Mungo magic in pictures
This article is brought to you by Australian Geographic Travel.
Catherine Douglas is a modest, softly spoken woman with a deep love of nature and remarkable skills with a camera.
During a recent trip to Mungo National Park in New South Wales, Catherine brought these two things together to capture a sequence of wild emus drinking from a shallow puddle:
To get this series of incredible images, Catherine lay flat on a road for some time.
“I love to get to the eye level of an animal, or even a bit lower. I want them to feel comfortable in their place,” Catherine says.
“I’m a visitor and I want wildlife to be in their non-threatened zone – so they can be themselves.
“All animals, even insects, have a sense of survival. But they also have intelligence and they sense that I won’t harm them, that I’m there just to be with them.
“If I’m close enough I sometimes talk to them.”
Catherine lay patiently near one emu until the others felt comfortable to also come closer. The result was some brilliant images. If you look deep into the eyes of the emus in some of these photographs, you feel like you’re with them.
Finding renewal
Catherine has always wanted to go to Mungo but her plans were put on hold for many years after her husband was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. She cared for him until he passed away, which took a toll on her emotions and her photographic ambitions. Several years after his death, she struggled to regain her passion for life, wildlife and photography.
Then one of Catherine’s mentors, well-known photographer Steve Parish, pushed the ‘go’ button that got her to Mungo.
“Steve said, ‘Get yourself out there, woman.’ And after that, I booked the trip,” Catherine says.
As a child she drew trees, rocks and grass while other kids were drawing stick people. She can’t explain why, but it’s still important for her to use all her senses to soak up nature: “seeing, hearing, breathing, touching.”
At Mungo she was stunned by the vastness of the outback, by seeing three species of kangaroo in the same region, by the cockatoos, and by the ancient First Nations culture. She made a point of rising early so she could watch all the creatures wake up, and she took photos where animals peer directly down the barrel of the camera and into the eyes of the viewer.
Looking deeper
One of Catherine’s aims at Mungo was to explore the eyes of the wildlife she was photographing. She wanted to make a connection; to show that wild animals have feelings, thoughts and expressions, and can connect with people.
In her photos below, a pink cockatoo flying past looks closely at the photographer and a spiny-cheeked honeyeater swivels its head to inspect the camera, and a female red kangaroo and joey, a male emu with his chicks, and a central bearded dragon, all eyeball us. Each image creates an uncanny connection between the animal and the observer and comes from years of experience as a nature photographer.
Happy place
Catherine started out in photography by accident when she was given a film camera, opening her world to wildlife photography. “It got me wanting to go to national parks, and they became my zone, where I wanted to be, my happy place,” she says.
She had found a way to turn her childhood passion for drawing wild things into capturing them on film. A new world opened up as she progressively became more enchanted by the wildlife, trees and rocks she was seeing through her lens. Then, after a long reticence – that many older photographers would understand – she progressed to a digital camera, “because I became so passionate about what I was doing”.
For Catherine, photography and nature are now inseparable. She gives back to nature through her images, as is so clearly expressed in her photos from Mungo.
Struck by vastness
Catherine loved everything about the trip to Mungo. The place reignited her life after the sadness and difficulties of losing her husband. Mungo, she says, got her “creative juices flowing again.”
“I didn’t expect the vastness of the desert,” she continues. “We went to one place for sunset, just a slight rise in elevation… and you could see forever. It was just incredible to see how much space there was.”
In that space she captured the landscape, the plants, the trees, the sand – everything that had been Catherine since she was a child.
She also managed to look deeply into the eyes of Mungo’s wildlife and share it with us. Sometimes she is close and low, other times farther away, but always sharing her lifelong connection with other living creatures.
Her photos are mesmerising.
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Follow in Catherine’s footsteps on Australian Geographic Travel’s Mungo Outback & Conservation Journey.
This article is brought to you by Australian Geographic Travel.
Roger Smith is Australian Geographic Travel’s Director of Conservation Travel.
