What were some of the issues that you were having during that particular project?

So council officers missed the VCAT deadline to appeal the development.

The issue is that the government's own standing advisory committee, 8,000 residents and a unanimous Kingston Council, have all rejected these plans.

The biggest issues are flood mitigation.

That's a really big concern.

But what's happening at the moment is that the Labor state government are just steamrolling our local voices.

I have issues.

What do you think a good growth should look like for a community like Kingston?

So why don't we just start with who you are, your background, and what drew you to underwater maternity and the feminine portraiture.

Yeah.

My name's Caroline White.

I'm a photographer, videographer, and artist based out of San Diego, Los Angeles, and Orange County.

A lot of driving all over SoCal.

I've been a professional photographer for 21 years this month.

Wow.

So do you feel like some of the work that you do is about being truly seen, going through that transition, becoming a mother? Do you feel like that's what they're trying to capture sometimes?

So now you shoot, okay, so take us through the things that you do shoot.

So, okay, when I started out, I was an actor in LA and I started just taking other actors' headshots.

So for the first seven years, I was a photographer, I was really just doing mostly actors headshots.

And that was a side business, like I was still acting.

And then when I was about maybe like 30 years old, I was like, you know what, I'm done with acting, let me try photography full time and see how it goes.

And around that time, that also coincided with a burglary where I lost like all my equipment, all my archives, everything.

So it was like a real rebirth, like reevaluation time, like renewal, crazy time in 2011.

So much of it is about educating people.

So share with me and everyone listening how you describe your current leadership context, Caroline.

Well, so I mentioned before, we have face-to-face classes and distance ed.

So we're quite a unique setting.

So we offer distance education programs to students all around New South Wales with a moderate to severe intellectual disability.

We have these wonderful cluster excursions where our staff will go out to regional areas so that we can go and engage with students and so that students can have that sense of belonging and meet students.

some of their classmates in person and we've had some wonderful feedback from a lot of our parents to just say how valuable those excursions are because often a lot of our families are geographically isolated so coming to meet together and meet other families in similar situations is just very, very valuable and it's wonderful.

So a lot of the context is really engaging with the community and building those connections and also asking, you know, a lot of our community, especially our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community, what they want to have at the school for Aboriginal education or what they want to be involved in for NAIDOC weeks.

And in regard to using AI, can you share an example of how, yeah, that's come into play in your role and in your work?

So what was the first gig you had?

That was also the year that I joined B-School, taught by Marie Forleo, and she became a client, and that's how I fell into photographing all these women entrepreneurs for online marketing and coaches.

I took her course, and I n- I don't think I even got through a quarter of the course, and just, I fell into that community at the right time.

But I also had the skills as well.

It was like this just confluence of luck meeting opportunity meeting skill and those lucky moments.

And I actually had photographed Marie's assistant, who was an actor, and she was like, "Oh, Carolyn..." She bought my biggest package at the time, and she was like, "Carolyn, you should really photograph women entrepreneurs." And I was like, "Oh, there's not enough of them.

I've already done, like, 10.

Whoa.