If I thought 2017 was bad for my photography journey, 2018 was an order of magnitude worse. I have photos for only about 20 days. This time there were no forgotten folders either; the new computer arrived in January of that year and has been in use up to the date of writing. (That is, August 2024, so this "photo a year" gallery is a bit behind.) In part this was down to changes in living arrangements which meant that there was no longer anyone to leave the wolf and the cat with. That meant no overseas trips, and no interstate trips for most of it either.
The only non-Illawarra shots (and there were few enough of those) were:
[*] 24 March, the Royal Easter Show at Homebush Bay (most of the shots were of the dog show);
[*] 21 April, Ironfest;
[*] 10 to 11 November for the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI at the War Memorial in Canberra, and to discuss plans for the 2019 return to Europe trip.
Of everything, I thought that only Ironfest had shots worthy of an annual gallery.
Ironfest began around the dawn of the century in the town of Lithgow (population 20,000), which is about 140km northwest from Sydney by road. Or, more importantly, it's just a little further north by NW and 167km (2.5 hours by car) from the Illawarra.
In the words of the organisation that ran it, it was originally "a glorified art exhibition... (which)... celebrated the birth of steel in Australia in Lithgow". (The first commercially viable blast furnace in Australia was built there in 1906-1907.)
From there the festival spread its wings. Ironworking and blacksmithing were always at the core of it, but there were also cosplay themes (like the Wild West in 2018), military and medieval reenactments and displays, classic cars, early steam tractors, hand-crafted goods stalls, falconry, steampunk, you name it.
Unfortunately this would be the second last Ironfest as we knew it. The one in 2019 went ahead, but Ironfest was hit badly by the Covid cancellation of the 2020 festival a mere 4 weeks out from the due date (since a lot of the costs had already been paid for) plus the fact that gatherings were still banned in 2021, and never financially recovered.
(The festival was resurrected in a fashion in April 2024 in the nearby town of Portland (population 2,424) which is about 25km NW of Lithgow.)
Here we have a head on view (at 150mm of zoom, I'm not stupid or suicidal!) of a medieval horseman using a sword to split a rockmelon (American cantaloupe), the two pieces of which you can see falling away from each other on the left. (In the full sized image you can also see a spray of juice, but it may be lost in the size reduction.)
If this sport has a name, I've never been able to determine what it is. True, cavalrymen (or knights, back in the day) did use swords to hack away at the enemy but making a clean, exact cut was never part of the plan. But whatever the activity's name... this horseman was clearly good at it.
Photographically, that was as good as 2018 got. The following year was to be a different story entirely.
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