary exchange students from around the world who were also spending a year in the land Down Under.
I met Rhonda first, on the very first flight over the Pacific Ocean. She was from Colorado. Then I met Michael from Michigan, followed by Amy from West Virginia and Carrie from Arizona.
Then I met Gary, Wayne and Lynette from South Africa; Mark from Zimbabwe; Katrine and Alfred from Norway; Joakim from Sweden; Siru from Finland; Pernille from Denmark; and Yan from China.
We were all being hosted by Rotary District 964 in eastern Australia, in an area that overlapped the northern part of New South Wales and the southern part of Queensland. Some of us lived in towns 50 miles or more from the ocean, while others lived in Surfer’s Paradise on Queensland’s Gold Coast. It not only is a surfer’s paradise, the city is literally called Surfer’s Paradise!
The exchange student program in the late ‘80s was very strong in District 964. They had many organized events for all the students in the district to participate in. Usually once a month or every six weeks we would get together somewhere in the district for a weekend. There were about 30 to 40 exchange students at these exchange student weekends. Some were just arriving while others were nearly finished with their year. There was also a large contingent of students from New Zealand who came on a three-month program, so I met a lot of Kiwis too, including Allison from Auckland.
Our Rotary weekends together were an authentic United Nations of the best and brightest, most outgoing and charismatic teenagers I had ever met. At the time I didn’t know why they liked or accepted me, a goofy kid from Nebraska, as much as they did. Of course, now I do. We were all going through an incredibly unique experience together. I am so grateful they did embrace me, a goofy kid from Nebraska. And I embraced them.
We discussed, debated, hypothesized and offered optimistic solutions to complex global situations such as apartheid in South Africa; Communism in China; the American influence on everything; and simple problems like homesickness, the difficulty in communicating with loved ones at home using dial up phones and international calling cards, the tremendous wait to receive letters from home – remember, in 1988, no one had even imagined the internet or email. We wrote letters home on rice paper because it was lighter and could be sent airmail. It still took weeks to get a reply.
The climax of my year was a 21-day bus tour in the month of May with 30 other exchange students. We rode on a Kirkland’s charter bus that towed a trailer full of canvas surplus-army-style tents, camping supplies, food and cooking utensils.
We camped in those tents and cooked our own food every day and night. Our tour began on the east coast in New South Wales. Picking up students along the way, we went north into Queensland, past Surfer’s Paradise, up to the Great Barrier Reef and spent a day sailing on the Whitsunday islands.
During our exchange student weekends together, we would have hours-long conversations, affectionately called “D&M’s” for deep and meaningful. Those conversations now took on epic depths as we had hours in the bus, followed by hours in our campsite, with each other, our thoughts and questions about the world and the universe, the sunsets, the stars and the sunrises to talk it all out with each other.
After seven days we turned west and headed into the outback of Australia, to the red center. Our destination was Ayers Rock, which now goes by its Aboriginal name Uluru.
We had a magical time at Ayers Rock. I remember climbing it a couple of times during our day there. If memory serves, it took about 45 minutes to mostly walk next to, and a few times hoist ourselves up, a chain that had been put in place to assist those who wanted to summit this monolith in the middle of a desert.
The land has since been returned to the Aborigines, and climbing is no longer permitted.
The next stop for us on our tour was the town of Coober Pedy, one of the most unique places on earth because it is 90% underground. Coober Pedy is the Opal Capital of the world, and this particular region of the outback is extremely brutal.
Weather conditions are extremely hot during the day and frigid at night. Very few things survive here, but people have learned to not only survive, but to adapt and thrive. Especially when opals are involved and can be found in abundant quantities buried in the earth here.
Somewhere between Ayers Rock and Coober Pedy, while the bus was stopped and we had some free time to stretch our legs and walk around, I remember seeing this scene and feeling that I truly was in another world, as far away from the cornfields and cows that I grew up around in Nebraska as I felt I could get.
This place was so desolate, and yet so beautiful at the same time. So haunting and so captivating. I had never seen anything like it and didn’t know if I ever would see it again.
