TURNING THE TIDE

SHELLI BANKIER’S LIFE WAS HANGING BY A THREAD WHEN SHE WAS PLUCKED FROM THE WRECKAGE OF A CAR CRASH 23 YEARS AGO

Life’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. It will not define her. 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, west of Mudgeeraba, where they exchanged vows as a thunderstorm broke overhead, with lightning and a heavy downpour soon followed by the calm that settles after a storm. A beautiful mist swirled through the valley, a fitting portent of the direction her work was taking.

Three weeks ago the couple brought their baby girl, Ballen, into the world after years of trying through IVF.

“I feel so blessed,’’ Shelli said with a sigh during a midday interview this week. It had been set down for midmorning, but a 4.30am message that pinged on the phone announced the need to delay.

“Hi. I’ve been up all night with the baby. Just need to catch some zzzzzzs. Around noon would be great. Hope that works for you too. Thanks,’’ she wrote.

Sure, no worries. Back to sleep. 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 chosen and have 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 just begging for her photographic art.

Silver Light was shot in cyclonic seas at Snapper Rocks.

Years ago, Shelli would have been in the surf or indeed on a board, considering her determination 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 with the help of her brother would learn to surf once more.

She still loves ocean swimming, but life is mellowing.

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

“Silver Light isn’t a perfect barrelling wave. It’s more about form and flow of the ocean within the image.

“I also do a lot of cloud work. It still has a connection with the water. I love that connection and how important it is to life on Earth.’’

When she was plucked from the wreckage of a car involved in a head-on collision on the highway near Coonabarabran, 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, was 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.

“The injuries were really severe. I had to be zapped back to life. They had to pump me full of blood. I’d lost so much,” she says.

She had been in a medically induced coma in intensive care in Sydney for three days before doctors realised there was a lot more going on than the abdominal injuries.

Her back was broken.

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 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.

But in the darkest days when she just wanted to give up and lie under the covers, her mother would be there to coax her, setting seemingly small goals for the day – maybe five steps across her room in the granny walker – which for a spinal patient is like a trek to the end of the earth.

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 and who did the

same, 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.

Leg function returned gradually to Shelli’s right leg, but not fully to her left leg.

She graduated from the walker to crutches, then a single crutch, a walking stick and eventually, around the age of 20, she was walking unassisted – although Shelli admits she would still fall over occasionally.

It took seven years for her to be able to stand up on a surfboard again.

She came to the Gold Coast to live at age 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 the surf, surfers, beaches, headlands and the moods of the ocean and atmosphere.

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. Freezeframing it, I guess.’’

Bluesphere was the culmination – to that point – of 10 years of photography.

“There’s a connection to the whole planet,’’ Shelli said at the time.

“One wave can be generated by a storm in the middle of the Pacific and travel as a line of energy all the way to break and finish its journey right where you are.’’

There was an atmosphere to the book – the images, the artwork and the lines of poetry she penned to go with it – that bordered on the mystical. It is still there in her work.

Captions were not used and beaches and headlands were not identified, but every photo told a story and if asked, Shelli had an anecdote for each image.

One image, in black and white, was of a surfer and dolphin sharing a wave at Cabarita.

“The dolphins are often hanging around there,’’ she says.

“They were milling around in the waves (that day) and a guy caught the wave and this dolphin surfed all the way in with him.

“Everyone on the headland put their hands up and cheered and clapped. He came off his board with his hands in the air.

“Sometimes you’re there for these moments that happen like magic.

“That’s a great visual of the connection between us and the natural planet we shouldn’t forget.’’

Her love affair with the ocean began as a small child when her parents, who then lived on a farm near the small coastal town of Knysna in South Africa, decided to build a boat, sell up and set sail to see the world. It was a long-held dream, hastened by their opposition to apartheid.

Her dad was an engineer who had worked in Western Australia during the 1970s and had Aussie citizenship, so settling in Australia was always the plan.

Neale was a keen surfer and when Shelli was 13 and the family was set up in Brisbane he would take them to the Gold Coast, where the kids learnt how to surf.

She laughs at the memories and reflects on how her father taught them about family, surfing, the ocean and also photography, letting her take all the stills as a child while he shot lots of video.

Shelli has undergone many operations since the highway accident. The last one was four years ago to replace a disintegrating disc in her lower spine.

That surgery has improved function in her left leg and foot, but has not relieved the nerve pain.

“Because I spent so long trying to beat the pain and overcome it, now I feel it is really important to talk about it,’’ she says.

“I did worry how people would think and feel.

“In some jobs, the bosses were not impressed and eased me out the door.

“I put this image out there of being strong and overcoming it, but every day I was dealing with severe nerve pain.

“I saw it as the enemy for so long, but I’ve learnt to deal with it and not be afraid to live with it.’’

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 little daughter.

“The future is not searching outside yourself, it’s settling in to the stillness of the rhythm of life, the love and connection.

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