Category: Goldfields - Andy Tyndall Photography

Out of range at Helena Aurora

8/5/2018

It must have been more than ten years since I have been here. Back then it was to photograph a couple protesting the planned destruction and removal to an ore crusher of this spectacular and unique range of hills a couple of hours north of Southern Cross.

This time I’m back, finally, to have a closer look at the Helena Aurora Ranges which have, again, escaped the bulldozer and dynamite after a late 2017 Government decision not to grant a mining permit in this Conservation Area.

I won’t dwell on the politics other than to say there are moves to make the area into a National Park not just because of the sheer, rugged beauty of the cliffs and gullies which rise out of the sand plains and woodlands, but because they are home to species of flora and fauna found nowhere else in the world.

This is not a place for the faint of heart or limb. I was following my mate, Geo Bob, or I may well have got lost in the myriad of tracks, trails, diversions and dead ends around the base of the range. It is a fair way from anywhere and rarely visited - we saw no one at all on the three days of our stay - although there was weak mobile signal at the top of the Bungalbin Hill, you really do not want to ‘come unstuck’ out there. Water, hat, tough boots are essential.

A 4WD, too, is highly recommended if you want to get the most out of the trip. Once you leave the bitumen the road, reliable at first, is prone to sporadic potholes and gullies which will defeat low-clearance cars. You might get to the bring-your-own-everything, quiet, level camping area at the base of the ranges in a 2 WD - but you certainly will not get to the top where the most spectacular views and rough walk trails await.

On the lightly-tree’d summit we clambered around outcrops, discovering caves and stunning views, finding signs of past mining explorations. Geo Bob points out a tetratheca plant - the small purple flowers on the spike-like stems appearing to grow straight out of the rock. This is the small plant which almost single-handedly defeated the first attempt to mine the ranges. You will find it nowhere else. From this sentinel rock we survey the scenes below: a rain squall approaching from the West, the clouds allowing a solitary pool of sunlight to fall on the Woodlands below and, next day, the clear skies, haze and distant hills hunkered down on the horizon. All the time we are under the gaze of a wheeling, proprietorial eagle.

I’m not sure if we even scratched the surface of what could be discovered in these ranges in the couple of days we were there - there are tales of rock art and sacred sites - but for the solitude, the views and the experience of treading (carefully) in such a unique, timeless place the journey was well worthwhile. An understated gem in WA’s jewel-encrusted crown!

Kookynie , WA - a roundabout tale of a one-horse town...

7/22/2018

I’m resisting the temptation to make some observation about Kookynie being a ‘one horse town’ (it is) only because it has a roundabout. Down the road, Kalgoorlie, with a population nearly 3000 times that of Kookynie boasts a few roundabouts, too, (and several horses) so roundabouts are understandable. In Kookynie (population twelve souls and one horse) it is baffling - and it’s very tempting to negotiate it the wrong way round… just because…

We arrived in Kookynie on a still, cool evening disturbed only by the wheeling of a wedge-tailed eagle and the last flittings of the day of numerous little birds in the mulga scrub. Our late arrival, due solely to a mesmerising linger on the red, rocky shores of the still waters of Niagara Dam ten minutes down the road, coincided with that of a train. No - it’s not what you think. Only ore and supply trains break their long rumbling roll at Kookynie and then only to change drivers. Trains bringing passengers to Kookynie finished a long time ago, when gold extraction and processing costs rose along with subterranean water tables in a classic case of Sod’s Law: in a region forever dogged by scarcity of water, Kookynie’s mines were eventually overwhelmed by it.

Kookynie is on the Golden Quest Trail, which is now also the back road to Laverton. It was not always so. A little over 100 years ago, Kookynie sprang from prospectors’ camp to a 400-building town in record time. At its peak, the town sported a racecourse, swimming pool, numerous hotels, two newspapers and a brewery. There were several churches, general stores, banks, a hospital, school and a few ‘red light houses.’ Of course, it was gold which had drawn the population of nearly 2500 population to the place. And it was the lack of gold which emptied it in a scenario so often repeated in the goldfields.

