I am in Adelaide on family business, and one thing I have noticed is how dry and brown the unwatered parkland is. I don’t mind the countryside when it’s like that, but when I watched Wanyi Wighton’s stills-movie of the Todd River in flow, I did find myself missing the temporarily green, green grass of home.
There’ve been a few features on the web celebrating the Centre’s wet summer in a way that only desert-dwellers really can. With the expert assistance of the ABC’s Nicole Lee, Alex Nelson took interested parties on a voyage of exploration up St Mary’s Creek, which has only flowed six or seven times in Alex’s lifetime. The film was apparently inspired by Alex’s great new regular column, Naturally, in The Alice Springs News.

Wanyi was also born and bred in Alice Springs, as was his brother Lelep, who co-stars with the Todd River in Wanyi’s A Flow of Moments. Wanyi’s technique, in which he takes hundreds of still frames at a fast shutter speed, has the effect of presenting life as just that: a flow of moments, each one with its own character, that exists independently as well as within the illusion of continuity.

This film is also great fun. – D.R.