FOR a time in the late ’70s our family made its home on a bluff overlooking Guam’s Tumon Bay.
Back then, the Micronesian island was the No.1 destination for Japanese honeymooners, who flocked there on Western-style white wedding packages.
From the hotels below, many couples espied the perfect vantage for wedding photographs and beat a path through the tropical undergrowth to summit on our front lawn.
There, the pretty little brides and their camera-slung grooms would politely await until they caught someone’s attention to “please, photo”.
In the autumn of ’79 I took dozens of photos of bridal couples poised like happy birds between sea and sky and — as a dubious return courtesy — they took dozens of me.
A photograph of the photographer was an unspoken part of the deal.
I imagined the presence of my lumpy teen self in the newlyweds’ albums being explained to bemused relatives from Akita to Yamaguchi.
“. . and this is the fat girl at the top of the cliff who takes photographs”.
Travelling along the Great Ocean Road last week I noticed couples of all walks stopped at lookouts taking their own photographs in that peculiar heads-tight-together-one-arm-outstretched pose of the phone camera.
With some sadness I realised the random helpful stranger who appeared in albums the world over had become redundant — the curled up corner of a memory, like the ghosts on a polaroid left too long in the sun.
But behind the shoji screens and across the tatami mats, the plump girl at the top of the cliff lives on.
— sharris@mmpgroup.com.au