A swift dusk tour of the townsite revealed ruins of classic cars and buildings speckled over the flat, tussocky ground. Faintly illogical in the scene of abandonment is a row of well preserved shop fronts - empty and closed, but ready for … well, something to happen.

We stayed at the Grand Hotel, the last hotel standing in the town. Eighteen foot ceilings, long passageways, an intimate bar and dining room, a beautifully relaxed, outback welcome from owners Kevin and Margaret and one of the best steaks ever; the evening there was delightful. But it was in the early morning light the next day when Kookynie really revealed its quirkiness to me.

The clatter and drub of a cantering horse swept out of the silence of the dawn. As I stood in the road by the pit and bricks of the National Hotel, once deemed the finest building north of Kalgoorlie, I could see nothing against the glare of the rising sun from where the hoof beats were approaching. I had met Willie the Horse the previous night when we spied him being given a bedtime cuddle and a blanket outside the hotel shortly before we were forced to negotiate with ( that is, move) his large bottom blocking the doorway to the hotel so we could get in. I was in little doubt that I was now about to meet the other end of Willie, a former trotter although obviously quite capable of cantering.

I did meet Willie but it was, of course, on his terms. I could almost detect a cartoon brake-squeal as the cantering stopped as suddenly as it started - Willie had realised I was not Kevin. His interest and enthusiasm vanished as did my anticipation of a Lawrence of Arabia moment: witnessing a horse emerge from the impenetrable brightness. Instead it was up to me to go to Willie, who allowed me, briefly, to scratch his forehead before he nonchalantly surveyed his domain and got back to doing what horses do best, eating.

It was intriguing wandering around the area. I did not have to look far to see the signs of big industry long gone: enormous tanks and spoil mounds hiding dilapidated cottages. Significant ruins marked by plaques tell modest tales of the buildings, long dismantled and dispersed for use elsewhere, in true goldfields tradition.

By the pit and bricks of the National Hotel, opposite the shop fronts, a plaque, complete with photograph of the Hotel in its vast grandeur (think a one storey version of the Esplanade Hotel, Fremantle) quotes Queenie Fogerty (née Lynch) recollecting a “dray and horses bringing loads of beer barrels and unloading” and how her “trusty three-wheel trike carried me as far afield as I ever went, on my own anyway.”

We climb aboard our four wheels and swing out of town toward the breakaways to the north and Malcolm and Laverton beyond. Willie is still eating, looking up as we pass him, not to look at us, of course, but to survey his estate. It’s a wonderful, unusual outcome for a once great town, really: a horse now rules it, visits its pub, treats its visitors with barely concealed disdain. And why not? After all, the gold rush is well and truly over in Kookynie.

Under the Gimlet Tree

7/1/2018

Summer 1922/23: Police discover 22 year-old sandalwood cutter George Harrod under his spring cart after he fails to return to Bullfinch, near Southern Cross for Christmas. Harrod has one boot missing, is lying face down and is dead. He is presumed to have been killed by a snakebite.

April 2018: I am with a friend (I’ll call him Geo Bob) who knows this region well. We have located a rude trail which winds its way through the glades and gimlets of this part of the Great Western Woodlands, to a long-disused airstrip. The strip, once used to bring mining exploration teams in to the area, 100 kms north of Southern Cross, is now only recognisable thanks to the occasional tyre which might have once edged the runway and a small set of star pickets marking where the windsock might once have stood. Otherwise the area could be another glade, large but only remarkable for the expanse of sparsity of tall trees.

A small spinney of young spiralled-trunked gimlets lies a little distance from the old runway, close to a scattering of ancient tin cans, the only signs of camps of sandalwood cutters and prospectors who first ventured out here. A rusting frame and springs of a cart lies in the shade of this whispering stand of trees. A horse’s head collar is attached to it.

This, we suspect, could be the last resting place of George Harrod.

