The air is still and dense with sweet clouds of volatilized nectars, and coloured by plumes of ochrey dust. Flakes of bloodwood bark tumble  to the stony soil below, whilst babblers and fledgling butcherbirds rollick around the nearby mulgas.

Spring in Centralia brings a frenzied scurrying of ants and tireless buzzing of bees and wasps that inspires life. It brings fresh, vibrant, radiant sprays of turquoise, mustard, lemon, tangerine, maroon, coral blooms, caked with sticky pollen.

Spring in Centralia brings dusty imprints of dog and emu prints in the damp clay; it brings children laughing and gallahs squabbling, drunk on seeds and nectar like so many larrikins at the local pub; it brings a vast, extensive, inimitably endless blanket of Wahlenbergias, peas, Indgoferas, Malvaceas and Asterales – a rainbow cape on the harsh, red, rocky range of Tjoritja.

Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with me will know too well how passionate I am about anything botanical – especially when it involves a long bushwalk in spring when the flowers are out across sandstone country of the Dharawal Nation.

I also love print-making (albeit I haven’t done a print for a really looooooong time). This year I thought: “right, i’m going to set aside some me time and prepare some plates for printing gifts for Christmas”, drawing upon some of the flowers that I found during my travels along the coast as inspiration. I am highly strung at the best of time, but especially when preparing a plate. For me, It’s not a spontaneous or expressive medium; I spend more time carefully planning out the design of the plate as I do in carving my design – after all, one wrong cut and the whole motif is potentially ruined. I usually nut out a design on cardboard and sketch pads before applying tool to board, but i always lose the good ones or cover them up with too much scribble and mess! I decided to work on some digitally so that I could play with colour and form more freely – and delete any scrappy ones…

Whilst preparing these templates I discovered something lovely: it was the process of coming up with the design itself that was rewarding and expressive, and not necessarily the final carved and printed image. In fact, the templates are the artworks now, and I have no intention of preparing a plate of them.

My next step is to curate a set of about 10 images and print a batch (signed and limited edition) for sale. I don’t know how much to sell them for, but what I do know is that any profits I make will go entirely to a managed fund to support undergraduate botanical research at UOW. I do my research on a shoestring and it’s largely funded from my own wage. I regularly take on three Honours students a year and I want to contribute to their  important work in vegetation conservation… i’d love feedback on whether or not this a viable proposition.

In the meantime, I hope that you enjoy my work below:

A vast stony plain shivers, strewn with tousled clumps of sclerolaena and dead-finish shrubs. A wall of aching, stout redgums snakes a trench of quartz and mica and gypsum through the heaving, bronzed sandstone spine of the Tjoritja. Their boughs ache with sticky, cakey bark, festered with lerps and ants, and dark with ashy charcoal. Sallow, grizzled corellas lounge on the rim of a dusty hollow, preening their scabby feathers with flaking beaks. A princess parrot clambers into a gash in the side of a tangled regum, flashing pale pink and olive against shards of heavy sunlight.

There has been no water here for a year. Mounds of sand and dust are strewn about the creek, heaped with beefwood pods and caltrop burrs. Iridomyrmex and Rhytidoponera glint emerald and turquoise as they thread between the pebbles and grass culms, carving a cricket’s carcass into littler bits as they march by. The birds are quiet today and there are no roos or dogs about.

A mass of crinkled, brittle grass heads nods about, breathing the heavy, sticky air. Buffel grass tufts, thick and stout, squat about the place, ruffled by the breeze that sighs over the stony floodplain. A lone gallah hobbles about these grasses, hoists up a stumpy claw, grabs a culm and strips it with its beak. There are no grass seeds to eat today – all are empty glumes. The sun beats down; the heat stifles even the retching cries of crows and babblers. The creek is an oven of shadowy, pendulous, brittle redgum leaves and crisp swathes of buffel grass.

A grey, foggy plume of ash rises above the tree line, mixing with the wavering mirage of heat on the sweaty horizon. Its distance is uncertain but you can taste the smoke. Then, a tangled panic of birds rises from the treeline, directionless, erratic. There is a dull roar some way up the creek, like blood-flow echoing around a shell at your ear; then,  a crackling and snapping, like a fist pumping up a sheet of cellophane; then, a rush of wind and dust, and a heavy haze of orange, dirty smog engulfs the bleeding redgums. There are dull thuds of branches hitting sand, of hooves on the clay, of hollows splintering. Fledged princess parrots and ring-necks squeal, then grow silent. Then the thirsty tongues of red and orange and blue and yellow flames lick through the branches and tear at the buffel grasses and devour the canopy.

Three months on and the sandy creek-bed blooms in a carpet of freshly-shot buffel grass seedlings, growing stronger and faster than they did before. The hollows are empty. The cattle have come down to feast on the buffel grass shoots. Purple inflorescences are already bearing ripe, swollen fruit. There are no native seedlings, though – the fire was too hot, the seeds too delicate. There are no resprouting shrubs – their volatilized branches leave all but a faint, ashy silhouette on the creek’s sandy face.

Buffel grass country…