Beatific Bucolic

Last weekend I went bird banding at one of our regular sites near Grenfell in central NSW. Normally I’d head out there on the Friday evening and return on the Sunday afternoon, but this time I only had a day available so left Canberra in the darkness of early Saturday morning and returned that evening.

As I headed north on the Lachlan Valley Way towards Boorowa, I hit a patch of thick fog, coinciding with the sun rising off to my right. It made for some stunning visual effects and I stopped to take some photos.

Just a little further on, having turned onto the Harden Road, the paddocks were instead bathed in sunshine with the fog restricted to the lower swales by the Boorowa River. The imagery created was more of placid shallow water, from which eucalypts emerged and to which a couple of kangaroos came to drink.

Along Henry Lawson Way on the way home again, as the sun sank below the Weddin Range, the long low rays of a late winter sunset competed with the pale orb of a rising full moon, creating more impressionistic photo opportunities that I couldn’t ignore.

The western slopes can be beguilingly beautiful in their rustic pastoral scenery, but the added dimensions of early morning sunshine and fog, sunset over golden fields of canola, and long shadows across spring green paddocks dotted with ewes and their lambs against a rising full moon made this trip quite special.