Holiday and an Exhibition

I'm now officially on leave for the next four weeks and it feels great.

No getting up at five thirty in the morning to go and sit at a desk all day and be bored out of my mind. Not that I'll be sleeping in too much, Donna won't let me. She's actually still working over the four weeks, but she'll make sure she wakes me up before she goes to work.

I've got a Geology exam on the 14th, so I'll be studying for that most of the time until then. On the 21st and 22nd I'll be going for that truck licence that I mentioned previously. Apart from that I'll probably do stuff around the house.

The desk I'm sitting in at the moment, which incidentally is in the corner, is in a small room at the back of the garage. Eventually I'll get it moved upstairs to the spare room and this room will become a darkroom. I have a heap of black and white wedding photos that I haven't got around to printing yet for my neice because there's too much stuff in the way in here at the moment.

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Today we're going to a photographic exhibition at the powerhouse in Newfarm. "South by 8" it's called. It features eight photographers including famous Vietnam war photographer, Tim Page and Errol Flynn's son Sean, who was a close friend of Page's during the war until he went MIA.

Tim Page originally became a photographer when he found himself in South East Asia at the beginning of the conflict. He was doing the hippy overland trip to Australia and got caught up in the middle of a gunfight. A journalist that he was taking cover with, Martin Stuart-Fox, handed him a camera, showed him how to use it and that was the beginning of a great career.

Page and Flynn had a reputation for getting right into the thick of things, often going on combat missions with the troops, as did Neil Davis, an Australian cameraman who filmed his own death during a military coup in Bangkok a few years ago. As a result Page was seriously injured several times during the war, once by a grenade, once by "friendly" fire and once by a mine that left him clinically dead for a short time.

As a keen photographer I found the story of Page's life quite inspirational after reading his autobiography, "Page after Page", many years ago. More recently I've read "Derailed in Uncle Ho's Victory Garden". It tells of some of his later trips to Vietnam and Cambodia to find Flynn's body and to set up a memorial for the journalists and photographers that were killed during the Vietnam war.

I'm looking forward to seeing the exhibition as is Donna as she hasn't been to a photo-exhibition for a long time.

I just hope we don't get wet, it's pouring down here.