The Australian landscape and the meditative Japanese haiku poem represent two seemingly irreconcilable aesthetics. Haiku, a l7-syllable poem in three lines, eschews the grandiose and the spectacular. The Australian landscape, a harsh and awesome terrain laid down on a grand scale, lacks the vernal qualities of a more temperate climate conducive to quiet, poetic contemplation. But the two are not as opposed as they may first appear. When I started reading haiku all those years ago, I was immediately struck by the visual qualities of many of the poems. So I set about recording - not with pens and brushes, but with my camera - images that expressed similar poetic intuitions to those encapsulated in this most diminutive of poetic forms. It must be pointed out, however, that in almost every case the making of the image preceded the “discovery” of the poem that accompanies it here.

This synthesis of words and pictures is exciting, but it is, of course, not new.

Many of the great haiku poets of the past were also painters who supplemented their poems with haiga - small sketches done with a few simple brush-strokes. Just as a haiku poet chooses the right words to convey the experience of one brief moment of Satori, when he is granted insight into the Suchness of things, a photographer selects and frames the materials he has in front of him in order to reveal the sense of wonder and surprise hidden in them. Again, like the haiku poet, he seeks beauty in the familiar, and significance in the mundane and the commonplace. He need not range the world to look for the grandiose and the sensational. Dr Suzuki put it well when he said: “When one is in a certain mood - a certain divine mood - even the most ordinary things that we pass by in our daily life can incite a deep religious or spiritual feeling one has never experienced before. This is the time one becomes a poet in spite of oneself.” This then is my attempt at living life as a poet, of discovering and recording these “moments of vision".