On Lonsdale Street he pauses, black-clad and bowed,
A silvered arch of hat against the day;
Bone-stitched trousers whisper as he goes,
Steel wheels mark time where traffic has its say.
Between the rush, he stands—old ritual kept—
A lone, dark note the city has not swept.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1074 and FACE OFF
Beneath Flagstaff’s plane trees, in a borrowed age,
They move like echoes freed from stone and page.
Feathers crown the brow, bone-white masks declare
The dance of life with death entwined in air.
Drums speak softly where the grass is worn,
Old worlds awaken in the Melbourne morn.
Between the paths, where past and present meet,
Ritual breathes again on urban feet.
Along Lonsdale’s measured lanes he rides,
A muted engine humming time and need;
Steel wheels trace the city’s patient tides
Where lines are drawn for motion, not for speed.
His helmet seals the weather from his face,
A visor holding back the urban glare;
The jacket bears the scuffs of constant pace,
The marks of work repeated everywhere.
Behind him, boxed and bound in canvas square,
Tomorrow’s meals and moments wait their turn;
The city eats, and he must ferry care
From door to door where lights and kettles burn.
No fanfare greets him as he slips between
The kerb and traffic’s unrelenting flow;
Yet Melbourne’s pulse, efficient and unseen,
Moves partly by the miles his tyres know.
O Lonsdale Street, your verses hum and roll
On battery and breath and borrowed time;
In one brief pass, a rider makes you whole
A working line within the city’s rhyme.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1057
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1054
He steps where drumbeats braid the air,
A living glyph of bone and flame;
Painted death upon his stare,
Yet pulse and breath deny the name.
Feathers crown the mortal frame,
Silver rings with ritual sound;
Each measured step recalls a claim
The earth remembers, tightly bound.
Not death, but homage does he wear—
A vow the moving body keeps:
That life, once faced with ending’s glare,
Learns deepest truth when memory leaps.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1053 and FACE OFF
Flagstaff Gardens opens like a commons of pause,
grass worn smooth by agreement rather than rule.
Here, the city sets its weight down.
A small circle forms—plates held mid-air,
hands negotiating portions,
conversation leaning in, then back.
Food passes between them
as gently as trust.
One man counts bites with thought,
another waits, attentive to nothing urgent.
A coat hangs heavy with elsewhere,
while sneakers stay faithful to the ground.
Lunch becomes a ceremony without words.
Beyond them, bodies recline into the afternoon
laughter low, knees drawn up,
someone testing the sky by lying beneath it.
Portable loos line the distance like reminders
that even leisure must be managed.
Everything happens at once,
yet nothing competes.
This is Melbourne resting in public,
where strangers share grass,
time stretches just enough,
and the ordinary learns, briefly,
to be enough.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1044
In Flagstaff Gardens, the afternoon loosens its tie.
Light filters through plane trees,
falls in careful greys on shoulders and grass.
The city exhales here.
He stands mid-step, phone resting in his palm,
as if time has briefly asked for his attention.
Sunglasses hold the sky at a distance;
his gaze is elsewhere,
measuring nothing urgent.
Around him, life edits itself softly
a child’s hat tipped with stars,
cups raised, crumbs falling,
voices blurred into a single human weather.
Someone eats. Someone waits.
Someone remembers to look up.
The garden keeps its older knowledge:
that towers can pause,
that movement need not hurry.
Benches listen. Leaves annotate the air.
In this frame, nothing declares itself important,
yet everything belongs.
A man, a child, a crowd in passing
all briefly held
in the calm margin of Melbourne,
where the city practices being still.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1043
On Swanston Street, the light waits at amber,
a held breath between steps.
Trams murmur somewhere out of frame,
steel singing to steel,
while the city keeps time in crossings and bells.
He moves through the monochrome morning
as if the day has chosen him for its measure
hood drawn close, shoulders squared
against the ordinary weather of thought.
