Australian Life photography competition 2025 finalists
Chris lost his home in the catastrophic floods of 2022. Due to being flood affected and the ongoing housing crisis in Lismore, he's been occupying a government buy-back house. He recently received an eviction notice, leaving him with no other options. Photograph: Elise Derwin
Captured over the summer holidays, this photo shows an Australian family enjoying a picnic, with the father smoking a traditional hookah. Part of the Summer Highway series, it reflects the vibrant blend of cultural traditions and Australian beach life, where families picnic, play and connect. Photograph: Natalie Grono
Max is the son I always dreamed of, perfect in my eyes, though he struggles with societal gender expectations and because of this, at just four years old, he described feeling like his body was 'broken'. Now eight, Max finds comfort with friends who accept him for who he is. Photograph: Rob Palmer
My three sons in the bath, determined to still fit in there together. From the ongoing series 'Brothers', a visceral journey of childhood, navigating the emotional landscape of siblings. A journey of transformation, connection and becoming. Photograph: Camilla Johansson-Merrick
I took this photo of my sister as she was moving goats around in a yard. The dust started billowing up so much so one could hardly see. Photograph: Rachael Ryan
Acceptance is elusive and the very need for it is disputed by the middle way of chaos and control. Each element within this world is placed and carefully curated over months of world-building among the wind, flies and unusual sandy heat. Photograph: Dave Laslett
Every Wednesday during summer, at dawn, a group of revellers who call themselves Cold Nips, gather for a dip in the Indian Ocean to start their day. The red pontoon at South Beach in Fremantle is not only a local icon but an invitation to climb, jump or dive no matter your age. Photograph: Lidia D'Opera
Enter Sabio's Tasmanian world of handmade objects: fantastical, grotesque, visceral, often pulling the carpet from beneath you. Opposite sides of Sabio are captured here. In 2022, Sabio's world was upturned by aggressive cancer, a double mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation. She rose fantastically from the ashes. Photograph: Chrissie Hall
Melbourne's beloved Gasometer Hotel was a maze of graffiti-covered walls, sticky beer-stained stairways, and a dancefloor beneath a retractable roof — and for this party at least, a clothesline. When word spread the venue was closing, friends and lovers gathered for one last dance, one final night of music, memories and movement before the wrecking ball arrived. Photograph: Louis Lee
On this scorcher of a day, Adelaide topped the charts as the hottest city on Earth. While the kids watched on, it was the poodle who stole the show — charging through the spray like a beast unleashed, ears flying, water everywhere. Pure joy in motion, beating the heat in true Aussie style. Photograph: Melissa Crisa
I captured this frame during the crowded Ramadan Nights at Lakemba this year. It was very interesting to see how the person was focused completely preparing the dish. Light and smoke was apt, even in the crowd I was lucky to get a glimpse of it and captured the frame. Photograph: Prasad Gaanesh
Louie and Max met for the first time minutes before this image was taken. In between changing film rolls, the boys compared scars and spoke about masculinity. Photograph: Robert Tennent
From a series entitled The Community Cup that documents the 2024 Louth Cup, the largest outback race in NSW. It features the official volunteer timers as the horses cross the line during one of the seven races in the program. The whole event is almost entirely volunteer-run. Photograph: Joe Kennedy
In the midst of an Australian heatwave, 27 year-old Jarryd couldn't help but to cool off. So what better way to do so than to crack a cold one... all over himself. While unconventional and messy, it serves as a satisfying reward after a hard day's work. Photograph: Brooke Rochow
Late in 2024, I picked up an old digital camera with a CCD sensor to see what the hype was about. A few weeks later, while my partner Fiona was making coffee, I casually snapped this photo from the couch. I didn't think much of it—until a month later, when looking for a submission for Australian Life, I realised how much it captured. This image distils the best parts of my life in Sydney – moments that have become my fondest memories. Photograph: Jourdain Vitiello
Alice's eight-year-old daughter, Frieda, is one of thousands of children in Australia experiencing 'school can't' – difficulty attending school due to emotional distress, sometimes linked to neurodiversity. 'It's a really lonely and confusing and shameful world because you assume that you are the problem,' the Sydney mum said. This image was taken as part of a 2024 ABC Four Corners investigation, in collaboration with filmmaker Sascha Ettinger-Epstein. Photograph: Mridula Amin
Self portrait of my son and I, after another lonely sleepless night. Sleep deprivation can be so crippling. And with bed-sharing the only thing that brought reprieve, shame was often an emotion that was felt, due to social pressures and expectations on how to be a good mum.
