Inverloch Cave Gippsland for Skywatch Friday

 

A severe heatwave has settled across Australia, rendering the sun not merely oppressive but actively hazardous. The air itself seems to press downward with weight and glare, driving people indoors in search of shelter. My friend Joel, currently holidaying in New South Wales, has found his respite reduced to retreat; even leisure demands concealment, and the motel room becomes a necessary refuge rather than a convenience. News broadcasts underline the extremity with almost surreal demonstrations—eggs reportedly boiling in a saucepan left beneath the open sky—an image both faintly absurd and deeply unsettling, emblematic of a climate moment that borders on the unreal.

Against this backdrop of heat and confinement, the image at hand offers a contrasting meditation on endurance and restraint. It depicts one of the remaining sea caves at Inverloch that has not yet succumbed to collapse. At high tide, this cave is ordinarily submerged, claimed by seawater and shadow. Here, however, the perspective is from within the cave, looking outward—a framing that emphasises both shelter and exposure, enclosure and release. The rock walls bear the quiet authority of geological time, shaped patiently by water and pressure, indifferent to the urgencies that dominate human experience.

The photograph itself is the product of multiple stacking, a technique that lends depth and clarity while softening the transient. This method mirrors the subject matter: layers accumulated over time, each contributing to a single, coherent form. The resulting image feels less like a moment seized and more like a duration distilled, as though the cave has briefly agreed to reveal its inner stillness.

In a season defined by excess—of heat, of light, of urgency—this image stands as a study in measured survival. The cave endures not by resisting the sea, but by yielding to it rhythmically, disappearing and re-emerging with the tides. It reminds us that persistence is not always loud or triumphant; sometimes it is quiet, shadowed, and patient, waiting for the waters to recede and the light to return at an oblique, bearable angle.

Sony A7RV

FE 16-35mm f2.8 GM

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