Author: James Vodicka, Pallion Point co-owner
For anyone who's been following Pallion Point for a while, you'll know this is a campaign close to our hearts: our love letter to the very specific, very Australian version of Christmas we grew up with. Not snow and roast dinners, but bare feet on hot timber decks, prawns on ice, and the back door swinging open and closed all afternoon as people wander between the beach (or pool) and the table. We knew we couldn't just slap together a shoot that replicated that unmistakeable feeling of an Aussie Christmas - we would need one that actually lived it.
Before Pallion Point, Ashleigh and I spent years travelling around Australia as professional photographers, shooting resorts, islands, sailing trips and campaigns in some genuinely stunning locations. So on paper, running a multi-day campaign shoot - with models, styling, props, shot lists, mood boards - should have felt like familiar territory.
It didn't, entirely. This time the brand was ours, and shooting a luxury villa looking divine after a team of housekeepers gave it their special treatment could not have felt further from what we were shooting - a Christmas tree covered in prawnaments, kids running past with presents, and a Christmas table exquisitely setup in the background.... when all of this didn't exist before we arrived. Oh, and Ashleigh was 30 weeks pregnant, which meant the sunrise-to-sunset shoot days of our old life were very much off the table. Add a two-year-old into the mix, and we were in a whole new world.
The job fell mostly to me to pull the moving parts into place: finding a beach house that actually felt like an Australian summer holiday rather than looking like one, casting a local family and a couple who'd be genuinely fun and easy in front of a camera, writing wardrobe and styling notes so everyone arrived in the right outfit, building out shot lists and mood boards, sourcing the props that would do the real work of making this feel unmistakably us, and building a schedule realistic enough to survive a toddler + his pregnant mum + overwhelmed dad, all while making sure we walked away with enough content to launch new products across social, email, the website and ads. There was a bit to do, and I haven't even taken a camera out yet.
Ashleigh's superpower has always been turning a feeling into something you can see on camera, and this shoot leaned on that hard. She enlisted her great aunt to source and hand-sew custom tablecloths and napkins so the Christmas table felt like it belonged to a real Australian family, not something crafted by a magazine prop stylist. She styled the tree so the Prawnaments - our prawn Christmas ornaments, and one of the two hero products of this whole campaign - looked like they belonged there, rather than being placed for a camera. And she made a full pavlova from scratch, piled with berries and cream, for what would be (at most) 3 seconds of footage and maybe a couple of photos.
I'll admit - loading a finished pavlova into the back of an already over-packed family SUV for a multi-hour drive north felt like a genuinely over-the-top thing to do at the time. But when it came out of the fridge mid-shoot to be decorated and shown off, I knew instantly it was going to be one of those shots - the small, almost throwaway details that end up doing more to sell the authenticity of the whole campaign than any of the obvious major details.
When I began planning this shoot, or actually even a long time before that, we knew Bowen would be the perfect Whitsundays town for a Pallion Point summer campaign. It's a quiet, slightly sleepy beach town of old weatherboard houses, scenic bays and an authentic small-town Australian feel that is actually pretty hard to find these days. It's exactly the kind of place where you can leave a decorated Christmas tree setup on the front verandah over a few days in July, and half the town will know about it by the time you pack it up.
The house itself did a lot of heavy lifting: a pale blue-and-white weatherboard beach house, wraparound verandahs, louvred windows, palm trees and grassed lawns that lead onto sand dunes, and water close enough that the kids could be knee-deep with buckets and fishing rods within minutes of waking up. It's the kind of house that looks like it's been in a family for three generations, which is exactly the feeling Fishmas is built on.
The props are potentially the part I'm most proud of, honestly. Anyone can put a Christmas tree in a beach house and call it a campaign. The difference is in the details you don't strictly need but include anyway. The Prawnaments went on our real family Christmas tree, dressed with gold baubles, white florals and fairy lights all from Ashleigh's mum's Christmas box - which is the only way for it to feel collected over years rather than art-directed in an afternoon. Our new Fishmas Hats, 100% cotton Santa hats with embroidered fish on the front, were worn by everyone, everywhere. On the beach, mid-tree-decorating, holding presents, hanging skewiff off our two-year-old's head because that's simply how two-year-olds wear hats. We wanted them to look like a family's well-loved, slightly daggy Christmas tradition, not a product shot.
Even the smaller touches mattered. A linen Pallion Point pennant hand-painted by our graphic designer, an old timber oar repurposed as a hook rail, a retired life ring we brought in from the garden, and our wide brim hats and totes hung together in the afternoon light like they'd accumulated there over a decade of summers. None of that was accidental. Every prop in every frame was chosen to answer one question: does this feel natural, or does it feel bought yesterday?
For this campaign, there was no separate photographer, videographer, art director or producer. It was Ashleigh and me, full stop. Casting, styling, directing, shooting and editing every single piece of content ourselves, while also being parents to a two-year-old, who thankfully spent most of the shoot with his grandparents. Add "extremely pregnant" to Ashleigh's job description and you start to understand why we're both a little bit proud and a little bit exhausted looking back on it.
We couldn't have pulled it off without the people who showed up for us - family and friends who flew up from Sydney, drove up the coast, and lent their time, their sewing skills and their patience to a couple of slightly stressed first-time campaign producers. Fishmas, in the end, was made exactly the way it's meant to be spent: surrounded by our favourite people.
However you spend it, around a crowded table, beside the pool, out on the boat, or under the shade of a poinciana tree, we hope your Christmas has bare feet, cold drinks, somewhere to swim, and someone arguing over the rules of backyard cricket. And a healthy dose of Prawnaments and Fishmas Hats thrown in there for that special Pallion point feeling.
Fishmas 2026, coming soon.
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