By the end of the last century most of the Mallee area of N. W. Victoria had been divided on government maps into selector's plots. There seems little connection with these straight linear boundaries and this sea of moving sandhills and unruly scrub. I have found remnants of fences far into the Big Desert Wilderness, forgotten fragments of wire and post which have become emblematic of the failed project to impose inappropriate European farming methods on unwilling ground.

The degree to which this linear construct – the fence - remains on the surface of the ground; or has melted to become one with the vital organic processes of the living desert has been the subject of many of my drawings. As I followed it for miles and miles, one particular fence became for me a kind of story about our relationship with the earth. Sometimes the fence still almost acted as a boundary or barrier between one area and another. Further on there would only be minimal lengths of wire lying on the sand like the forgotten underlining to a text which had moved away.

Or was this fence one long poem? This idea fitted well with the presence of someone who once lived in this country. John Shaw Neilsen, possibly Australia greatest lyric poet, spent his life in and around the Mallee as an itinerant labourer, farmer and fence-maker. He could even have constructed this fence. And his poetry, like the fence, often hinted at a tension between the wilder flows of nature and the confinement of cultural boundaries.

	The poet's fence I Watercolour and carbonised wood on paper. 123.0 x 300.0
	Mallee Fence 1 Callitris and Casuarina Watercolour pencil, carbonised wood on paper. 56.5 x 151.5
	Mallee Fence 3, fire and ash sand and salt Watercolour and carbonised wood on paper 56 x 228