Three Rivers

The three rivers are the Misbourne, Brown's Creek and the Never Never River, rivers that I've lived alongside, crossed, recrossed, swum in, fished in and, in the case of the Misbourne, lived on top of. Only the Never Never is a proper river, so called because it never dries up, running straight down a thousand meters from the Great Dividing Range into the Bellinger River and then into the Pacific Ocean. It's a short potent river, not only because of it's name.
The name says everything about Brown's Creek, the water is muddy, turbid, ordinary, an unreliable water source of small stagnant pools in hot weather, a roaring beast in the wet season. The creek runs through a narrow valley in South East Queensland to flow into the Maroochy River which meanders across a small soggy plain before running into the Pacific.
A bourn denotes a small stream of water that runs sometimes and the Misbourne is certainly true to that, some years there is a dry river bed, dead fish, rusty cans and other years a very low water table devoid of oxygen. In the winter of 2013/14 it surprised everyone by going rogue, it burst it's banks to follow it's own course, rampaging through gardens and outbuildings. It seemed like a war of logs smashing into each other was going on underneath my studio, where the river runs, a dark space previously home to some sluggish crayfish and a few trout that never seemed to grow big enough to eat.
My brother and I grew up beside the Misbourne, we were considered fortunate kids because we had access to the stream to build dams, to swim and float on lilos on glorious summer days, to fish for trout on cloudy days. It's a clear chalk stream that you can watch for hours to see creatures moving about. Fifty years ago there were large grey water rats living in the banks beside where we sloshed about, nobody had heard of the waterborne diseases that terrify people now.
There were leeches that we used to put in jam jars beside the house and watch as they made their way back to the river, one body stretch at a time. We caught minnows and newts and tadpoles in nets, there were many things alive in the water to interest a child fifty years ago.     (cont. later)

Interior Landscape

Interior Landscape is a wood block in oils with pastel layered on top, the wood for the print came from an old stable where I live in the UK. It's a desert scene in the middle of Australia where I go in my imagination, dreaming of the dry heat and noise of insects, the isolation and connection to everything.

Interior Landsacpe

Woodblock with oil and pastel on paper    March 2014

Journey to Australia with Marquez

When I left England on a one way ticket to Sydney in September 1974 I had amongst my baggage a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez to read on the plane. It seemed an appropriate choice of reading considering what I was leaving behind, it was rumoured to be a strange and unusual book written by a Colombiano who's native country was the source of a product I was very interested in and had been consuming at a furious rate for a couple of years, I don't mean coffee.
I travelled on one of the first 747s, a virtual bus trip, stopping everywhere picking people up, so you'd be sitting next to somebody for a few hours and then another person would get on, another conversation, another story, you could smoke on the planes then and you paid for your drinks, a bar in the sky. I was deranged, sad, paranoid and scared, beyond caring about a lot of important things,  a twenty two year old with a habit and a book for a talisman, bolting for a new life in Australia where I knew there was no connection to any product, except coffee, from South America.
The book was exotic and profound, it seemed to express what was in my mind, what I had experienced, everything that was unsaid, and a lot is unsaid in England, it was comfortingly chaotic and unpredictable, it was magical.
When I arrived in Sydney with my chest ray, shocked by the space and sunshine and freedom from Englishness I went for job interviews and met the person I would spend the next nine and a half  years with. The major connection for me was that he'd just read the book too, he knew and understood, it was maybe a small bond in a big space but it kept me anchored in the mysterious for a few years, enabled me to start painting again.

Forest dream - recently hung work

Some Australian landscapes now at the Gallery

Ironbark at Jowalbinna

 

 Cabbage Tree Palm, Sydney

July 6th 2013

There were no souvenirs the last time The Rolling Stones played Hyde Park, just our memories of that sunny summer afternoon forty four years ago - Mick wearing a white dress, the excitement of being out in the open with others also rejecting the old authority, white butterflies, flamboyantly, extravagantly dressed people, seeing our soundtrack live at the centre of the Empire - the counter culture at play.
I came up from the suburbs as a seventeen year old schoolgirl, jumped a train to see The Great Rock Band, who after the death of Brian Jones were playing to confirm the life force.
I was one of a quarter of a million people floating under the trees that day, the odd one out in my milieu, here I was home safe. There were no fences, barricades or merchandising, security was only to protect the band. We talked to strangers, we smoked some weed, we knew the lyrics but were far too cool to sing them out loud even though they were anthems already.
I don't remember the play list just that it was a life changing day, one of the best, most spontaneous days that London has ever produced. I went away feeling that I'd been initiated into something very large, a tribe, a life underground.
My partner of the last twelve years, Eddie Mosdell, was there on that day in 1969, we didn't know each other then even though we lived a few miles apart, so July 6th was a big memory day for both of us.
A lot of time passed, the concert in the park became a distant memory, in 2013 the barricades were up, security wore black, we were searched, there was no shade and it was ferociously hot, the sponsors had some truly awful advertising and directionless performance artists wandering about.
But we'd come to see The Stones and none of it mattered when they fired up, some of their best work was written in the intervening forty four years, they'd moved into much deeper territory and they played it all, it was heartfelt, it was a thread through a lot of lives.
"Wind me up and I'll never stop, never stop" was what he sang and that's what he did - he danced, he pranced, he sang, he gave us the life force rock and roll style for two hours. The show never flagged, their performances were seamlessly fluid, the lyrics were resonant, they gave us a piece of themselves and they were joyful doing it, different to the moody posing of their earlier style.
Paint it Black was deeply, purple black and menacing, lyrics from another century when information was what you heard on the street. The long version of Midnight Rambler was goose flesh erotic and felt like entering a trance state with the band, Satisfaction and Brown Sugar were nearly as good. There were many musical allusions layered on top of each other, Eastern, Gypsy, American South, all rolled into London.
The overriding memory of those hours was the driving force of the lyrics, of just how much of an enigma the individual band members and their relationship with each other are. Mick has said that he could have done something else with his life, that you don't need to be intelligent to be a rock star.
I disagree, the power of an intelligent band performing music with multi layered inflections and timeless lyrics, played for several generations to go wild over is a great gift to have, and to give.
The day made me feel young again, a big shot of the life force, they deserved the glory
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