We had heard of the story of a man found dead along with his horse still tied to a cart or a tree but did not come here specifically to locate the cart, nor to search for the gun which, one story relates, was leant against a tree which ‘subsumed’ it, carrying it high up its trunk over the near- 100 years since Harrod’s demise. Although we did search for it, craning our necks to stare high into polished branches, to discern the faintest gun-like ripple among the boles and whorls of the trunks, and although we ran a metal detector around the hard-decaying, bleached skeletons of trees long fallen, we found nothing but the occasional nail or a rusting bully beef tin.

Harrod’s tale is just one of so many about men and women who, in the early years of exploration, ventured out, became ‘unstuck’ and perished to be subsumed, like Harrod’s gun in these woods.
It’s even bizarre now, standing in the shade of one of the massive eucalypts, to think there was once a busy airstrip here with all the smells, sounds and detritus which accompanies it; that once men - and maybe women - sat around here planning digs and chucking empty cans into the scrub; that maybe the woods rang to the sound of the sandalwood cutters’ axes and saws. Or that a man died a painful death in such an inoffensive, tranquil place

Lance Stevens of the Yilgarn History Museum is not so certain that our cart is related to Harrod’s death. He points out:

Police would have gathered all property belonging to the dead man, that carts were abandoned if a wheel broke or the horse went lame and that the Old Coolgardie Track in the early years was littered with equipment and carts 'which never made it.'

All fair points and maybe academic now that, except for the occasional flit and twitter of small birds in the scrub, or the rustle of the leaves in the light breeze, there is the distinct impression that these Woodlands have shrugged away the incursions of mankind and are peacefully carrying on the way they were tens of thousands of years before Harrod or any other European made his ill-fated journey out here.

On the Quest for Gold

5/27/2018

“It changes you,” says Marty Pereira. “It changes your eyes when you find gold.”

Having prospected as a past time for many years, Marty was often asked to teach prospecting skills. Now he operates a self-contained ecological, transportable camp set up among the tall, bronze-trunked gimlet trees on his lease in the Great Western Woodlands. The directions are classic ‘bush directions’ involving gateways at unnamed waypoints and following tracks defined by the most recent tyre marks rather than wide avenues. Nevertheless, we twist and turn our way through the magnificent, glowing trees and arrive at an almost deserted camp: a number of tents, a couple of portable gazebos, a huge caravan, campfire and a colourful bus displaying the name of Marty’s Golden Nugget Tour company.

Marty is the only one there. He shows us our tents, in which each has a stretcher and decent mattress. We are supplied, like all his guests, with a brand new sleeping bag to keep. A small torch and an external lantern are there for our use, too.

Marty chucks some leaves on the fire in the ‘Bull Pit’ (named “because so much bull is talked there” he says) and soon the flames are crackling away on some logs.

As the evening creeps in and the bronzed trunks glitter in the last rays of the day, Marty’s guests drift into camp, unsaddling their metal detectors, slotting the batteries into the huge charging bank Marty has set up in the back of his caravan. Some walk in, some chug in in their utes or 4WD. Guests are fed and accommodated for the duration of their stay at Marty’s camp. They can prospect where they like on the lease and sometimes wander, legally, further afield with Marty guiding them. Guests get to keep whatever gold they find. Our new companions consist of three farmer friends from the Great Southern, a New South Welshman and a couple from Mandurah.

Two camp ovens are swung into action: one is filled with beef and vegetables, the other has a nonchalant mix of flour, yeast and water mixed and kneaded (plus another secret ingredient) in it. Both ovens end up on the embers of the fire.

As the darkness gathers, more cars turn up. Marty’s camp has become the site for quite the corroboree: there’s a couple who host a gold prospecting TV programme, a neighbouring leaseholder, another New South Welshman who comes to the Goldfields every winter for some prospecting. He shows me a nugget he found “Oh.. about one and a half kilometres that way.” A vague wave of the hand is the best direction I’m going to get. With gold prospecting, I soon learn, it was ever thus…

All the talk under the gibbous moon is of gold, tales of gold, prospectors, the bad things that can happen if you stray off lease. The single, repetitive mantra is “Dig every target”. The TV hosts reckon you should dig 150 targets each day for reasonable chance of success. The gold can come in tiny flakes or large nuggets. Previous treasures are displayed: ‘good looking’ nuggets which have been eroded by slow travel through the soil can be worth three times there weight if suitable for jewellery.
All the time Marty is tending to the ovens, occasionally shovelling embers around the bases or onto the lids to cook the contents just right.

