One thing that can be said about our Australian bush is that it is almost never tidy and I like my paintings to reflect this messiness. So I am inclined to steer clear of nice neat scenes. I would be happy if people could smell the eucalyptus and feel the hot hot sun when they look at my paintings. I want my birds to look alive, as if, a second later they might fly away - which is usually precisely what happens (in real life - not in the painting)! With my effort to post phot

A flutter of tree martins landing on ashes left in an abandoned campsite, was the inspiration for this painting. (I wrote a blog post about this strange behavioural characteristic of tree martins, that you can find here). We spent three nights at the Junction Pools camp-ground in Barrington Tops National Park during a week away in November 2015. (You can find my gallery of photos from this trip, here.) The road in to the camp-ground was simply awful, taking an hour to travel