Reconnecting with nature and community in the inner city.
The tutors told us to bring out paint brushes and nothing else. No easel, no paper. We drove along a dirt road and they told us to get out. It turns out the Woomera-Adelaide water pipeline was going to be our canvas. It was such a fun morning, half way through some of us abandoned brushes and fingerpainted, later I found a tennis ball and Brent and I loaded it up with gouache and took turns throwing it at the pipe. Some of my clothes were the worse for wear afterwards, but it was just a blast.
Woomera use to have 6000 residents, but then in dwindled to 2000 last year and now it is down to about 200. The houses on this site were all pulled down and now all that is left are remnants of driveways and little treasures like this piece of warped leggo hidden in the dirt.
A few early sessions before sunrise, painting by feel rather than sight and lots of dancing into the night at the local pub. How lucky can you get?
The bus rumbles all the way to Woomera 
; in the quiet town centre crows call to one another and a distant dog barks 
. These are the things that linger in my mind, the sounds, and the feel of desert sand through my fingers, cratered rocks and weathered timber.
A photo only captures a fragment of my experience, images only a fraction of my memories.
We journeyed into the South Australian Desert in a mini bus with a hand made trailer bumping along behind us. Despite the fact we were all architecture and landscape students and this was a design studio no architecture was studied and plants were left undocumented. We painted instead, watercolours on rolls of paper, red earth and crushed leaves.
Our first day in Woomera we visited the Detention Centre. A metal cage in the middle of nothing. The buildings were curiously decorated with murals, a speck of colour in all that concrete.
Whilst watching one of our tutors goosing around with the soldiers on guard (one guess who he is in the photo) I heard some ghostly music , a strange howling whistle and a rhythmic ‘clank clank’. On further investigation I discovered the strange music was coming from wind blowing through a hollow metal fence post with holes up the sides and the clanking of chains against a post in the carpark. This made me think about how much of memory is not visual, but auditory. How silent a photograph is. I decided that auditory memory would form part of my final project, a sensorial journey through the desert.