I held my Vivitar PS 135 up to my eye and, framing this scene in the viewfinder, pushed the shutter button.
For a fraction of a second, I’m guessing 1/125th or 1/250th of a second, the shutter on that simple camera opened and closed.
Imagine taking one second and dividing it into 250 equal increments. That is the fraction of a second we are talking about.
So, in a millisecond, a hole in front of the camera opened and sunlight came flooding into the opening. Behind that hole, called a shutter, unexposed film was waiting inside the dark chamber of the camera. The shutter closed. That unexposed film was now exposed film, it had been exposed to light, specifically the light that was reflecting off the Outback scene before me, back towards my eye, and simultaneously towards the film inside the camera.
Bzzzzzzzpp was the sound the motor drive made as it wound the exposed film onto a sprocket inside the camera and pulled a new piece of unexposed film into place, ready for me to push the shutter button again and take another picture.
I have taken more time to write this essay on this page than we had during that quick pit stop break in 1989. Infinitely more time than the 1/250th of a second that the little shutter was open, capturing the light that came from the sun on that hot May afternoon, hit the dead tree and the red earth and the mountains in the distance, and was reflected back in wavelengths that our eyes can detect and our brains can turn into “what we see.”
Inside the camera, the film also saw those light wavelengths, and magic happened. Like water combining with a seed inside soil that gives way to life, the exposed film, when developed using liquid chemicals in precise order, that film became negatives. By taking a negative and shining light through a device called an enlarger, a positive reproduction of the negative could be created on paper that was treated with chemicals that were also sensitive to light. The end result of this fantastic chemical reaction artistic experiment is a photograph that I could hold in my hands, a photograph that I could share with my friends, a photograph that could last hundreds of years, and a photograph that could bring to life and recreate the scene I saw when I was Peter Pan and having swashbuckling adventures with the most amazing cast of characters in our Never-Never land.
I can assure you that I never wanted to grow up, I never wanted to leave that land Down Under. I never wanted to leave my Aussie mates and my newfound brothers and sisters in my host families, and most importantly, the soulmates I had discovered in my fellow Rotary exchange students.
Thankfully, I had my camera. Thankfully, I took those pictures. Thankfully this picture, and so many others of my year there, still exist. And I feel a sense that as long as the pictures exist, I will exist. My children and my children’s children will, perhaps, be able to see these pictures and see the man that provided one little link in their genetic code that will create their DNA, and they will see what I saw when I was alive, and maybe, just maybe, be inspired to take their own pictures in order to deliberately leave a legacy of the most important and memorable times in their lives.
I digress. To complete the story of this photograph…When it was time for me to return home, in addition to the buckets of tears I was crying, I was carrying home 20 or 30 rolls of exposed film. I was going crazy at the end of my time there, taking as many pictures as I could, and because I was running out of money and time, I decided I would just develop the film when I got home.
Little did I know the next chapter of my life - and the next story in this book - would involve me working at the local one-hour photo lab. But it did, and it was during those early days at Bob’s Superstore, when I developed all my film from Australia, looked through the pictures, saw this one of the Outback, and was immediately flooded with the memories of one of the best days of my life.
Those same memories flood me know, at this moment, as I type these words and look at this picture.
And this is the story behind the photograph “The Australian Outback.”
I was only 17, but I had fallen head over heels in love with photography. I had discovered my passion but had no idea where it would lead me.

•••••

Oh, and I did fall in love with a girl, a girl named Lizbeth, who lived in Grafton, New South Wales. Although we never made it to becoming actual boyfriend and girlfriend, she was the first Australian girl I kissed, and the memories from the week we got to spend together when I was in her town with the other exchange students for the Grafton Jacaranda Festival are ones that I will always treasure deep in my heart.

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