Into the Red

It was only some years after I first set out on a series of extended trips through the desert inland that I came to grasp how profoundly, in the course of those journeys, my ideas about the aims and tasks of art had changed. Before, I would read books with a view to plot, and to the consistency of character; I would search out and judge the themes and currents inside an unfolding story; or, with paintings, it would be their symbols or the clues they held to the life of the artist that most intrigued me, the features that conveyed their intent and their human scale. But that emphasis, in looking and in reading, eventually gave way; I found myself struck, increasingly, by the influence that nature works on art; I concentrated my attention more and more on pattern, rhythm, tone, the things that give force and drive to images and words - and I can date my dawning awareness of this shift inside me with some precision: it came during a long drive I made, at the blazing height of summer, in a wet, stormy season, together with my photographic colleague Johnson Venn. We were in an old white LandCruiser with scalloped tyres; the vehicle was caked in clay and mud from creek crossings; and we were travelling down the exiguous backtrack that runs from Innamincka on the Cooper across flat gibber plains, north-west, before crossing the border and meeting the Birdsville Development Road. It had been a hard, slow ride. We came up to the site of Cordillo Downs: the gaunt stone woolshed of the station loomed, looking distinctly like a Romanesque cathedral's nave. I pulled up. Off to the west, black cloud systems, dropping heavy rain-veils, stretched away. The air was still; the heat haze shimmered; a group of half-dead gums drooped by the roadside.