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?
WOOMERA
We wondered around the town, there sure were a lot of rockets in random places. I think Woomera is particularly proud of their rocket museum 
. Every now and again we’d come upon strange remnants of occupation in what just looks like an empty site od sand and scrub: pegs, toy soldiers, buttons. We heard that there was a bird sanctuary on the outskirts and went exploring. The sanctuary consisted of a large manicured lawn with roses all along the path. Roses in the desert! The birds seemed happy enough, but we felt so sorry for them in their little cages 
. When a flock of wild cockatoos flew overhead the caged birds all screamed. We made friends with one cockatoo in particular. He refused to speak except when we started to leave 
. Poor chook.
The image with the sign warning ‘keep off the grass ‘ is at the Woomera golfcourse. It must be like one giant sand trap.
THE DESERT ECHO
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.