Isla Maree Garrett (née James)

The Electrician's Daughter (1980–1997)

Isla Maree James was born on 12th March 1980 at Shoalhaven District Memorial Hospital in Nowra, New South Wales, the second child and only daughter of Graham Douglas James and Patricia Anne James née Sullivan. Graham, an electrician whose work took him across the Shoalhaven region — from dairy farms requiring rewired milking sheds to the naval base at HMAS Albatross where civilian contractors maintained infrastructure the Navy preferred not to discuss — was a quiet, methodical man whose hands bore the permanent evidence of thirty years spent negotiating with copper wire and junction boxes. Patricia, who managed the front office at Nowra East Public School with an organisational precision that the teaching staff relied upon more than they acknowledged, brought to the household a warmth and sociability that balanced her husband's taciturn nature. Together they occupied a fibro house on Moss Street whose modest dimensions contained a family whose internal dynamics were shaped less by the space they inhabited than by the temperaments they had inherited and the circumstances they had chosen.

Isla's older brother, Scott Graham James, born on 29th August 1977, received his sister's arrival with the proprietary interest of a three-year-old whose territorial instincts had not yet been softened by the discovery that siblings could serve as allies rather than competitors. The rivalry that characterised their early childhood mellowed into genuine friendship during their primary school years, when Scott's protective instincts manifested as a willingness to walk his sister to school, to intervene when older children tested playground hierarchies, and to tolerate her persistent presence during weekend adventures along the banks of the Shoalhaven River.

The Shoalhaven's landscape provided Isla's earliest education in the relationship between light and place. The south coast possesses a quality of illumination that varies dramatically with season and weather — the flat, bleached intensity of summer, the soft golden compression of winter afternoons, the particular grey-green cast that precedes storms rolling in from the Tasman Sea. Isla absorbed these variations before she possessed either the vocabulary or the technology to record them, developing an attentiveness to visual detail that her teachers at Nowra East Public School noted in the observational drawings she produced during art classes with a concentration her mathematics exercises never received.

The catalyst arrived on Isla's twelfth birthday, when Graham presented her with a second-hand Canon AE-1 he had acquired from a retiring colleague at the naval base. The camera — a thirty-five-millimetre film model whose mechanical operation required understanding of aperture, shutter speed, and the relationship between the two — transformed what had been passive observation into active practice. Isla spent the remainder of 1992 burning through rolls of film whose developing costs Graham absorbed with the quiet resignation of a parent who recognised that suppressing a genuine passion would prove more expensive in the long term than indulging it. The early results were predictably uneven — overexposed beaches, blurred pets, family portraits in which the composition revealed more ambition than competence — but occasional frames demonstrated something beyond technical accident: an instinct for the moment when light, subject, and angle converged into images that communicated meaning rather than merely recording appearance.

Nowra High School, where Isla enrolled in 1993, offered limited formal instruction in photography but provided ample subject matter. She documented school events with increasing confidence, contributed images to the school magazine, and won a regional youth photography competition in 1996 with a series depicting the fishing fleet at Greenwell Point — images whose combination of industrial grit and coastal beauty suggested an emerging aesthetic sensibility that valued authenticity over prettiness. Her academic performance followed the pattern common to students whose passions are genuine rather than strategic: English and visual arts commanded her fullest attention, whilst mathematics and the physical sciences received the investment their compulsory status demanded and nothing more. Her Year 12 adviser, noting both her photographic portfolio and her competent but uninspired HSC results, suggested that a degree combining journalism with her visual interests might provide the professional foundation her talent required.

Sydney: University and Film School (1998–2004)

The University of New South Wales, where Isla enrolled in February 1998 to study for a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Media Studies, presented the challenge that confronted every regional student arriving in Sydney: the disorienting discovery that one's provincial accomplishments carried less currency in metropolitan contexts than their local recognition had suggested. Isla navigated the adjustment with the pragmatic resilience her parents had modelled — Patricia's sociability providing the template for making connections, Graham's methodical approach informing her study habits — and by the end of her first semester had established the routines that would sustain her through four years of academic work.

Her coursework confirmed what the Nowra High School adviser had intuited: Isla's intelligence was genuine but visually oriented, processing information through images more fluently than through text. Whilst her written assignments in media theory and journalism ethics met required standards without exceeding them, her practical work — particularly in photojournalism and visual communication units — demonstrated capabilities her lecturers identified as significantly above average. Her photography lecturer, Dr Michael Tan, described her as possessing "an editor's eye in a photographer's body" — the ability to identify, within the chaos of unfolding events, the single frame that contained the story's essence.