The word Nomadic rests on his chest,
not a claim, but a question.
Glass and stone blur behind him,
history smoothed to a soft hush.
Signals hang like small moons,
deciding nothing yet.
His stride answers for him:
forward, unhurried, exact.
This is Melbourne in a minor key
coffee steam lifting unseen,
lanes waking to their own names.
Each footfall writes a line
no map can keep.
And in the brief truce of the crossing,
before the city resumes its argument,
he carries a private horizon with him,
moving through Swanston Street
as if the street were moving too.
Sony A7RV
FE 50mm f1.2 GM
Check out Candid 1042
In the Flagstaff air, thin as prayer,
she lifts the offering high
a vessel catching sunlight,
a quiet bridge between earth and sky.
Feathers arc like spokes of memory,
her silver garments whispering
the names of those before her.
Around her, the crowd dissolves
into a single held breath,
as tradition rises
weightless, unwavering
in her outstretched hands.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1041
In Flagstaff Garden’s open air,
A chap stands dressed in suited flair
A crisp-cut rose, a classic hat,
But his painted face is more than that.
Mexican colours bloom in grace,
A festival dancing on his face,
Petal patterns, skulls of white,
A hint of day and edge of night.
Among the trees the city hums,
Yet he becomes the beat of drums,
A walking echo, bold and bright,
Of distant lands and candle light.
There in Melbourne’s gentle green,
Tradition shifts, alive, unseen—
A suited man, half myth, half art,
Carrying culture on his heart.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8
Check out Candid 1038
In Flagstaff Garden’s gentle shade,
A bald head gleams beneath the day,
Brush in hand, the artist sways,
Tracing colors where masks will play.
A Peking opera rises there,
Red and black upon pale skin,
Curved lines like whispers in the air,
Stories of warriors drawn within.
A mustache arches, bold, precise,
Shadowed against the garden’s green,
Each stroke a dance, each hue a slice
Of ancient theatre, alive, unseen.
Pedestrians pause, the city hums,
But time slows here, a quiet art,
Two souls converse with pigment drums,
And painted faces speak from heart.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1035
In the hush between drumbeats,
a dancer leans into the trembling air
silver tassels shivering along his shoulders
like a whispered prayer in metal.
Paint shadows his face,
a mask half-myth, half-memory,
as though he is stepping out of some older world
and borrowing our sunlight for a moment.
Around him, the crowd softens into blur
a ring of breath, of waiting,
their modern jackets folding quietly
against the ancient thrum of ceremony.
He holds something small, fragile, smouldering
a ritual ember, a thread of smoke
curling upward like a spirit
seeking its rightful sky.
Behind him, another dancer rises
in a crown of feathers,
a living echo of winds that once
swept untamed across continents.
And in that suspended second,
between steps, between heartbeats,
the street becomes a timeless corridor
where the past returns not as ghost
but as pulse
steady, defiant, beautiful.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1033
In Flagstaff Garden,
colour has slipped away—
leaving only the hush
of black and white.
A woman in traditional Mexican dress
moves like a soft echo
from another time.
Her embroidered skirt,
no longer bright,
unfurls in shades of cloud and ink.
She holds a cup with both hands,
its pale rim catching
a thin silver glint of light.
Every step she takes
sends a quiet ripple
through the grayscale air
a dance made of shadows,
memory, and breath.
The festival hum fades
to a distant murmur,
as if the world is listening
through old film grain.
Pigeons lift like smudged brushstrokes,
trees stand in charcoal stillness.
And she
she becomes the single moving spark
in this monochrome garden,
turning the absence of colour
into its own kind of beauty,
a dance that glows softly
in the language of dusk
and silver rain.
Sony A7RV
FE 50mm f1.2 GM
Check out Candid 1032 and FACE OFF
A lady with rabbit-bright teeth
stands in Flagstaff Garden,
a cup held lightly in her hand
as if it knows her secrets.
