I am not quite sure what is behind my current obsession with boundary lines and the handwriting of culture called 'fence'. In 2005 I travelled the length of the Victorian/South Australian border fence to try and knock this obsession on the head. I set up camp in an area of ground which because of old surveyors ‘ inaccuracies belonged to no-one - no state or territory. A lost no-mans land and there I felt a strange sense of release. Just the place I thought to break free from previous states of being - to make some creative leaps, or even start a new art movement. I began a series of drawings in which I played with the idea of FENCE and GATE.One of the paintings I did there utilised the large many historied sheet of paper from Sunset tank which I have been describing. I attached three more sheets of paper below it, and drew an old gate known as Camel Gate. It was possibly originally erected by John Shaw Nielsen the poet who with his father nearly died building this section of the border fence. Perhaps it was his lingering spirit....but something strange happened when I added this gate to the bottom of the painting.

Over a period of a week my axis of vision subtly changed and revealed new dimensions about the landscape through this opening in the fence. It was almost as if by having a conventional construct like an old farm gate I was able to enter through it and find a poetic
dwelling new to me in that mysterious stretch of Mallee ground. I don’t know whether I have succeeded in embodying this experience in the final painting. I think I've fixed or pinned down something - perhaps ironically when I fenced it all in. I have described earlier how the workings of the watercolour medium seem to mimic the dynamic of living Mallee ecosystems. I found that when I moved my linear fence constructs into this field of action - pinned it down and fenced it in - then the painting really did start to look and feel like it was an actual landscape. And the imposition of a kind of linear thinking - the enclosing stitches of fence suggested that as with the organic evolution of the land surface, I was again subjecting the picture plane to a further process - that radical alteration to wilderness which comes when it is fenced and enclosed. Sometimes as I start to dig my fence posts in - as the straight lines move across the page - I feel
that I am atavistically replaying that moment when some ancestor first fenced in the corn or herds of animals. When I dig those posts in it is almost as if I am impaling a hidden nerve. A nerve or conduit which leads back to that critical change when nomad became pastoralist and the direction of the world changed.