The next town along the road north of Granity, is Ngakawau, it's got a very industrial vibe, it host the railway terminal for coal haulage out of the Stockton coal mine. The town boundary hugs the southern side of the Ngakawau river, while Hector is more residential and sits on the northern river bank. The Ngakawau river suffers from historic acid mine drainage pollution. This makes for some of the most affordable coastal real estate around.

When they named the little coastal town of Granity they didn't use much imagination but, it's succinct.
The beaches are predominantly granite cobbles in the intertidal zone and above the high tide line. The colours (mineral components) and morphology of the stones are hugely diverse, and in some areas very complicated.

There's a spot a few kilometers north of Granity, that I photographed 20years ago when we previously lived in Buller, I revisited the area this week and was stunned at how interesting the granite boulders were and how little impacted that had had on me back then. I've always loved rocks but I've become much more tuned into geologic process and formation in the last decade.

For decades walking has been the foundation of my fitness "regime", and an essential component of my mental health and processing. I mostly walk alone and often with a camera strap slung across my shoulder.

My thoughts are clearer when I'm walking and while I've also swum and cycled for fitness, I find that walking is something that takes very little motivation to enact. Walking with a camera, adds a level of awareness to my surroundings, I deliberately look for light and contrast in whatever environment I'm moving through. 

When we [my husband and I] left our long-term home in Tasmania and moved back to New Zealand, my normal walking and photographic practices were massively disrupted. Partially this was because I took on a fulltime job that didn't allow for either. And we moved to doesn't have the variety of track in roads close to home that I'd become used to- it took me some months really process the depth of disruption, and how closely linked this was to my photographic practice.

So now with some new developments in our New Zealand situation and some self awareness I'm consciously developing my walking photography practices. My two main purposes are fitness: to be able to walk further and into more of the topography of the country. And refocus my photography, not into a specific project yet but to open myself the place and what stories it might present me with.

So I'm returning to blogging, I could do this on Instagram or some other platform but, I don't want to over saturate my feeds with images and word, and this is a form that I'm familiar with, it also allows for larger images and I can experiment with building groups of images that support at thought, concept or experience I've encountered during my walks.
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