The damper and beef stew are served - and I’ve got to tell you, it was very, very good: soft bread, meat which fell off the bones and all with a subtle smoky flavour perfectly matched to the setting.
Several of his guests attest to the high standard of Marty’s campfire cooking skills, remarking on the delight of a Peri Peri chicken he had concocted previously.

Cars drift away into the night, numbers dwindle: it will be an early start the next day.

“The rule is first one up gets the fire going again” is Marty’s good night greeting. “It’ll be cold in the morning.”

He is, of course, absolutely right. There’s a distinct chill which urgent cups of tea and coffee alleviate in front of the reinvigorated flames.

While the other guests saddle up and drive out for another day of optimism, Marty arms us beginners with his high-end metal detectors, shows us how to set them up, tune them in and swing them from the hips, keeping the flat disc close and level to the ground. How to sift and eliminate targets which are not gold, how to zero in on the elusive flecks. We carry small picks with magnets in the butt of the handle to pick up and discard the huge amount of iron and metal that has been dispersed over the ground. Gold, being non-magnetic will be left behind by the magnet to trigger again the detector’s demanding shriek…

Tiny fragments of tin, dustings of iron filings, much scratching and scraping, sweeping of magnet and then, then the time the detector keeps yelling after the magnet has done its work. It’s in a shoe-box sized heap of dirt I’ve scraped up, whatever it is. Marty directs the slow elimination process: handfuls of dirt are waved over the detector and cast aside if there is no screeching from the machine.

It squawks on one of my handfuls. I divide and divide again until the detector’s squealing is sparked by a small heap of crumbling dirt and powder which would barely fill half an egg cup.

I can see how prospecting ensnares you: you’ve whittled down the possibilities, chased down this last fragment of something, something which yet may not be gold. Now it’s down to the gentle brush of a finger sifting aside the red powder dirt. And there it is. A tiny nugget, undoubtedly gold in colour, about the size of a quarter of my fingernail.

I have found gold.

I’m off into town.

See you Marty, Bye…. I’ll shut the gate as I leave.

Siberia

5/13/2018

Along the goldfields’ roads leading to Siberia, Western Australia, the sparse area once a townsite spawned by a fruitless goldrush, the muted greens of the scrub are coloured sporadically by patches of ruby dock, a small red plant brought to Australia by cameleers as feed for their camels or to pad the pack saddles. The exotic plant grows in patches, I am told, which indicate where cameleers paused, the seed either leaking from the camel bags or spilled as it was fed to camels. Another plant with a tale to tell has been growing in Siberia for more than 115 years, although to look at it you might not think it is that old - and that’s a story in itself, too.

Once you find Siberia*, you will find a solitary bougainvillea, out of place amidst the scrub and scrap of the former townsite. Nearby is a small pit in the ground with some rusty tin which may have once lined it. At the base of the bush is an assortment of vessels: tins, cans, 20 litre water containers.

The pit is all that remains of the Reward Hotel, one of two hotels built in the wake of the fatal goldrush of October 1898. The Reward was owned by James and Mabel Kirkham, whose fourth child, a boy, was stillborn or died soon after birth. His little body was buried in the garden of the hotel and the bougainvillea planted to mark his grave. The Kirkhams left Siberia for South Australia in about 1919 taking their hotel with them, but many years later Mabel returned to Siberia and the bougainvillea. She is reported to have said, while standing by the purple bush: “That bougainvillea will never die - my heart is buried under it.”

Mabel died in 1965.

