Daydreams of Home

I have a picture hanging in my bathroom. We’ve had it for a long time, probably 15 years. It’s one of my favourite pictures.

I look at it every day, several times actually ….. It’s my view from the loo 🙂

Whenever I look at it, I am swept up by what the photographer, Ken Duncan , might have seen.

It whisks me back in time, when this house was a home or a homestead and these paddocks were worked by horse and plow. I see a farmer’s wife standing at the door, white apron on, dishcloth in hands, shooing away flies or wiping her brow from the heat.

I picture children running around outside in patched overalls, hand pumping water from the tanks to play in. I see an old dog lying in the shade of the bullnose verandah, long fallen down.

I imagine the scraggy, stunted shrubs trying desperately to be the english country garden they were born for. The heat and lack of rain scorching their dreams along with their foliage.

I picture life on the land, I think of home and the country I no longer reside in.

I get lost in the deep blue sky and the clouds. I can feel how hot it is on that day, the gentle breeze cooling me, by blowing on my sweat soaked shirt.

I ache to run full speed across the wide yellow paddock by foot or on horseback, all the way to the hills behind.

I imagine what the land was like before it was cleared for cropping, now with it’s lone tree off to the right, where all you could see in any direction was the blue/green hue of the gum tree, and smell the bush and hear the noises.

Sometimes I’m an outsider on horseback riding by, sometimes I am that farmer’s wife.

Some days I can’t look, it makes me too sad. It makes me miss home and family.

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But mostly it’s more interesting to look at than the view outside the window while I’m showering.

P.S. Out of interest I looked up the print on Ken Duncan’s website gallery

He’s printing it in reverse now and we certainly didn’t pay that much…. here’s the link…He also shares the story.

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