Photograph: Grace Alexander
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Technology has changed everything. She calls Cabbage Kids 'authentic': 'The props were all real. It was all in my garage. It's funny; with Photoshop and AI, it makes me sad to think that if you came to my work now, you might question whether it was real. 'I think original stories will always prevail. That's why having people and humans behind the photographs is important. AI can't replicate that.' If you grew up in the 1990s, there is every chance that, like me, you tacked a Geddes poster to your wall. Babies upright in a flowerpot or a bucket, or gazing sleepily from a peony, a calla lily or a bed of roses. Some were dressed as bumblebees, others with little fairy wings, snoozing on a bed of crisp autumn leaves. The images are whimsical, otherworldly and sometimes plain weird. But they have that rare quality of appealing to children without being childish and have begun popping up again, often ironically, on social media. They were disseminated initially not just on Hallmark greetings cards, but also on the cover of Vogue Homme, in a Dior advert and even in a 2004 book with Céline Dion (the best image shows the singer holding aloft a baby asleep inside an amniotic sac). The height of that period, for Geddes, was appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show: 'She came out carrying two babies dressed as bumblebees and we shot up the New York Times bestseller list!' But for many millennials, the peak of her fame was the episode of Friends in which Elle Macpherson's character, Janine, moved in with Joey and attempted to 'girlify' his apartment using Geddes' photograph Tayla as a Waterlily. Geddes is striking, with silver hair, high cheekbones and bright skin, like Meryl Streep if Streep wore her cap backwards. She sits in front of a generic backdrop, warm, if a little reserved, speaking slowly and carefully about bumblebee suits and lily pads. It's almost 30 years since she created Down in the Garden, a series of photographs of babies in and around flora and fauna, some of which will appear in her first ever retrospective, at the New Art Museum in Tübingen, Germany, this month. Among the 150 images are identical triplets sleeping in the hands of Jack, a school groundsman, whose hands also appeared in her 1993 photograph of Maneesha, a baby born prematurely at 28 weeks. For years, people have written to tell Geddes they keep this hopeful image on their fridge. Another photograph is of Tuli and Nyla. Geddes had two days in the studio, lots of babies and a giant Polaroid camera. 'I had no props, but you need a vague plan when you work with babies, as you have to work quickly,' she says. When Nyla began fussing, Tuli rocked her and whispered into her hair. She grabbed the moment. Geddes refers to these prop-less, slightly quieter pictures as her 'classic work' and the babies in flowerbeds as 'what they know' – 'they' being people like me, who grew up with them. 'After Down in the Garden came out, it was all pots, pots, pots,' she says. 'It was like I had a flowerpot tattooed on my forehead. People always want the flowerpots! But I'm like: I do other things. And what I'm looking forward to is that people will see the other work. This exhibition is really the first time anyone has asked me to do this.' Despite selling more than 10m calendars and almost twice as many copies of her seven coffee‑table books (for context, EL James shifted fewer copies of Fifty Shades of Grey in its first decade), Geddes hasn't always been treated with reverence in an industry dominated by single-name stars such as Bailey and Rankin. Is it snobbery? 'It's just a bit of a guy industry,' she says. '[Men] would say: 'I used to shoot babies, but then I moved on to landscapes.' I was always puzzled. To me, babies are magical.' The response to the baby pictures has sometimes been frustrating, she says. 'People said I was a one-shot wonder. I'm just as interested in shooting pregnant women or new mothers. It's just people don't want to talk about that as much.' With some earnestness, she says she now prefers photographing anything pertaining to the 'promise of new life, the miracle of pregnancy and birth'; she hopes the exhibition will draw attention to that. 'I've found that once the Europeans say: 'This is amazing,' then the Americans are like: 'We want this, too.' It has to be that way round.' Geddes was born in 1956 and grew up on a 10,500-hectare (26,000-acre) ranch in Queensland alongside four sisters. They were country kids who attended a two-room primary school. Photography wasn't a big part of her life: 'I only have three images of myself under two and none of me as a newborn.' As a teenager, she subscribed to Life magazine and became fascinated by the idea of telling a story through an image. Still, she lingered on the periphery of photography, going to work in television, where she met her husband, Kel. It was in those corridors that she came across the 'magic' of the darkroom. Shortly after they met, the couple moved to Hong Kong, where Kel was running a new TV station. 