© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Author: Greg Ray

This author has written 481 articles
Read more about the article Art from disaster: Ron Morrison’s last exhibition
Ron's submerged home, showing the peak flood level (left); Ron as a young man at The Maitland Mercury newspaper office; some flood-damaged items from Ron's collection.

Art from disaster: Ron Morrison’s last exhibition

When a monster flood ripped through the Northern NSW town of Lismore and surrounding districts in 2022, veteran photographer Ron Morrison lost almost all his possessions and his health took a severe hit. Forced from a comfortable ground-floor flat beneath his son's home in the riverside town of Woodburn into respite care in a nursing home, Ron - already frail - struggled with the situation. Ron's wife Liz had already been moved into care before the flood, due to slowly encroaching dementia. Liz Morrison in the ground-floor apartment she shared with Ron, before it was destroyed…

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Read more about the article The man who was Hanimex

The man who was Hanimex

There was a time when Hanimex-branded consumer goods - particularly in the photographic line - were everywhere you looked; in Australia at least. There were Hanimex cameras, projectors, slide viewers, binoculars and, quite honestly, too many other products to list. Growing up in Australia in the 1970s I often wondered who was behind this prolific corporation, but I never followed up on the question until, a year or two before the Covid pandemic, my wife and I stayed at a bed and breakfast at Bellingen in NSW, the owner of which, Frank Wynen, told me he…

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When the familiar becomes unfamiliar

AS a child sometimes I used to stare into a mirror at my own face, unblinking, for minutes at a time. It got scary. Because at a certain point my own familiar face stopped being recognisable and I saw a weird creature. I couldn’t look at it for long, but nor did I have to, since the merest movement of my eyes brought back the familiar me. But I thought about what happened and I realised that the benign interpretation of my face that I had become accustomed to wasn’t necessarily the only way it could…

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