She graduated in December 2002 with results that reflected her particular distribution of strengths, and immediately enrolled at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney for a Diploma in Cinematography. AFTRS, whose reputation as Australia's pre-eminent screen arts institution attracted applicants from across the country, provided training in moving images that completed what her university education had begun. The transition from still photography to cinematography required adjustments — the discipline of sustained visual attention rather than the decisive moment, the collaborative demands of film production rather than the solitary practice of photojournalism — but Isla adapted with the facility of someone whose fundamental skill was seeing, regardless of the medium through which that seeing was expressed. Her diploma project, a short documentary about a Vietnamese fishing family in Cabramatta, demonstrated both technical competence and the empathetic attentiveness that would characterise her subsequent professional work.

The Craft of Seeing (2004–2013)

Isla's first professional position, as a production assistant at ABC News in Sydney, commenced in January 2004 and provided immersion in broadcast journalism's industrial realities. The role demanded versatility rather than artistry — assisting with camera setups, managing equipment logistics, performing the dozens of unglamorous tasks that enabled polished news segments to reach audiences unaware of the labour their production required. She gained hands-on experience in camera operation and video editing, observed the working methods of experienced operators whose instinctive decisions about framing, movement, and light represented accumulated wisdom no curriculum could fully transmit, and recognised during these years that her vocation lay behind the camera rather than in front of it — translating the world's visual complexity into images that enabled people to understand what they had not personally witnessed.

In 2006, Isla left the ABC to work as a freelance camera operator and videographer in Sydney. The decision, which Patricia greeted with the particular anxiety that freelance careers generate in parents whose own employment had always featured regular pay cycles, reflected Isla's growing confidence and her desire to develop a broader portfolio than staff positions permitted. She worked on corporate videos, wedding films, short documentaries, and music clips — each assignment contributing different skills to a repertoire whose breadth would later prove invaluable in regional journalism, where camera operators were expected to produce everything from breaking news footage to feature-length documentary content with equal competence.

The move to WIN News in Wollongong in 2009 represented a deliberate return towards the regional journalism that had initially attracted her to the profession. Wollongong, situated on the Illawarra coast barely an hour south of Sydney and two hours north of Nowra, offered proximity to her parents — Graham's knees had begun yielding to decades of kneeling in cramped ceiling spaces — whilst providing the experience of regional television news production that her Sydney career had not encompassed. She covered local stories across the Illawarra with the visual sensitivity her training had cultivated, developing collaborative relationships with reporters whose words her images were required to complement rather than contradict. The work was grounded in the particular rhythms of a community small enough that the camera operator was recognised in the supermarket by people whose stories she had helped to tell.

Four years in Wollongong taught Isla that her professional instincts were fundamentally regional. When, in early 2013, she learned that the Silver City Sentinel in Broken Hill was seeking a dedicated field camera operator for its multimedia operations, the advertisement's combination of regional focus and creative latitude generated an excitement that metropolitan positions had never produced. She applied, was interviewed by telephone by editor Margaret Thompson, and accepted a position that required relocating to a town she had never visited, in a landscape that bore no resemblance to the coastal environment she had inhabited for her entire life.

The Silver City Sentinel (2013–2018)

Broken Hill's visual landscape struck Isla with the force of revelation. After thirty-three years spent in environments defined by water — the Shoalhaven's river systems, Sydney's harbour, Wollongong's coastal escarpment — the arid immensity of far western New South Wales offered a visual vocabulary she had never encountered. The quality of light alone demanded recalibration: harsh and unforgiving at midday, reducing the landscape to flat planes of ochre and white; impossibly rich at dawn and dusk, when the red earth seemed to generate its own illumination; theatrical during the rare storms that transformed dust into mud and dry creek beds into temporary rivers whose violence was proportional to their brevity. Isla spent her first weeks in Broken Hill shooting footage that served no editorial purpose whatsoever — the play of shadow across corrugated iron, the geometry of mine headframes against cloudless skies, the faces of elderly residents whose weathered features contained stories that words would struggle to articulate. These images constituted her private apprenticeship in a new visual language, and they informed every frame she subsequently shot for the Sentinel with an intimacy that distinguished her work from the competent but emotionally detached footage that visiting camera operators typically produced.

