d r i n k s t e r: VINTAGE SUNSET WAY DOWN SOUTH

“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”

DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)

23 February 2018

VINTAGE SUNSET WAY DOWN SOUTH

The gloaming sky was trippy last night at Casa Blanca. Three weather patterns collide over Yangarra. This photo faces due south: the Blewett Springs gullies are over that ridge. In the sky you see the sou-westerly bring in rows of clouds from the Great Australian Bight from the lower right; underlying that come similar waves from across the Fleurieu Peninsula in the lower left.

Both these prevailers come from the Great Southern Ocean. On the right days, I can smell whale's breath: I'm 15 kays from the Gulf St Vincent on the RHS of this shot, further to the Great Southern Ocean; five times that distance to the LHS you're in the Murray Estuary and then that same vast Ocean.

When the other pattern comes in, from NE to NW, it pumps angry high-ion dusty desert breath toward the photographer's shoulders from behind. All I smell then is the acrid tang of waste and rage.

Twenty minutes after that shot, I swung 45 degrees to my right and snapped this.