In 2016, Steve and Beccie Soetekouw sold their farm on Tasmania, bought a 43ft yacht and, with no boating experience, set off to sail around the world with their 10 children. Photographer Alex Vaughan took this picture – a winner at this year’s OpenWalls Arles awards – off Chinamans Beach in Sydney in 2018, where the family’s boat was moored. The Soetekouws had by then been two years at sea and were celebrating the arrival of a baby girl, Squeak, who was three days old.
Vaughan had heard about the family from a friend and rowed out to see them, ending up talking for a couple of hours to Beccie, “while all the kids patiently listened, chiming in occasionally with thoughtful comments and questions, the little ones climbing over the big ones. No devices, no distractions - I had never seen kids as calm and engaged for that period of time.” Vaughan ended up documenting their life on the water over 12 months.
For Vaughan, the family came to represent the possibility of different ways of being in the world. The original motivation for the voyage was the familiar one – too much work, too little time together – taken to something of an extreme. The Soetekouws’ experience, Vaughan suggests, showed that “maybe the dream life of large mortgages and the continual and obsessive acquisition of things could be traded for a less traditional lifestyle that puts time with family and in nature at the forefront of existence”.
Beccie has taken on most of the responsibility of home-schooling the children while at sea. A year after this picture was taken, tragedy struck the family when their three-year-old daughter, Zeinobiyah, fell from the boat and drowned while they were at anchor in the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney. Though heartbroken, the Soetekouws have not abandoned their nomadic life; in February this year, on their Facebook page Our Round the World Adventure, Steve announced to their many followers the birth of a baby girl.
The winners of OpenWalls Arles 2020 will be on show at Galerie Huit, Arles from 26 June to 5 September
