In 2012 I was still notionally doing a Photo A Day gallery. The Canon 40D with its 24-105 f/4 L lens (and friends) did the work on weekends and getaways (of which there were a few but not a lot; Canberra in March, for example), and the Olympus E-P1 compact did the job on work days. This is also the year that I moved south from the inner south west of Sydney to the Illawarra, making for a pretty drastic shift in my photography landscape. And, incidentally, bidding farewell to over a decade of wasted opportunities to document my then-local area, opportunities which, as we know, will never come again.

However again I've opted for the "new territory" criterion in picking my 2012 entry in this gallery. This year saw us make our first (and as at the date of writing (2024), only) trip to Tasmania. It was centred around Hobart with a brief diversion to Port Arthur to the south east; a former convict colony in a place that was quite hard to escape from. The colony was at the end of a long peninsula which constricted itself at one point to a very narrow piece of land which was easy to guard.

Trying to get out by water was a suicide attempt. Trying to get through the unforgiving bush to even reach that well-guarded neck was barely any better.

To try to reform the convicts, religion was provided (because of course that always works so well) in the form of a non-denominational stone church that was built by the convicts themselves in 1836 to 1837. It was a beautiful piece of architecture, very reminiscent of a lot of church architecture in the rustic areas of mother England.

Unfortunately Tasmania is more prone to bushfires than England is, and the church was burnt out and gutted during a bushfire in 1884. It does however remain an attractive backdrop for events like weddings.

The woman in the doorway? I have no idea. She was just another tourist who wandered into my shot but I thought her looking back at the arch fitted with the image title. Or possibly inspired it; it's a "chicken or the egg" thing.

As of 2024 I have processed hardly any of the shots from this trip (which still saw the old firm of the Canon 40D and the 24-105 f/4L doing most of the work) other than this one... and one which shows an inexplicable spectral shape in this reputedly most haunted of places, something that the 40D had never done before and never did again.