Welcome to Rotto

 

Spent a day walking around Rottnest Island a 45 min catamaran jaunt off the coast of Perth. Irrespective of the population of Quakkas propping up the local economy it was possible to circumnavigate the island by foot hitting up all the tourist touchstones (both light houses, a bunch of beaches, wind turbine railway station the inland lake). 

Probably could have gotten a few series out of Rotto if I had a few more days, so really four for the price of one:

-  The gnarled and deformed trees seem to be everywhere on Rotto and really quite beautiful like full size bonsai. 

- Looking back to the skyscrapers of Perth with different foregrounds. I remember a Melbourne photographer who did that with the the gas power plant stack in south Melbourne and more recently with the viral video on Instagram of the Berlin TV Tower.

- People leaving clothing hanging out like laundry at the access points to beaches reminded me of a series I wanted to do in Japan of all the umbrellas that were left in this bins outside shops but at least with the umbrellas it was a more temporary thing. 

- It's low hanging fruit but People taking selfies of Quokkas. Probably could go full meta and do a series taking selfies of me with people taking selfies of Quokkas but someone has surely done that before. 

- There were all these no entry signs everywhere. a commentary on human's relationship to the environment? just liked that juxtaposition.

- Rotto was going through a fair bit of redevelopment [insert some social commentary here]  

I got the sense that the ratio of apartments to nature seemed pretty high making it feel a bit like Yosemite. From all the hero photos of Yosemite ever produced you get the sense it's a pristine environment untouched by mankind's then I rocked up there and my jaw dropped by the asphalted accessibility of it all. Given it use to be a military base during the 2nd World War the overdevelopment makes sense. But get out the backside of the Island and nature opens it's self taking back over. 

There was this sense of almost like been in a video game open world. The two light houses and the wind turbine acting like visual map marker points of interest with a sweet spot of appearing close enough that it was walkable but not far enough away that one would not be bothered. 

In hindsight I would have highly recommended hiring a bike as I defiantly got my 10,000 steps in that day with only 45 mins of change remaining.