A wry smile curls at the edge
of her quiet afternoon,
soft as the breeze that moves
through elm leaves overhead.
She watches the world
with a gentle, tilted wonder
a moment paused,
simple, odd,
and perfectly her own.
Sony A7RV
FE 50mm f1.2 GM
Check out Candid 1026
Under the old wooden Lemonade Stand sign,
cups are stacked high,
a vendor waiting with a quiet smile.
A woman stands in front of him,
ponytail falling over her shoulder,
hand on her hip as she studies the menu
blood orange, lemon, granita.
The food-festival bustle drifts around them,
trees rising behind the tents,
a simple moment of choosing a drink
in Flagstaff Gardens.
Sony A7RV
FE 50mm f1.2 GM
In Flagstaff Gardens, Melbourne’s quiet green,
a man stood pausing in the late-day air,
a fork raised like a small, earnest compass
guiding him through a container of nachos
golden shards catching the light
as if the sun had scattered them by hand.
He wore summer lightly:
a T-shirt soft with miles of wandering,
shorts brushing the edge of breeze,
and in his back pocket, a bottle
tipping like a secret he’d forgotten to hide
a small companion clinking with his steps.
Around him, the city hummed
its unhurried evening hymn:
trams sighing, leaves whispering gossip,
pigeons pacing like old philosophers.
But he ate as though nothing else existed
each bite a quiet devotion,
an edible peace,
a brief, gentle proof
that a moment can belong entirely
to one person,
one fork,
one mouthful of nachos
in a garden holding its breath.
Sony A7RV
FE 50mm f1.2 GM
Check out Candid 1020
Two men beneath matching caps,
T-shirts blazing a Brazilian logo,
stand anchored in the Saturday hum
of Flagstaff Gardens, Melbourne.
One is bent to the grill,
cutting meat with a craftsman’s calm
smoke curling around him
like a quiet anthem
lifted from far-off shores.
The other,
sunglasses dark as river stone,
faces my lens without flinching
a held breath of curiosity,
or challenge,
or just the stillness
between sizzle and song.
Around them the garden thrums:
kids running, parrots chattering,
wind brushing the old trees awake.
And in the middle of it all,
two men in the same hat and shirt
briefly become a scene
a small, vivid stitch
in Flagstaff’s wandering tapestry.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1019
Two lady performers,
floral loops crowning their hair
like dawn-warmed garlands,
let the last notes of their music
settle into the soft lawns
of Flagstaff Garden.
They lean toward their support staff,
quiet laughter blooming
between them like late-spring petals,
their words drifting in the air
where melodies once lived.
The garden listens
trees tilting in approval,
pigeons pausing mid-step
as the performers, unmasked from the stage,
become simply two friends
gathering themselves
after giving their hearts to the day.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1018
Two lady performers
floral loops crowning their hair
like small, deliberate blossoms
stand before twin microphones
in the green hush of Flagstaff Garden.
The guitarist begins first:
fingers like soft rain on warm timber,
each chord a slow unfurling
of late-afternoon gold.
Beside her, the violinist lifts her bow
as though summoning a dawn,
and from the strings bloom tones
so tremulous, so fine,
they seem spun from the breath
between wind and dreaming.
Their voices rise
two petals carried on the same breeze
braiding through guitar warmth
and violin shimmer,
floating over the lawn
like a blessing that knows no name.
For a moment, time leans in,
listening.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1017 FACE OFF
An Indian chap in a weathered cap
stands behind his hawker stall
at Flagstaff Garden
a small kingdom of smoke and sizzle
claimed for the evening.
He brushes sauces onto skewers
with the precision of habit,
lacquered reds and browns
catching the flare of the grill.
No ritual of sharing here
just trade,
just hunger meeting craft,
just the quiet exchange
of money for flavour,
the brief transaction
between a vendor and the passing world,
each skewer handed over
like a moment that never lingers.
Sony A7RV
FE 135mm f1.8 GM
Check out Candid 1016
