Collection

  For the last two years - and in full swing now - I have been working on projects about what they used to call the Big Scrub.  Outside my studio door north of Bendigo the Mallee  marches for many hundreds of kilometres away West to beyond the South Australia Border.  I have been exploring the pockets of Green, Blue and Red Mallee - and the whole region called 'the Mallee'.  I think it is a fabulous kind of country and yet since the great  aboriginal tribes were pushed out by the new settlers it has not been 'fabled' much at all.   That is to say apart from a handful of poets and painters it is quite uncanny how it has been ignored and in fact regarded as flat, uninteresting and even hostile.  My project has been to understand why.  And in the course of drawing it I have discovered pockets of forests and heathland with an astonishing variety of endemic plant species, the greatest concentration  of song bird species in all Australia,  and some of the most degraded and unnsustainably farmed areas in the world.
 
 
This project is taking about five different forms.  All of which radiate out from key Mallee concepts.  Radiate in a particular Mallee way which finds its exemplar in  the familiar almost iconic shape of the Mallee root itself - The lignotuber from which the multi-stemmed Mallee foliage bursts  out.  These often voluminous semi-subterranean woody reservoirs are part of  a brilliant strategy for storing water through drought, fire and even climate change. The hidden dark aquifers are the secret source of those seas of branches and leaves which glitter over the surface of the sandhills.
 
 
I returned in October 2006 to just such a landscape - to the Murray Sunset country - but instead of glittering leaves I found the effects of extensive bush fires.   The  branches of burnt Mallee stems formed  a black calligraphy on the pure white sand which stretched from where I stood  for a hundred miles.