The Sentinel's Argent Street headquarters, with its distinctive clock tower and heritage-listed façade, housed a newsroom whose multimedia ambitions exceeded its resources in ways that required every staff member to operate across multiple platforms. Isla's responsibilities encompassed field camera work for the television broadcasts, photographic coverage for print and digital editions, and occasional contributions to 2BHR radio's online content. She worked alongside Mackenzie Roberts, whose progression from senior reporter to news anchor in 2015 created a professional partnership whose importance to the Sentinel's broadcast output was difficult to overstate. Roberts's composed, authoritative on-camera presence required visual framing that enhanced rather than competed with her delivery, and Isla developed an instinctive understanding of the angles, lighting, and movement that served Roberts's particular strengths.

The newsroom's established staff received Isla with the combination of welcome and assessment that small teams apply to new arrivals whose competence will directly affect everyone's workload. Jack Thompson, the veteran reporter whose four decades at the Sentinel had provided him with an infallible sense of which newcomers would endure and which would retreat to coastal comfort within eighteen months, initially watched Isla with characteristic reserve. His assessment shifted when he accompanied her on a field assignment to document drought conditions on properties west of Broken Hill and observed her patience — the willingness to wait for the light, the reluctance to impose her own narrative upon what the landscape was offering, the understanding that some images required hours of apparent inactivity before the decisive moment presented itself. "She sees like a reporter listens," he told Margaret Thompson afterwards, which from Jack constituted the highest compliment his vocabulary permitted.

Ellen Pascoe, who had joined the Sentinel the previous year and was establishing herself as the newsroom's primary environmental correspondent, became an unexpected professional companion. The two women, close in age and temperament though different in their modes of storytelling — Ellen's journalism was built on words and sources, Isla's on images and observation — discovered that their respective approaches complemented each other with a productivity that neither could achieve alone. Ellen's environmental investigations benefited enormously from Isla's visual documentation, which provided readers with evidence that prose descriptions, however precise, could not replicate. The contamination visible in Isla's photographs of the Stephens Creek reservoir — the discolouration of water, the distress of surrounding vegetation — communicated urgency that Ellen's carefully researched text substantiated but Isla's images made visceral.

Liam (2015–2021)

Isla met Liam Patrick Garrett at the Palace Hotel on a Friday evening in October 2015, during one of the informal gatherings that constituted Broken Hill's social infrastructure for people whose working hours precluded more organised recreation. Liam, a station hand who managed livestock operations on Nundooka Station, a pastoral property seventy kilometres north-west of town, had come in for supplies and stayed for a beer that became several. He was thirty-one, solidly built, quiet in the manner of men whose working days were spent in conversation with animals and landscape rather than people, and possessed of a dry, understated humour that required attentiveness to appreciate. Isla found in Liam something she had not previously encountered: a man whose sense of self was sufficiently settled that he did not require her constant attention to sustain it.

The courtship proceeded at the pace that distance imposed. Liam's work kept him on the station for weeks at a time, and Isla's Sentinel responsibilities meant that their time together was rationed in a way that might have extinguished less resilient attraction. They married on 8th April 2017 at the Broken Hill Civic Centre, a small ceremony attended by family and Sentinel colleagues, after which Liam relocated to Broken Hill — a compromise that acknowledged the impracticality of Isla commuting seventy kilometres of unsealed road for a six-o'clock broadcast.

Their daughter, Matilda Grace Garrett, was born on 3rd November 2017 at Broken Hill Base Hospital. Isla took three months' leave before returning to the Sentinel in February 2018, the timing coinciding with significant changes in the newsroom: Dexter Clark's assumption of the Editor-in-Chief position, succeeding Margaret Thompson whose retirement marked the end of an editorial era, and the arrival of Drew Polden from Adelaide in March. Isla's promotion to Senior Camera Operator, announced in the same restructure that elevated Clark, recognised both her accumulated expertise and the expanded visual responsibilities that the Sentinel's digital ambitions demanded.

The years that followed tested the arrangement she and Liam had constructed. Liam, whose identity was fundamentally rural — shaped by landscape, weather, and the agricultural rhythms that had governed his family's life for three generations — struggled with Broken Hill's relative urbanity in ways that surprised them both. He found work as a fencer and general hand on properties accessible from town, but the daily commute to stations whose labour he had previously inhabited rather than merely visited left him restless. Isla, absorbed by the Sentinel's expanding ambitions and the demands of a toddler whose energy exceeded the combined resources of both parents, found herself navigating the particular exhaustion of competing professional and domestic responsibilities.

The bushfire season of 2019–2020 — the Black Summer that devastated eastern Australia — provided Isla with some of the most significant footage of her career and simultaneously exposed the fractures in her marriage. Her coverage of local volunteer firefighters returning to Broken Hill after weeks battling blazes in neighbouring states produced images whose combination of physical exhaustion and emotional intensity communicated the crisis's human dimension more powerfully than any statistical accounting of hectares burned. The footage aired nationally, the first time Isla's work had reached audiences beyond the Sentinel's regional footprint, and generated conversations about documentary projects whose scope exceeded what regional news production could accommodate. These conversations excited Isla in ways that unsettled Liam, whose understanding of their shared life had not included the possibility that his wife's ambitions might carry her beyond the community they had built together.

