What is the Question November

This month Roland caught up with photographer and environmental campaigner Peter Kervarec.

 

What is your name?

Peter Kervarec

 

What is your occupation?

Professional photographer semi-retired

 

What brought you to Ballarat?

I was born here, and I love it, although council decisions are testing the friendship.

 

What is your favourite spot in the city?

Lake Wendouree at dawn.

 

What is your earliest memory?

My mother operating the Garden City taxis two-way radio base station at home.

 

What is the most courageous thing you’ve ever done?

Making the decision to have my beautiful boxer, Mickey, put to sleep as he was so unwell.

 

What is the best decision ever you have made?

To leave my job on the railways as a train driver and locomotive maintenance worker to become a photographer.

 

What do you like to cook?

Scones, stir fry or chicken and sweet corn soup.

What is the most expensive thing you’ve purchased – property aside?

A car, for sure.

 

What building would you choose to be?

A miner’s cottage

 

What is your most treasured possession?

My camera. My first was a Nikon FE2. I cost $750 in 1984.

 

What is the greatest love of your life – apart from friends and family?

Photography and nature.

 

If you could ask your pet one question, what would it be?

Do you see in colour?

 

What would you change if you could edit your past?

The anger I had as a teenager and which is now resolved, although it took 50 years to find out.

 

What or who inspires you?

The Aboriginal People.

 

What is your favourite holiday destination?

Mallacoota.

 

What music and television do you like?

Some classical, 60s 70s music, John Lennon. ABC and non-fiction programs.

 

What is your favourite quote?

“Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been,” David Bowie.

 

What person – living or dead would invite to dinner party?

Leonardo Da Vinci,

 

What technological/scientific development boggles your mind?

My mobile phone with which I have a love hate relationship with

 

What qualities do you admire in other people?

Compassion, love and RESPECT of the natural world.

 

What was your first job?

In the school holidays: stacking sheep skins at a sheep’s merchant, and picking spuds with my uncle.

 

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

A geologist.

 

What scares you?

Nothing really – maybe the way humans treat nature and trees – abysmally.

 

What historical calamity would you choose to reverse?

Wow! So many – I think the white settlement mistreatment of Aborigines.

 

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?

Work hard now; save every cent you can, and retire young and see so much. You’ll be 60 before you know it!

 

What is the best parenting advice you could give?

Love your children with boundaries and limits not presents, so they know you really love them.

 

What is the best parenting advice you have been given?

Listen to your kids, don’t interrupt, and talk to them without distraction.

 

What is your most embarrassing parenting moment?

My three-year old son vanished while I was babysitting him. I looked everywhere – the house, the street, and the nearby shops. Before I decided to call the police I took one more look in the bedroom. I thought I saw the doona move. The munchkin was there, asleep. I learned a lesson: make the bed!

 

What is the funniest thing you remember one of your kids saying, or doing?

I had a friend called Wally. When they met, my six-year-old son stood wringing his hands and asked him if he wasted water like the ad on television?

 

What do you think is the most difficult thing about being a parent?

Peer pressure possibly and keeping a lid on that.