How it all begun.
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| My Pop in his new fishing vest |
When I left home at an early age I would write letters. To start with I would write to everyone in my address book (guess I’ve kind of gone a full circle back to that?), but as the replies got slower so did the amount sent. In the end I decided it was easier to write one letter home and anyone who wanted to know what I was up to could read it, we are talking 20 years ago using snail mail! Granny & Pop were the receivers of all my travel news, not just because Granny always wrote back to me but because Pop loved fishing!
I remember so well as a child, our family fishing trips, which Pop was more often than not a part of, or staying at Granny and Pop’s fishing shack. Pop would already be on the river fly fishing somewhere when us kids got up. I hardly ever heard him leave, but I’d always be awaiting to see the trout he brought back. I meet Johnno as soon as I arrived in Perth and we started fishing together straight away. I was excited to be able to write home (the bottom on NZ at that time) and tell Pop I’d met a fisherman over in my new home of Oz and I was catching fish, big fish!
Our first extended fishing/camping holiday was 19 years ago. Johnno and I drove from Perth to Broome (staying at Quondong Point for the first time ever for a month), to Darwin (where we worked for a month), then straight down the centre and back to Perth. I wrote to Granny & Pop regularly about all the fish we were catching, and different techniques I was learning; saltwater fishing for big fish being so different to worm fishing for trout!
My letters home would be less while working, who wants to hear about that kind of boring stuff. Thankfully Johnno and I embraced the camping lifestyle, so we often hit the road on fishing adventures, that I always wrote to Granny and Pop about.
When we were care-taking for KCC, 6 months alone fishing remote Kimberley wilderness, I was able to EMAIL my letters to Pop. I can not remember how I did that; Pop never had email? Perhaps I sent them to Aunty Ruth, because she made a little bond book of all my letters and photos from KCC, that was very cool!!
Granny & Pop are on a fishing holiday in the sky now, but I still want to write to them. Sometimes when I’m sitting at my computer writing my blog it is easy to imagine they are sitting in their sun room reading my letters. So I write, because writing still invokes that loving special feeling that I always get when thinking about my wonderful fishing Pop.
Dear Pop;
You wouldn't believe how many fish I’ve lost over the last couple of days! Did you ever lose fish? Haha, I’m sure you lost plenty, but the good fisherman your were, you never told us kids about them!
----Movie making actually started very similarly. My natural father Stanley Rule used to have his movie camera every where he went. So I started making movies to send to him when I moved to Oz.
Pop and Dad were completely different personalities, so perhaps that is why sometimes my movie making and writing styles can seem so different. I like to think they work well together; excited go-go-go movie clips with more relaxed slower paced writing?
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