They separated in January 2021, with the mutual recognition — painful but honest — that the people they had become were not the people who had married. Liam returned to station work, accepting a manager's position on a property near Wilcannia that offered the space and solitude his temperament required. Isla remained in Broken Hill long enough to complete her notice at the Sentinel and to manage the logistics of relocating to Adelaide with a three-year-old whose comprehension of upheaval was mercifully limited by developmental stage. The departure was professionally wrenching: eight years at the Sentinel had woven Isla into the newsroom's fabric, and the relationships she had built with colleagues — Jack Thompson's gruff mentorship, Ellen Pascoe's collaborative generosity, Mackenzie Roberts's broadcast partnership — constituted losses that professional courtesy required her to minimise in farewell but whose weight she carried to Adelaide along with her camera equipment and her daughter's increasingly battered collection of stuffed animals.

Adelaide and the Documentary Life (2021–2026)

Adelaide offered Isla what Broken Hill could not: proximity to the documentary filmmaking community whose creative ambitions matched her own, and a city whose scale was sufficient for professional opportunity without the metropolitan intensity that had overwhelmed her during her Sydney years. She rented a two-bedroom flat in Prospect, enrolled Matilda at a local childcare centre, and established herself as a freelance documentary filmmaker and photographer whose regional credentials distinguished her from the university graduates competing for identical commissions. Graham and Patricia, now both retired, visited regularly from Nowra — Patricia arriving with luggage that consisted primarily of baked goods and unsolicited parenting advice, Graham contributing practical assistance in the form of electrical repairs and the quiet, steady presence that Isla had valued since childhood without always recognising its importance.

Her first independent documentary project, commissioned by the South Australian Film Corporation in 2022, examined the environmental rehabilitation of former mine sites across the state — a subject whose relevance to her Broken Hill experience was obvious but whose treatment required the broader perspective that distance provided. The film, completed in 2023, screened at regional festivals and earned modest critical recognition, but its greater significance lay in establishing Isla's professional identity beyond the Sentinel's institutional framework. She was no longer a newspaper camera operator who aspired to documentary work; she was a documentary filmmaker whose regional journalism background informed her visual practice.

The news of Ellen Pascoe's death on 5th April 2024 struck with the particular force that accompanies loss of someone whose daily presence one had ceased to register until its permanent absence made the previous taking-for-granted seem criminal. Isla attended the memorial service at the Broken Hill Civic Centre on 12th April, sitting with former colleagues whose grief she shared. She photographed nothing that day, understanding that some moments demanded presence rather than documentation.

Isla continued to collaborate with media outlets and organisations whose interests aligned with her own, producing visual content for environmental campaigns, Indigenous land management projects, and regional arts initiatives. Her relationship with Liam evolved into the cautious friendship that separated parents sometimes achieve when sufficient time has elapsed for resentment to dissolve into shared concern for their daughter's welfare. Matilda, who spent school holidays on the station near Wilcannia learning to ride horses and identify bird calls with the same focused attention her mother had once applied to learning camera settings, provided the bridge between her parents' different worlds that neither had anticipated but both were grateful for.

Scott, whose career as an electrical contractor in Nowra had followed their father's trade with the inevitability that sometimes accompanies eldest sons' relationship to paternal example, maintained the familial connection that geographic dispersal threatened to attenuate. His own children — two boys whose energy levels Patricia described, with characteristic understatement, as "lively" — provided Matilda with cousins whose company she demanded with increasing insistence, and the annual gatherings at Nowra that Graham organised with the meticulous planning he had once applied to wiring diagrams became occasions whose importance exceeded their modest scale.

Isla's documentary work continued to find audiences whose appreciation, if not vast, was genuine. Matilda was growing into a child whose curiosity about the world — visual, tactile, relentlessly inquisitive — reminded Isla of herself at the same age, though Matilda's environment was urban where Isla's had been coastal, and the camera she was learning to use was digital where Isla's first had been mechanical. The Canon AE-1 that Graham had given her for her twelfth birthday sat on a shelf in the Prospect flat, its film advance mechanism seized and its light meter long since expired, but its presence served a purpose that functionality could not encompass: it was evidence that seeing clearly had always been the point, regardless of the technology employed or the distance travelled in pursuit of subjects worth the effort.