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It was very, very hot to an non acclimatised pom arriving in Sydney in the summer of 1974, there was little air con then and I used to dream of the cool, clear waters of the Misbourne. Rivers in Australia are different, I went to an evening course at Sydney Uni about the river systems in 1976, wanting to understand this eco system in my new home. I've never forgotten what I learnt about the completeness of what happens in the water itself, but there was no mention of the red bellied black snakes that I later lived along side and that always live beside fresh water.
When it came to Brown's Creek I knew that we were fortunate to have water out in the bush but it really was a dark, snakey place, water twisting round rocks with overhanging trees making sure that the sun light never reached the bottom of the valley. We had no running water for the first year that we lived out there, we lived half way up a steep hill and carried jerry cans from the river up to the shack where we lived. Eventually we worked out that this was pretty stupid, so  we filled the cans in town and carried them half as far.
Plants grew by the minute in that valley, tendrils crept across the windows and up through the floor. It was an old failed farm on three titles, it had been cleared and some of it fenced but it was poor land for European style use. Forty years ago it was scrubby with pockets of rainforest and a few large seed trees with a rough track through it. Today it's a triumph of re-wilding, the trees are huge, everything has grown lush, luxuriant and very dense, the whole place pulsates with life, singing, sliding, flying, gliding, climaxing, in that amazing oasis just two hours from Brisbane.
There were great swimming holes along the river, and being an alternative community in the seventies, we'd all strip off and jump into the cool dark water to be refreshed for a minute in the tropical heat. It was like jumping into ink and was definitely not up to my criteria of being able to see the bottom but it was so hot I even had to paint with no clothes on. The locals used to hide in the bushes and get their thrills from seeing naked hippies, we were brown, hairy and carefree, draping lovely colourful sarongs over ourselves, we must have looked like another species. I certainly felt that I'd arrived in a paradise and that I had to shed contemporary values on beauty, cleanliness and convenience.

more Three Rivers

Of course by the time I was a child the river hadn't been used as a toilet for at least fifty years and the polluted water course had recovered somewhat. In days before there were outdoor dunnies at the bottom of the gardens along the river bank emptying straight out into the water. The ruins of one of these facilities was still in the corner of our garden when we moved in in 1957. The stench must have been awful, no wonder the houses faced the street. Our house has high walls around the garden and a wall at the end to shut out the river and the smell of whatever happened to have been tipped into it.
As the water wasn't fit to drink everyone drank beer, there were three breweries in the town to supply the numerous pubs, coaching inns and thirsty population with liquid that wouldn't make them ill, I suppose that from childhood on everyone just got used to being a bit drunk all the time.
The old, windowless stable over the river with it's two stalls for coach horses and dark upstairs hay loft was damp and full spiders, three hundred years of generations of spiders, they still think it's theirs and I just happen to be a large being amongst them, they live in more comfort these days. My studio above the river is heated and clean these days, but still home to wildlife, bees come and go, on hot days frogs hop in and on autumn nights Glisglis try to eat their way through the facia board to find a winter hideout.
I sleep in great comfort facing downstream, going with the flow and dreaming strange dreams, I used to sleep across the flow of the river, like a bridge but this never felt right.
I went away when I was eighteen and saw many fine and pleasant rivers but the clear chalk streams of the Chilterns are unique, I've never trusted water that I can't see to the bottom of. In the 11th Century church a few miles upriver amongst the old murals is a picture of a salmon. So before the river was tamed with walls and buildings the fish swam up to spawn. It's a long, long way up the Thames Estuary and small tributaries to reach the Chilterns.

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