Rada Priya

CEDAR CREEK, Australia - The road to Hobie Porter’s studio winds through dense green, the kind of layered rainforest that seems to breathe. It is quiet in a way that feels deliberate, as if the landscape is holding something back. Porter has built a career on that exact tension. I had known of Hobie Porter long before I knew him personally. His sweeping landscapes hanging at Tweed Regional Gallery had stopped me in my tracks. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise he was the same person I saw regularly at my daily café, Bastion Lane in Uki. For more than two decades, Porter has painted the Tweed Valley - its escarpments, shifting light and familiar outlines - but rarely in ways that feel settled. His works resist the easy beauty often associated with landscape painting. Instead, they hover somewhere between recognition and unease, inviting viewers to look again at places they thought they understood. “I’m trying to present a fresh perspective of something people are familiar...

There are people we grieve twice in a lifetime. Once for who they were. And once for who we were never allowed to know. My father is one of them. When I was a child, my mother told me he was a paedophile. She didn’t whisper it. She didn’t hesitate. She said it plainly, as fact. As warning. As control. When we misbehaved, she would drop us at the greyhound station and force us to spend sleepless weekends with him. I remember the noise of the station. The way my stomach would knot. The terror that would sit in my chest at night when the lights went out. I was absolutely terrified to sleep. He was a workaholic. Twelve-hour days. Long hours. Absence disguised as provision. He would leave cash on the bench, stockpiles of food in the fridge, and the television on - a wild luxury I couldn’t enjoy because fear had already moved in. At home with my mother, we weren’t allowed a TV at all. Looking back now, my father was unemotional, but never unkind. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t offer hims...