'Then we got married and I thought: I've got a roof over my head, now's the time to pick up a camera.' She began putting up adverts in supermarkets, offering to photograph families and children, traipsing around their gardens and homes with a Pentax K1000 she borrowed from her husband. When she was back in Australia and pregnant with her second daughter, now 40, Geddes began taking her classic baby pictures. She realised that, in a studio, she could control everything. She started taking photos for new parents, spending months creating elaborate sets in her garage and trying out different props. A lot of the shots came about by accident. One day, a six-month-old called Chelsea was brought in for a portrait and Geddes spotted an empty flowerpot in the back of the studio: 'We just popped her in there.' To keep her comfortable, she lined the pot with fabric. After a few months, she sent a collection of these images to a small greetings card company. That was that. At the beginning, she would put a call out for babies and take 'whoever came through the door'. But she learned to be discerning. 'Under four weeks is good. If they're full of milk and warm, they'll sleep.' She also liked working with six- and seven‑month-olds, 'because they're not mobile, but suddenly they're sitting and have this whole new perspective. Also, their heads are too big for their bodies, which is funny.' 'The more you charge [for a portrait], the more they want you to make magic with a two-year-old who is having a bad day,' she says. As she became well known, 'people began sending in photos of their babies, or rang from the labour ward in tears saying: 'I've just had the most wonderful baby.' I was just like: 'OK, yup, sure, let's go.'' The images that appeared in calendars, posters, books and magazines were always used 'with the permission of the parents', she says, and the parents were always on set. 'To me, a naked newborn baby is perfect,' she says. 'They are us, essentially good people, at the start of their lives, and that's what I love about them. That's what I was trying to capture. You look at these tyrants that are running rampant [in politics] and think: they were once newborns. What happened? Why didn't your mothers just tell you to sit down and behave?' 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Revealed: The identity of the mystery woman seen at dinner with ex-AFL club boss who left his job during 'd**k pic' scandal
The glamorous woman who had dinner with ex-Carlton president Luke Sayers shortly after his infamous lewd photo scandal has been revealed as one of Australia's top interior designers – and she's reportedly still working for the high-flying executive. Sarah Townson, the director of the acclaimed Anthology architecture and interior design company, was spotted having a meal with Sayers in April, as it was revealed that his wife had left him after his 'd*** pic' scandal in January. Sayers quit his post with the Blues effective immediately on January 22, with the announcement coming just minutes after the AFL Integrity Unit found he was not responsible for the sending of the sexual image. He was pictured having a meal with Townson at Melbourne's Geppetto Trattoria restaurant, with the pair pictured and filmed smiling as they clinked wine glasses at the eatery. Townson is currently doing interior decorating work at the headquarters of Sayers' consulting company, Tenet Advisory and Investments, and his property in Melbourne's inner city, according to News Corp. Sayers' wife Cate, the mother of his four children, is currently living at her property in Red Hill on the Mornington Peninsula, the publication reported. Townson - who was previously with Plus Architecture - has been nominated for awards and has worked on hotel developments. The Daily Mail does not suggest she is or was in a romantic relationship with Sayers. The former Blues president stepped down from his beloved club after an image of a mystery man's penis was posted from his X account, with the account of a top female management figure with a company linked to Carlton tagged in, at 5.41pm on January 9. The public post was directed at the executive's social media account, although the mother-of-two does not appear to have used X since 2017 and does not follow Mr Sayers on the platform. Sayers noticed the development after the photo had been online for 12 minutes, at which point he hastily deleted the image and apologised to his followers, stating he had been targeted by cyber criminals. 'Sorry, my account has been hacked - please ignore all posts,' he wrote. The married father-of-four's account, which had more than 7,300 followers, was deleted but the post had already been reposted and screen-grabbed by other X users. He told Daily Mail Australia he was 'outraged' by the hacking when the news first broke. The high-flying executive (pictured with Carlton star Patrick Cripps) was cleared of any wrongdoing by the AFL Integrity Unit 'This is outrageous. I'm investigating and will leave no stone unturned finding out who did this to me and my family,' he said. Sayers had been with the club for 12 years before stepping down. The AFL and Carlton later said his account was compromised and no further investigation would take place. The fallout from the scandal didn't stop there, with a club sponsor pulling out of an event that was run by Carlton and Sayers also stepping back from another post. It emerged that Bupa cancelled its naming rights arrangement for the team's Run for Respect charity event on February 2. However, a company spokesperson confirmed Bupa will continue its relationship with Carlton, adding, 'Bupa continues to prioritise the wellbeing, privacy and safety of our employee.' In addition to quitting as Blues president, Sayers also announced he would step back as chairman of his consulting company, Sayers Group.