Fifty years later the bougainvillea was not doing so well. All that now marked the grave, thanks to a severe drought, was a bunch of dry sticks poking out of he ground. Local passers-by started to water the twigs until eventually a green shoot appeared. The bush is not doing so badly now, standing at 2 metres tall, its similar diameter supported by an arch. A tradition has now developed: visitors are asked to pour a few drops of water from the containers left there onto the bush to help keep it going. A small history and visitors’ book is there for well-wishers to sign before heading on their way.

Mabel Kirkham would surely be pleased with that.

*Siberia is best found by following the Golden Quest Trail from Ora Banda. Full details are given in the Golden Quest Guide Book or app.

CoolGardie

5/6/2018

There are three reasons to stop at the Coolgardie Visitor Centre: first, the Centre is a prime source of up to date information on the condition of the roads on the Golden Quest Trail. I am setting off on the Trail the next day because Coolgardie is a perfect starting point.
   The second reason: there is an intriguing pharmacy museum, the beautiful, internationally renowned Waghorn bottle collection plus an intriguing display about the rescue of trapped miner Modesto Varischetti as well as artefacts and photographs from the town’s heyday.
   The third reason to stop: you may, if you are lucky, meet Vic Dale. He was there in the foyer of the magnificent building when I walked in and, it turned out, knows everything there is to know about Coolgardie in the most intricate detail.

   I spent the afternoon with him. Had I not I would never have discovered the school - still teaching Coolgardie kids - built by the Bunning brothers in 1894. And yes: there’s a certain popular WA-based hardware store named after them.
Vic told me tales of characters of the day, went into considerable detail about the politics of Coolgardie’s heyday, when the clamour from the Goldfields, heavily populated by native eastern-staters, threatened to form its own separate colony. A reluctant State premier was forced to call a referendum on Federation: the Goldfields vote ensured WA joined the rest of the States.

I learned about Coolgardie’s reign as capital of the would-be colony, Aurelia, and its decline once Kalgoorlie-Boulder’s Golden Mile proved to be so rich and enduring. Many of Coolgardie’s buildings succumbed to a fine Goldfields’ tradition they were recycled and moved: Merredin’s majestic Cummings Theatre and the Tavern at Westonia were both originally located in Coolgardie in its glory days.
The school, railway station, old hospital , morgue, and a few teetering shacks from that time are dotted around the town. They are all worth a visit, if only to admire the style of the solid buildings and fortitude of those early residents. The sights and sites are best located with help from the Golden Quest Trail Guidebook, App or Visitor Centre, itself located in one of the magnificent buildings peppering the main street.

Vic guided me to the still waters of the incongruous Coola Carbi gnamma hole - from which Coolgardie took its name - and recounted how it was enlarged, courtesy of explosives, to retain more water for the burgeoning township, named at that spot by the first warden Finnerty.

Warden Finnerty - one of Western Australia’s richer characters - was ordered from Southern Cross where he was Warden of the Yilgarn Goldfield, to live in Coolgardie. His Bunning-built house, originally the administrative seat of the Goldfields, commands a sweeping view from the hill above the gnamma hole. It is now a National trust property, open to the public for a nominal admission charge. Historic and ghost tours are also offered, admission otherwise is self-guided. Do consider a guided tour in order to hear details about the redoubtable Finnerty: as magistrate and administrator of the region he was a large figure, highly regarded for his determination and practical approach to the complications of leases, gold, not averse to administering swift justice to those found behaving badly in the town’s streets.

A small distance out of town toward Perth lies the graveyard, the last resting place of hundreds who died of illnesses and infections which rushed through the community. It was said, at one point that half the town was burying the other half. History’s sieve filters out wonderful stories in graveyards: Finnerty’s wife, Bertha lies there, as does the body of Italian cyclist, 23 year old Leo Beretta killed when the forks on his bike collapsed during an international race held in the town in 1900.
We all but stumbled upon the grave of redoubtable explorer Ernest Giles who, in numerous major expeditions, crossed to the Swan River Colony from the then Darwin-Adelaide Telegraph line, discovered The Olgas, Victoria and Gibson deserts, and mapped out large areas of the inhospitable interior. Pneumonia also took him, his exploring days over, working as a clerk, living with his nephew in Coolgardie.

