Susanna Duffy

Please allow me to show you the lenses I have so thoroughly enjoyed creating..

I live in Melbourne, an immensely livable city with two rivers running through to the beautiful Port Phillip Bay a huge shallow body of water with an extremely dangerous entrance to its placid waters.

One river is the Maribyrnong, 'Mirring-gnai-birr-nong' - meaning 'I can hear a ringtail possum'. You can still hear the ringtail possums along the Maribyrnong, they're incredibly noisy creatures.

The other river is the Yarra, once called Birrarung in the Woiwurrung language meaning 'The River of Mists'.

The word, Yarra Yarra, just means "waterfall" and is descriptive of any river or creek. The early European settlers misunderstood what the Aboriginal people were telling them.

Perhaps the noise of the local possums deafened them.

I live alongside the Merri Creek in Clifton Hill, on a jointed basalt column formed by cooling lava, just where the creek meets the Yarra River. A few steps out my back door and I'm on the creek, looking over to where the creek tumbles into the river. It's very hard to be depressed when you live in a spot like this.

The Aboriginal name is Merri Merri meaning "very rocky" and rocky it certainly is! The back of my house overlooks the area where the Wurundjeri people held their large gatherings - the location for one of the earliest land treaties in Australia between Indigenous Australians and Europeans.

My great grandmother, Mary Humphries, was the first white child born here.

I knew her well, she lived a long life and I spent a lot of time with her. She told me wonderful stories about the early days of her childhood and of her father, a miner from Ballarat.

After the Eureka Rebellion he came down to Melbourne and was one of the quarry workers who achieved the Eight Hour day in 1856.

You can see by the photo how the 13 long years of drought have affected the creek. Yes, that's Melbourne on the close horizon, I'm within walking distance of the CBD.

Mythology is very real in my life. My Great Aunt Nell gave me Bullfinch : The Age of Fable for my 9th birthday and I hurried home from school every day for weeks to finish reading it all before Mum called me to set the table for tea.

Those fantastical stories of fabulous gods and fearsome monsters stirred my imagination and summoned me to discover more. Bullfinch also blessed me with a deep love of beautiful language, a love which still thrills me today.

Years later, when I began to study Behavioural Sciences, I discovered Jung.

Myths are public dreams. Dreams are private myths : Joseph Campbell

Jung constructed his concepts linking the world of outer events and the inner realm of fantasies, dreams, and symbols - symbols which appear again and again throughout history in mythology, religion, fairy tales, alchemical texts, and other forms of creative expression.

The source, he said, of this symbolic material was the collective unconscious, a pool of experience accessible to all humans through history.

So when I first found Joseph Campbell I swooned! The journey of the hero is the one we all make, and I make mine accompanied by the faces of the Goddess I found in Bullfinch.