Ideas always seem to come around whenever someone is bored. Boredom is probably one of the main reasons why I do a lot of what I do. This is no exception. Most people understand the concept of a treasure hunt; you’re given a list of things or objects to collect and bring back evidence before anyone else does. I’m sure there are other terms and times where other people have done something similar, but I’m doing this for the first time. I went on a picture treasure hunt. A Picasure Hunt (I dunno, it sounded pretty good at the time) of epic proportions. Honestly, I had too much fun. Probably more than one should in regards to something like this. I did realise with this though, that I am horrible with a shitty camera. I hate point and shoot cameras, I don’t know what the pictures are going to look like, so you’ll have to excuse some of the blurry ones. Let’s begin!

This was an idea brought up by Taryn in the middle of the week. I think it started somewhere along the lines of me taking a picture of the grass to remind her what Darwin grass looks like. What ended up evolving into a list that I had to go and take pictures of. The list:

1. A peg.
2. Bubble Wrap.
3. A Spatula.
4. A Band Shirt.
5. A street sign.
6. Something painted blue.
7. A mailbox with the number 14 on it.
8. Alcohol.
9. A red car with a 7 and a 2 on their numberplate.
10. Your mother (she has to be holding a sign saying “Taryn is the coolest yo!”).
11. A school.
12. Nail Polish.
13. A sprinkler.
14. A hammer.
15. A credit card not belonging to you.
16. Both an analogue and a digital clock in the same picture.
17. A photo of you with a photo of you.
18. 5 different thongs (the shoe not the undergarment.)
19. A beanbag.
20. A dvd starring Gregory Peck.
21. A treadmill.
22. Bare female human breasts.

Fortunately for me, almost everything on that list was attainable. The only thing I thought I was going to have trouble with was the band shirt and the bare female human breasts. I know I have a couple of pictures involving the latter, but I didn’t want to have to resort to that. I spoke to Taryn and got the list saturday and begun my mission. Quickly scanning the list I knew which ones I was going to get straight away. And so I begun with getting a street sign. The first one that come to my head was Cockburn. Simple as that, no other street sign was going to suffice, and I had to get it. I grabbed my laptop, camera, and my list and headed out. To begin with, I started out war driving with my laptop attempting to pick up random open wireless networks (as one does saturday night.) I left home around 9:30 and went around Leayner trying to remember where Cockburn was. After randomly stopping, parking and connecting to someone’s wireless I found what I was looking for. Cockburn. Click! It felt weird stopping and taking a picture just out the front of someone’s house, with the flash on, it felt like they knew I was there. It was incredibly creepy. Like, you know how you read about people watching other people, that’s what I felt like with my camera. Continuing on!

I drove around to Fannie Bay doing some more war driving but looking for a car with a seven and two in the number plate. I stopped out the front of some units thinking I had found an open network but instead I look to my left in the carparks and I see what I’m looking for! A red ute with the numbers seven and two! Brilliant. I jump out and I instantly feel creepy. I was going to be doing more than just quickly snapping someone’s car, but instead walking into their garden type thing (which was in plain view of everyone who lived there) and taking a picture. Fuck that idea. Just a quickly as I got out, I was back in my car again. My next port of call? Cullen Bay.

I headed down to the carpark near the bottom of Cullen Bay (which incidently was right next to a whole buttload of units) in an effort to try and get someone’s internet. I parked up and holy shit, what’s that right next to me? Red car? Check. Seven and two in the number plate? Check. Woohoo! One quick photo and I was out of there. In the span of 20 minutes I had only accomplished 2 photos. I need to pick it up! Not 5 minutes after I had driven out of Cullen Bay I turned into Mitchell Street and what do I find here. It’s a chair, and it’s painted blue. Awesome. Another quick photo and I was back on my way. I was actually kind of hesitant about getting out and taking a picture here. Other times I got out of my car and left the thing running, but I wasn’t too sure this time. I mean, Darwin is by far from being a ghetto, but it looked kind of unsavory at night.

