Mallee Milky way for Skywatch Friday

 

It has been another relentless week, the kind that disappears beneath obligations, uncertainty, and the constant noise of modern life. The government’s latest tax reform announcement has weighed heavily on my mind, stirring anxieties that seem impossible to silence even during long drives through the border towns between Victoria and New South Wales.

There was something haunting about those places. Beyond the quiet streets and faded shopfronts lay vast stretches of dry country — parched paddocks, brittle grass, and exhausted earth baked beneath a washed-out sky. The land carried a weary beauty to it, harsh yet strangely poetic, as though the drought itself had etched its memory into the soil. Looking across that arid emptiness reminded me deeply of this photograph: lonely terrain scattered with scrub and dust, where the silence feels almost endless.

Lately, I have not felt the same urge to chase the Milky Way through the night. There was once a kind of comfort in driving far beyond the towns, setting up the tripod in the cold darkness, and waiting for the stars to slowly reveal themselves above the plains. But recently that longing has faded beneath the weight of routine worries and mental fatigue.

Perhaps it will return later this year when the Sony A7R VI is finally released. Maybe then I will once again find myself standing alone somewhere in the dry inland country, surrounded by silence and red dust, watching the galaxy rise slowly over the empty horizon.

Sony A7RV

FE 24mm f1.4 GM

Linking Skywatch Friday