I have been looking through the local National Trust Museum's collection of old photos, as I like to try and find old photos that can be duplicated today so that we will have a before and now shot of the same place. I found a photo labelled as being taken up at "The Cups" and immediately knew it to be incorrectly labeled, as the area was very familliar to me from my early teens, it was actually taken another several hundred yards up the creek at the Belalie Springs.
The image in our collection The rock formation is very distinctive and so I decided that it might make a good example of Before and After, so we could see what it looked like today. I don't know what it was, but for some reason, it looked "out of whack".... So several nights ago I rang the owners of the land where it is situated and asked their permission to go and take some new photos. Yes, they were only too pleased to let me do it, so next morning, last Wednesday, I took the opportunity to go and have a look.
In retrospect, it was not a particularly wise decision, as Wednesday was extremely hot and steamy, but then again, I suppose that making great decisions has never really been one of my strong points, and I was anxious to get up there and see what I could see. I drove out to Belalie Springs a kilometre or so out of the town and parked as close as possible to where I wanted to go. After opening a few gates and jumping a sheep yard fence I found myself only a matter of 40 metres from where I imagined the original shot had been taken.
Above you can see my view of the area immediately after getting over the sheep yard fence, and from what I could remember the original photo would have had to have been taken from the other side of the rocks looking back toward where I was now standing. This was going to be almost impossible as the bottom of the creek was now thickly overgrown with a stand of native pines. So, I walked along the fence down into the creeck only to fiind that my worst fears were realised, the whole creekbed was completely ful of native pines, growing so thickly as to be almost impenetrable. I started to push my way into the thicket only to find another unpleasant surprise, it was hot out in the sun and at first I welcomed the shade and boggy ground underfoot as it was at least 10 degrees cooler, BUT the flies had also realised this and the instant I disturbed the growth, I was literally covered in small bush flies which unlike house flies do not always move when given a wave of the hand. They were so thick that within 20 seconds there was standing room only, on my hands and any other part of me that protruded from my clothing, they were in my eyes and ears, up my nose and had no intention of moving unless almost wiped off. What I would not have given for a can of Aerogard.
To get where I had to go, I had to walk in the creek itself albeit on the edges where it was just soggy mud and I gradually got within several metres of that peculiarly shaped rock formation whereupon it was immediately apparent that taking a photo was going to be absolutely out of the question, as all that could be seen was trees. To get anything at all it was obvious that i would have to climb up the steep side of the formation which being solid rock was clear of almost all growth. I wasn't keen on this idea,... at least not whilst carrying an expensive camera. The rock, although not all that steep is crumbly and covered in loose debris making it very hard to get a secure foothold. So,... after a bit of very cautious scrambling about I worked my way up the righthand side of the small notch in the rocks getting about 3 metres above the creek and took the photo below
I then edged my way forward to look down into the narrow slot in the rocks and that is shown as best i could in the photo below.
It was a careful exercise, as if I slipped there was little to stop me until I fell into the pool at the bottom which used to be over two metres deep when I was a kid. I didn't like the thought of that nor what it would do to my camera.
It was not easy to see anything that actually looked like the top photo, so having done as good as i could in the circumstancesI fought my way back through the few metres of overgrowth and started back to where I could easily get over the fence. Just before i did so, I took one last photo looking back over the area, and the instant I clicked the shutter, it dawned on me as to what was "screwy" about the original photo,....
It was a mirror image. The negative had been placed in the enlarger the wrong way up transposing the image from left to right. It should hve looked like this,
Below
and here is my photo cropped and vignetted in a similar manner to the original.