I returned to Finnerty’s house in the dawn to witness, to the east, where the Superpit’s spoil heap hunkers down on the horizon, a golden mist hovering over invisible lakes, weaving among the eucalypts and gimlets.
That scene, soon burned away by the day, was the first of many not normally associated with the Goldfields. Let’s face it: most of us associate the area with big money, big mines, big machines, high vis-clad workers and skimpies.

Coolgardie and the subsequent journey around the Trail shows a very different side to the Goldfields. In the first few kilometres out of Coolgardie we passed a small lake. An enterprising humorist had placed imaginative art of a Loch Ness monster, a fisherman in a dinghy, a shark and a flamingo. A little later we passed the ruins of Kunanalling and all the time we are making our way through the bronze trunked gimlets of the Great Western Woodlands, now growing strong after their virtual eradication to fuel the gold rush. The humour, the ruined dreams, the resilience: I was realising the pulsing themes which has kept the Goldfields alive for so long in such adversity.

" and then there's the time I went to a brothel..."

4/22/2018

The story so far:

Having found gold at a prospector’s camp, I’ve hot-footed it to Kalgoorlie, visited a gold dealer and now find myself in an unusual situation…

I am being entertained by a delightful, attractive blonde in Kalgoorlie’s last remaining historical brothel. I appear to have followed, in the last 24 hours, a well worn path and here I am, in this den of sin and depravity. Enjoying myself bigly. (Dear Editor, Please may I use that word?)
Except that there are twenty other people in the same room with me, on a fascinating, insightful and hilarious tour of Kalgoorlie’s last remaining working brothel. Carmel, who has owned Questa Casa for the last 25 years, is conducting a highly entertaining tours of her brothel.

“We could not survive,” she admits, “without the tours.”

Carmel, was a Queenslander in need of direction after a family tragedy when she bought the brothel after being marooned in Kalgoorlie having, initially, decided against purchasing the 113 year old building.

In her quiet, well-spoken, understated tones she is very easily mistaken for a high end Pom, when, in fact, she is fourth generation Australian. She told us about the rules and regulations brought in at the turn of the century when men outnumbered women 20:1, a time when Kalgoorlie was rapidly overtaking Coolgardie as the principle mining town in the region. She told us why the high fences were constructed at the front of the building to shield negotiations from onlookers as well as to preserve the respectable nature of Kalgoorlie:

“Kalgoorlie was a family town,” she asserts several times.

She tells of the system of negotiations designed to protect the girls from finding themselves in dangerous or uncomfortable situations, talks of the demise of the other 18 brothels in the town and talks of the rules and regulations that kept the family part of town separated from the seedier side: working girls had to come from outside town, could not live anywhere but in the brothel and must never, ever attend places where people gather - so no outings to the races, pub, shows and so on.
Breaches of the rules lead to banishment from the town and could mean permanent closure of the brothel.

Carmel’s daily tour, which she has run for the last ten years, lasts for one and a half hours, includes a viewing of all three ‘working rooms’ , and her gleeful demonstration, on a Bundy Bear lying face down on the bed of the “Domination Room”, of a few sharp strokes of a “paddle”. There are numerous jokes and priceless anecdotes of unusual goings on, tales of some of the characterful girls who worked there, a history of the change of the town’s attitude to and reality of prostitution, a few statistics regarding number of clients and, er, speed of service. One of our group was invited to work for Carmel after she cracked a particularly witty pun which I wish - O! How I wish! - I could repeat. But, as you would expect, the tour is for over eighteens - and so were most of the tales and jokes.

We all spilled out into the late afternoon light chuckling about the most entertaining and risqué history lesson ever.

