I was standing somewhere in the middle of the Northern Territory of Australia. In front of me was a house, though most wouldn’t call it that. Scraps of iron sheeting, old timber, held together with a few screws, rope and hope. A place built from whatever the land and community offered and found. A place that shouldn’t be standing, but did, just like the people inside it. I had my camera with me, as always. Ready to frame things, to find the right angle, to capture the moment, to tell the story I thought needed to be told. I’d done it a thousand times before – slip in quietly, document, slip out again – leaving with pockets full of other people’s stories.

But that day, a little boy stood beside me. No older than eight years old. Bare feet, dusty, eyes sharp like a hawk’s and a heart soft like river clay. He just stood there, silent, breathing with me. Waiting. I don’t know what made me do it. Maybe the ancestors whispered, and I listened. Maybe the land nudged me, and I felt it. I don’t know. But I handed that boy my camera. I didn’t say a word. Just showed him how to use it and stepped back.

And in that moment, everything shifted.

He lifted the camera to his eye. He wasn’t framing or composing. He was seeing – with every fibre of his being, without ego, without wanting to capture or keep. Just seeing. Later, I checked what he had taken. There on the screen was his grandmother, her head poking out the door frame into the light, laughing. Her eyes crinkled with love. The patched-up walls glowing around her. In that image, I saw what I could never see with my own eyes, could never capture with my frame. 
That boy didn’t only take a photograph. He showed me the world as it truly is. He reminded me the stories worth telling are not mine to take. They are gifted by those who live them with truth and clarity. That these stories are the ones that matter the most.

This entire project began with something so simple that it almost got lost in the noise. One small gesture, one quiet moment. A camera, handed to a child. 
In that fleeting instant a window opened onto something immeasurably larger than I could have imagined. It ignited a question within me; what could happen if the young people in these remote communities, these marginalized people could stand in their own light, in their own right. If they could tell their own truths, and preserve the threads of culture that have guided their families for generations? What if this empowerment could, in turn, generate the resources needed to manifest tangible, transformative, real lasting change in their communities? I carried my camera across Australia, to slums in Mumbai, jungles of Guatemala, streets of South East Asia, the remote villages of the Himalayas – and everywhere I went, in every frame those children took, I didn’t find pain or hopelessness. I found unbreakable light: family, connection, community, love, and true happiness.

The moment it all came together and marked the official start of what would become the Ngarra project, was when I sat in ceremony with my mentor, Dig, and he placed his handprint in the warm red earth by the campfire.
We each hold a fragment of the pattern of creation. What we have to do is bring those fragments back together.
You do not need to tell their story, you need to help them tell their own, that’s your role. To bring those pieces back together. Bring them all back around that one fire, so we can be together as one again. Ngarra.

Sitting across from Dig next to that fire under that vast, star-filled sky, he drew the plan for this project in the earth, sung up the story in the sands, and gifted the title of what we had to do. It wasn’t just a word. It was a way of seeing, a way of being. An invitation for everyone to remember that everything – people, animals, the land itself – all belongs in one circle. One fire. One story. Together as one. 

That was the birth of Ngarra.