I laid out some 1.5 metre x 3 metre lengths of Waterford paper on a sand bank in that vast area of Northern Victoria known as the Murray Sunset Country and I started painting in a rather wild and haptic way - pouring, brushing , sploshing quantities of watercolour which I had previously mixed up in large bowls. On that hot November morning I created my own personal deluge on those sheets of paper - as if responding to the drought-stricken yearnings of all that country around me.

My pools and runnels and washes of colour created their own waterscape on the gently undulating sheets of paper. Pools in depressions, conforming to the dimples in the sand below , overflowed in slow winding rivulets; and became analogues of what hydrologists call a 'chain of ponds systems.' On the paper there appeared a re-enactment of the way surface water on the land paints and carves and moulds its own complex geographies. How it alternates times of flow, times of rest, as it creates and maintains the creek beds and ephemeral swamps on these white sand plains.