It wasn’t too long before I had a brilliant idea of how I was going to be getting a photo of alcohol. Only 2 minutes down the street was a bottle-o, a drive-thru no less, but it was a bottle-o. By then it was around 9:45 and they would have been closing in 15 minutes, I needed to be snappy. I parked up down some sidestreet and wandered over. On my way past though was this huge block of units. What’s generally associated with a huge block of units? Letterboxes! One quick shot later and I continued my way to the bottle-o. Mind you, I wasn’t dressed for any occasion as I wasn’t expecting to any type of human lifeform. In I stroll, straight into the bottle-o and asked the guy behind the counter whether it was alright that I took a picture of alcohol. He could not have given me any more of a look that didn’t say “what the fuck are you going on about.” After a few seconds of him just being blank, he said it was alright and I found the closest bottle of alcohol (vodka, awesome.) No quicker was I in there, but I was out just as fast. I think I kind of scared the people at the bottle-o though, because I think I looked like the biggest gin ever. I was quite surprise they didn’t ask for any type of ID, but I digress. I returned home not long after feeling conceited and went looking for sleep.

Sunday arrived and I woke up feeling victorious! No, not really, I woke up without any kind of clue what was going on. After slowly waking up I decided to plan my attack strategy. It was kind of random to be honest. I managed to get taking a picture of my mum holding a sign, and I printed out a picture of me and took a photo of me holding me. Oh, and I can’t forget the picture of the analogue clock with the digital clock. I got “dressed” and headed to Kmart to drop off a DVD for Matt and to start taking random pictures. I was kind of worried about what people would do if I took pictures while they were around. I mean, I definitely wasn’t being inconspicuous about the whole deal, and I wasn’t well hidden either (face it, a tall pale white guy with red hair and a red beard doesn’t blend in very well.) But I got a picture of a treadmill and a wall of thongs! You may say it’s cheating, but there are at least 5 different types of thongs there. At least! There may be a hundred of the same thing, but there are 5 different ones none the less.

I got bubble wrap, a spatula (sorry about the horrendous quality), nail polish and a bean bag (it doesn’t say a full bean bag now does it!) What was funny about the nail polish was that when I wandered into the cosmetic section of the store, there was some woman standing around looking at the perfume. Next thing she knew, I come waltzing it and start taking photos willy-nilly. She had an awesome look on her too. Now. I got a peg. No where does it say a clothes peg, so I can only assume any kind of peg is accepted. And I did just that, a bike peg. It was rather odd walking into Big-W looking around. I was originally just going to find one clothes peg and take a picture of that, but I wandered past the bike section and the idea instantly popped into my head. What better way to circumvent the “rules” by a little word play.

If anyone is keeping count so far (and if I’ve counted correctly) I now have 15 items on the list. Only 7 more left! The next item I planned on getting was a DVD starring Gregory Peck. Who the FUCK is Gregory Peck? I had to IMDb the poor bastards name to find out who he was. Apparently he starred in the original The Omen, and also Moby Dick. Good lord. Good luck trying to find either of those in Darwin easily. I headed over to Easy DVD and tried my luck there, but was only let down. My next pit stop was going to be JB Hifi. As my luck would have it, a box set of the movie! Including the original. Awesome. Afterwards, I was about to head home when I ran into Boyd again and I mentioned having to look for a band shirt and he suggested Drunken Goat. Never thought of looking in there, so we wandered along and I remembered I still needed to get someone else’s credit card! Boom! Click. Boyd has a credit card with his thumb on it! Stopping just before the Drunken Goat though, there was the 50c & rap-gang-related crap store. Normally when I think of band shirt I would have gotten some random metal band, what better to change things up and get a picture of G-Unit. I did just that! G-U-U-U-U-Unit!

After finally leaving casuarina, I went on a prowl looking for one of those huge sprinklers they used to have way back when I was in primary school. Instead I come across a school. What a fitting picture, it’s my old high school. Click. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the huge sprinklers and headed home set on finding some kind of sprinkler at home. Where would most people put a sprinkler? Near the hose? On the grass still? Nope. Ours was sitting on our gas bottle out the back. Brilliant. I quickly find a hammer and head upstairs to assess the damage I had done during the day. Let me check my list. Yup, everything bar the bare human female breasts. I sat in front of my computer wondering what the hell I could do about that one. I didn’t want to wait until some kind of bare-your-brest competition out in town. No. I had to do something more ingenious than that. I have a giant monitor sitting in front of me. I have a hard drive of porn somewhere. Let’s combine the two.

There you have it. I have completed my set task. I AM VICTORIOUS! As I said earlier, it was surprisingly fun. Seriously. I’ve put up all of the pictures I took, and they are at my gallery. Click for some higher resolution pictures. I’m considering setting up something similar to this, but where people actually comment and ask for certain things (trying to not make them things like someone’s vagina or breasts.) Things that you could considering something out of the ordinary, or something that would be easy to photograph, but incredibly hard to work out where to find it. I’m open to anything. Let me know.