Sleep, Rest, Finishing
Hello everyone,
The last two weeks I have been on holidays from the substitute teaching work that I do, and my god it’s been nice.
Over Term 3 I became increasingly worn out and the irony of being that tired is that I sleep worse. There’s a cruel twist where the more I need sleep the harder it is to get a good night’s rest. I don’t know why that’s the case, but it often is.
In the first week of the holidays all I felt like I did was rest. I slept a LOT. I napped a LOT. I took it easy, lay down on the couch, didn’t go out much and it felt so good.
In the second week of the holidays I taught a great workshop, and have now driven up to Sydney to do some work and photograph some dingoes. Yet I’m not completely rested — it’s 5am and I’m typing this - and waking up super early is something that happens when I’m not 100%.
Over term 3, as I became more tired, I kept making mistakes. I’d miss emails, forget to get on top of something in the publishing world, fall asleep and miss calls, just totally let people down and lose weeks of productivity on publishing work. I exercise less because, when I get home from a day haranguing teens, I just flop on the couch and recover. That day job just creeps in and in and in and takes over not just in the 6-7 hours I’m on the clock, but in the way all the weariness, the mental slowness, the distraction, the stress and the emotional drainage make everything else worse.
It was a bit of a mess.
I don’t know why this is the case but for most of my adult life work and sleep are often linked, for the worse, and I just don’t sleep very well while working a lot. After a week off I was absolutely bursting with energy and it was a good feeling to have again.
We’re coming to the end of school holidays and I will be working for a lot of term 4. The reality is that I want to earn as much money as I can before the baby comes, so I will work for about 7-8 weeks straight and it will be quite tough.
But that’s ok. There’s a clear end date (December 5th) and that will be the last substitute teaching work I do for many, many months, perhaps ever.
The business continues to grow a bit by bit and I think I might be in a place in 2026 not to need to do the substitute teaching work to bring money in during slow times. Of course that’s a prediction and no one can see the future but I would be so happy if I didn’t have to work as a teacher in a high school any more in 2026.
I want to end by writing a bit about being in Sydney and working on my dingo project. This project is one that will always remain incomplete. There is just so much to see, read and photograph. There are parts of the country I simply haven’t been able to visit - from Coober Pedy where the Dingo Proof Fence runs through an absurd mining town, to K’Gari, an island hotspot of Dingo-on-human attacks, to the Western Australia Dingo Fence, to Ecula roadhouse where dingoes visit most days to suss out the trash cans - there are endless places that I wasn’t able to find the time or money to visit. Australia’s a big place, there’s so much to see and I just ran out of steam. I can feel myself be less interested in the photography of this project and more interested in the design, the exhibiting and the conversations around it.
Yesterday I visited two researchers I’ve been working with. I was, ostensibly, there to take photos, but I think I took about 50 photos and then, over a 7 hour visit, probably talked about environmentalism for 5 hours. That was the part of the project that’s exciting me now - the ways it can be a platform for interesting and exciting conversations and reactions.
In art there’s often this question we ask ourselves: ‘how do I know this is finished?’. For some that’s an impossible question to answer - they sit with it, grapple with it and want to keep adding more art works/photos/etc to what they’re making. But for me it’s simple: I’m done when I start getting a bit bored with making more work. For better or worse that’s where I am now - I’ve been amassing material for 3-4 years and I’m not as excited to get new stuff any more. But I’m excited about putting books, exhibitions and events together. That’s my internal sign to put down the camera and pick up all the other tools.
One last shoot is Sunday this week, I’m visiting someone who has 6 dingoes they look after, and I have some ideas for photos. After that I am 100% putting the camera down.
Anyway, as I’ve been typing this my eyes have started to close, I’ve begun to nod off again. I think it’s time to try and get some more sleep.