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Past Surrounds

Although I visited Tasmania off and on throughout the 1990s, I spent most of it in Canberra, with trips to surrounding areas of New South Wales. As part of sorting out my old negatives, I’ve collected those trips into a few representative galleries at Detail

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1 December 2021

Old Hobart Town

The slow march through my old 35mm negatives continues, and has yielded a few more galleries for Detail of Tasmania in the mid-1990s.

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28 November 2021

10 REM RIP

Sir Clive Sinclair, who launched countless programming careers, has died at the age of (ZX) 81.

No one in Australia would remember him for his failed C5 electric trike (we never saw them, except on news reports), but a mate in high school had a ZX81, and I still remember pressing my fingertips firmly on its flat plastic keyboard. Even though it couldn’t do much, it looked great, with its sharp black corners and red lettered logo, like KITT from Knight Rider. In rural Tasmania in the early 1980s, it was pretty cutting-edge.

I can’t think of too many of the personal computers of the time that were so closely associated with a single individual. None of us knew who’d founded Acorn, or who the Vic was behind the VIC-20. Even Apple had two Steves, not one. Clive was one of a kind.

18 September 2021

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

View from Jurys Inn, Edinburgh, 31 July 2001
View from Jurys Inn, Edinburgh, 31 July 2001.

31 July 2021 · 1 Comment

Tasmaniac

A two-month gap in posting could do with some explanation, but the details wouldn’t make for the cheeriest entry, so I’ll skip lightly past them and turn to some photos I’ve been tinkering with off and on in the meantime.

Since my parents moved there in the mid-2000s I’ve added seven galleries of the Tasman Peninsula to Detail—eight including the one of Port Arthur—and here’s a ninth, going back to a camping trip in the mid-’90s and a day trip the following summer. The negatives had yellowed with age, so the scans needed work (some are from the original prints), but the results aren’t too bad. As with my other old photos of places I’ve visited many times, there are echoes of more recent ones, but they’re still worth a look.

Tasman 1995

9 June 2021 · 1 Comment

Past Coast

After a break of a few months, I scanned a few more old rolls of film recently, and have added another gallery to Detail with some of the results. In May 1994 I visited Tasmania for my brother’s graduation, and afterwards took a trip up the east coast with my parents—the last time I would see it until 2015. Some of the photos made their way into my very first gallery, but I’ve included them here as well to put them into context.

East Coast 1994

6 April 2021