LIFE AND ART

AN ACCIDENT THAT ALMOST PUT HER IN A WHEELCHAIR TURNED THE TIDE FOR GOLD COAST FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHER SHELLI BANKIER, WRITES JOHN AFFLECK

L ife’s good for Shelli Bankier. Except for the pain, of course – the lifelong legacy of a car crash that killed her father and broke her back when she was 16. But she has learned to live with it. Now aged 39, she understands that instead of fighting it, she should listen to what it is telling her.

Two years ago she married her partner, Taya, in a rainforest ceremony at Austinville.

Three weeks ago the couple brought their baby girl, Ballen, into the world after years of trying through IVF. “I feel so blessed,’’ Shelli sighed during a midday interview this week.

Shelli’s passion for the ocean, which pushed her into surf photography, has morphed in recent years into what she describes as “fine art’’, producing ethereal works in black, white, shades of grey and silver that caught the attention of the producers of home renovation show House Rules.

Two of her works were featured on the show on Seven in the past few weeks, which is a big plus for a photographic artist who candidly admits her career goes nowhere near putting bread on the table.

Maybe that will change, since much interest has been shown after those works, titled Atmospheric and Silver Light, were presented on reno walls. Silver Light was shot in cyclonic seas at Snapper Rocks.

Years ago, Shelli would have been in the surf or indeed on a board, having been determined as a teen lying in a spinal ward that not only would she one day rise up and walk again, proving wrong the doctors who said she would forever be in a wheelchair, but would learn to surf once more.

She still loves ocean swimming, but life is mellowing.

“My work has transformed a little bit. I used to shoot beautiful empty waves. Now it’s more about abstract work and seascapes.”

When she was plucked from the wreckage of a car involved in a head-on collision on the highway near Coonabarabran in NSW 23 years ago this September, Shelli’s life was hanging by a thread.

She had suffered dreadful abdominal injuries and, as doctors would realise much later, her back was broken. She remembers nothing of the accident, although she has been told she was conscious for a time in the back seat, where she had been lying down with the belt around her waist as her parents, Neale and Jenny Bankier, drove south from their home in Brisbane for a holiday in the snowfields. Her little brother Colin had been following in a car with friends.

Her father died in the crash. Her mother suffered minor injuries. Colin had to witness the aftermath. Shelli “died’’ but was brought back with a defibrillator.

When she awoke after about three weeks she was paralysed from the waist down.

She spent a month in intensive care in Sydney before being flown to Brisbane where she spent a little over a month in Royal Brisbane Hospital and then a similar amount of time in the spinal care unit at Princess Alexandra.

Her spinal cord had not been severed, but had suffered massive injuries nevertheless and doctors told her she would not walk again.

“With the best of intentions they wanted me to learn how to live in a wheelchair. Instead I spent that time trying to walk with the parallel bars,’’ she says.

When she left hospital her life focused on rehabilitation. She was determined. So were her mother and brother.

Shelli’s story became one of love – a brother who would put her surfboard in the pool and help her on to it, just so she could get the feel of paddling about; a mother who would not give up on her, carrying her across the beach one day when the surf was flat and helping her on to her board so that she could paddle about in the sea she loved. It took seven years for her to be able to stand up on a surfboard again.

She moved to the Gold Coast at 19 and enrolled at Griffith University in an arts degree, majoring in marine biology. But instead of swimming with whales and dolphins, she found herself bogged down in heavy science and maths. Then fate dealt a fortuitous hand. She found a book by American photographer Jeff Devine, decided she wanted to resurrect the interest her father had nurtured in her as a child, quit uni, bought some second-hand equipment and went out to start photographing surfers and the moods of the ocean.

Soon after publishing a book of her work titled Bluesphere in 2014, Shelli said: “Each and every wave is unique. It’s like capturing a moment that will never be again.’’

Shelli has undergone many operations since the highway accident. “I put this image out there of being strong and overcoming it, but every day I was dealing with severe nerve pain.”

That means not sitting for too long in front of a screen and limiting the time on a photo shoot.

And for Shelli and Taya now, there is a huge reason in that tiny bundle in the cot for getting the work-life balancing act right.

“Awesome seems too small a word,’’ Shelli says of their daughter.

“It’s a life-changing thing. I’m sure every parent feels that.’’