Each Moleta in that small boat is the centre of their own universe, with all of the complexity of action and relation and hope that each of us carries around in our heads. For that instant though, they were likely quite universally, collaboratively captivated by the excitement of where they have come from or are going to, and the thrill of being all together in the boat on a sunny day with the water gently lapping and ordinary labour set aside for the duration.

How do we keep our eyes from sliding sideways - surveilling the journey of those alongside us? I think the answer is in nurturing the useful obsessions we’re prey to. When I’m merrily making my own thing happen, I’m so much less aware of or concerned by what everyone else is doing. I guess my answer to the social media-fueled battery of comparison, is to find my own happy - not someone else’s.

I’m far from any kind of elite, but I really like the idea of having some wild spiral trees in my vicinity. There’s something very Dr Seuss about them - not only the wiggle and twist, but the fact that they can develop that sideways list. They bring to mind a plethora of Tim Burton films and a kind of hallucination of the Umbrian countryside. They look a little bit like my hair after a day in the trenches of a location photography shoot. They’re how I’d draw a tree if it was meant to be part of a dream.

I won’t lie. I was quite scared about colouring this print. I hadn’t done something like this in more years than I care to admit, and the cost of the print was still basically a hundred dollars. I’m not printing it again just because I messed it up, so there’s a bit riding on the steadiness of my hand, and the choices I make for colour. When I was the first few strokes of pastel in, the sweat was beading on my nose, and I had to have a moment to collect myself.

I chose red, a rich velvety red, to colour the title in. It involved many rotations of the sharpener to get the thing done. What remained of the pencil was less than half of the original unblemished length. When mum discovered it, she was really unhappy that I had used it so exclusively. The precious set was now unbalanced - the rainbow rank interrupted by a much shorter member. What ensued was the biggest fight we ever had, before or since.

I could write about the white guy with the afro, lead guitarist of The Naked Ape rock band, smoker of weed, builder of houses and culverts and bridges. And his exotic trainee teacher girlfriend, who he wooed with his badass backing skills using the steering knob on his Valiant Wayfarer ute.

When I was working in the early stages of my Master’s project, I took a collection of voice recordings from a guided conversation between my mum and her sister, about their remembered childhood at Waitai, on D’Urville Island. Something mum said changed the direction of my enquiry, from being specifically about inherited history, to something much more fluid. She said, in reference to the feud that broke the Moleta family into two, ‘Family folklore can warp and change with the telling’. It shook me, for its absolutely liberating truth.

What do you do when you have equally warring instincts to conform to peaceful order, and to abandon convention and break the rules? I think that’s actually where photography positions me very comfortably. There’s a faithfully followed method to making a good exposure, placing sharpness, balancing composition. I know how to do those things. But in the same way that mum shakes the tin of her world, and chooses to make the best of where things have landed, sometimes I do too.

Show me the audacious and the new. Some artists work well as hermits, removing connection with normality so that they can bury themselves in a pure kind of making. That’s the Van Gogh cut-your-ear-off kind of artist life that wouldn’t be useful for my family, or actually for my own mental health. Instead, I’m really pretty happy when my work lets me encounter the brilliance of other people, and dwell for a time in their particular passions.

Returning to this idea about work and play. I’m accepting that I might never make any money from my urge to pursue ‘art’, whatever that actually means. In the post-study aftermath, I am piecing together the ways that we can fund our life. One of the main ways I can do that is with my photography, and I have never been more grateful to have this ability to merge my obsession and our need.

This piece of moving image is some evidence that my Master’s degree development has infiltrated my leisure time. I was going to just take some photographs, but I was instead utterly captivated by those stampeding horses of tumbling water.

When I was a child, I’m told, I had an invisible friend I called ‘Geoffrey Lion’. I have no memory now about what Geoffrey looked like, but it might have been an early indication of my particularly vivid imagination.