Recently, while spending a few days photographing in the Port Stephens area with my friends Roy and Des, we visited a scene of defeat of capitalist folly and greed. Mutual friends Denise and Mike had been there before us and had alerted us to the photographic possibilities. The site was a failed resort development funded by Chinese investors exclusively for Chinese clientele (until the money ran out) at Birubi Point. You can read a Newcastle Herald newspaper article about it here.

What we saw was a scene of reclamation...by Nature. Inexorable forces of wind, time, and sand are showing how Nature is in charge. I'd never been to a site of contemporary ruins. Like many photographers, I'm drawn to the old and weathered—sites with a flavour of olden days or antiquity like Angkor Wat. Such is not the case at Birubi Point. The aborted rise and subsequent fall has occurred in this century, as young as it is.

Drawing on awareness developed with the help of a book called The Practice of Contemplative Photography—Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes, I photographed the location by looking for small stories within the big picture. I forgot to take an establishing shot of the whole scene! The slideshow below contains the images that survived the cut. They have undergone basic processing in Adobe Lightroom. I have given them titles to support the ideas, resemblances, associations, and metaphors that occurred to me as I shot them.

The thing that appealed most to me was obscuring the context of the images to make some of them puzzles.

Note: You can stop the slide show and proceed manually through the images (30) by clicking the left and right arrows that appear at the sides of the images. To watch the show without controls obstructing your view, move your mouse out of the frame area after clicking the play button. 

The slide show Inexorabilia is programmed to auto-repeat.

I created the slideshow images, including the titling and the sand dune background, using the Slideshow function in Lightroom (with the images exported as JPGs). The images were then uploaded to my Zenfolio website and inserted into this blog post. The soundtrack is End of the World, one of the free soundtracks that comes with a Zenfolio account.

As always, I'm happy to answer any questions posted in 'Comments' below. ®