Life.
It’s all about the little things. Hands up if you’ve heard that more than once in your life?

I know, I think we’ve all lost count how many times we’ve heard it.

But 2017 for me was just that. I had transplanted myself to the other side of the world, in pursuit of twelve months of simplicity, exploration and adventure.

I hadn’t thought too much about what I would miss from home apart from my family, my home and friends.

Sometimes you don’t realise what you’ve missed until it surrounds you once again in great abundance: the little things.

And one of those things I missed deeply (unbeknownst to me) was the golden ochre tones that sweep this land in the big dry that is the warmer months.

 I forgot how much how much visual memory I attached to the heat of the Australian summer.

How unique it is that leaves of eucalypts still fall to the ground outside the autumnal months.

Summer’s air so devoid of moisture, dry carcasses of foliage line native forest floors, in tones of amber, copper and cinnamon.

Oh, this brown country, you still have my heart. Full of the little things, the memories, that make me ‘me’.

I think Dorothea Mackellar summed it up best in the last stanza of her poem “My Country”

“An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly. “