And it occurred to me, a little later on as I watched a huge full moon rise over the Superpit, that my journey around the goldfields and, particularly of the last 24 hours, was one which had been repeated (almost exactly) thousands of times before in the last 130 years, by men in search of that elusive precious metal. Journeys which, in the dying years of the 19th Century, were witness to unspeakable privation, tragedy, loss and love. Which forged today’s state of Western Australia both politically and economically.
So little is now left as testimony to the hardiness and determination of men who built the multiple towns and their connecting railways., but it is all still out there to discover for ourselves. As are the various delights of Carmel’s brothel…

Droning on about .... well, drones

3/25/2018

A few weeks ago I attended an Art Exhibition in the Goldfields in which “Drone Photography” featured among the prize categories. The judge, when announcing the winner mentioned her excitement at the possibilities drones offer for photography and art. And she is right.

I am not , of course, the only photographer with a drone by a long, long way - and I would certainly not pretend to be the most proficient of drone pilots. However, I have found my new camera to be a perfect addition to my photographic armoury, allowing perspectives once only achievable by expensive helicopter rides. Now it is possible to show clearly the scale of, say, a building in the desert, the expanse of a town. Or give a viewer an idea of what it would be like to fly through a deserted village.

Choosing an affordable drone was not hard. Aware of much twitchiness among authorities at various levels, I approached the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) website for guidance. They have a whole section on drones which makes it clear, very early on, that if your drone is over 2kg you are going to need to be licensed and certified by CASA. There are exceptions for pilots flying their drones over their own property, otherwise training and certification is required.

So my drone would need to be under 2kg. I would still be allowed to fly it commercially subject to permission from CASA whose simple red tape process is outlined clearly on their website.

Like thousands of others, I opted for a DJI Mavic PRO. It is cunningly compact, folding and fitting easily, with three batteries, into a medium size camera bag. Its weight - well under 1kg - allowed for less restrictive flying rules but it was the huge number of image-making options that swung me. A 4K video option, 4000x3000px stills from a 28mm lens mounted on a controllable gimbal was not a bad start.

The flying mode options impress me still: I have easily programmed the Mavic to follow moving objects, fly along side them, guided it between buildings, positioned it exactly where I wanted it for stills. My fears of crashing it remain but are eased by the Mavic’s ability to detect obstructions (it stops dead, hovering, until I fly it around or over the object) and it lets you know in plenty of time how much flight time is left, heading for home (it logs its take off point) itself or landing before the battery is drained.

Other modes are ‘Sport’ for rapid flight and agility, although I have mine set permanently on cinematic, a mode which allows for gentle movements and halts, perfect for videos.

Flying it takes a bit of getting used to but is a simple process using a controller, a mobile phone (check that your mobile phone is compatible with the app - not all are!) and DJI app. Joysticks, a touch screen and buttons control rotations, altitude, flight speed and direction as well as camera tilt and pan. The drone can also be controlled directly by wi-fi from your phone, but I found this much less easy or satisfactory.

I was surprised by its batteries’ power, too. Each battery lasts approx twenty minutes, which I have found is usually plenty of time to capture the images I want, although I nearly came unstuck trying to fly it back against a stiff wind: I watched the flying time diminish rapidly and landed it with 5 seconds to spare, glad I did not have to find out the hard way if the Pro’s emergency landing automation worked!

There are many rules to be aware of in Australia. Most are common sense brought in for all when the few disregarded others’ privacy, safety and peace. Be aware of the need to maintain visual contact with your drone at all times, do not fly over or near people and do not exceed maximum altitudes (usually 120m). All details are on the CASA website: http://www.casa.gov.au/.

The Mavic Pro came with a decent sized micro SD card (it took a while to learn how to reformat after downloading images), charger for drone and controller and three batteries all for under $2000. For the vast array of options the Mavic opens up for keen photographers, it’s hard to pass up the the value at that price!

Author

Travel has always featured strongly in my photographic work: whether on assignment for a newspaper or on holiday with my family, I have always enjoyed recording the unique scenes and sights appreciated most by eyes fresh to a region. This blog is a small record of some of my travels and experiences - and even some photography tips. Some have been published, some not. Whatever, I hope you enjoy the blog.

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