Lynette and I have been travelling the trade circuit together for years, selling South Australia at shows in London, Berlin, Brisbane, Sydney, New York, Melbourne and Adelaide. Flights, airports and hotels. Lost luggage, set ups, knock downs, smiles and flu. The glamour of travel!
We also share a passion for painting; both dabblers with many foreign nights spent over a shared red debating the merits of Payne’s Grey over Vermilion skies, the frustrations of Heysenesque gums and Centralian light.
She has been badgering me for as long as I can remember to manipulate the diary and head north, where she and her husband run a Resort. This time her call caught me off guard. It had been a bugger of a week; it took about ten seconds to argue the toss. I rang a couple of clients, finding a pressing engagement. “OK for the following week …Yep? Great! I see’ll you then, then.” and left.
I was grinning from ear to ear by the time I got home. I dislodged a couple of redback spiders ensconced in the swag and dusted off the tucker box. I had recently finished pickling last season’s olives and took a generous measure from the tub in the cellar. Lynette always liked my chili, garlic and rosemary brew. She reckons they deliver the perfect entrée for a ‘serious session’.
Four bottles of ‘98 Bernoota should do the trick as I checked my supply of primaries, chucked the paints, a couple of boards, easel, a spare pair of stubbies, jocks and socks into the ute and hit the road. It was as simple as that!
As I drove north, I mused on just how easy it had been to give the office the flick. Mmmm. Food for thought as I delicately balanced the steering wheel on my left knee and rolled a smoke.
The country was getting drier and a hot wind blew through the cab, bringing with it the outback; the smells, the dust and the inevitable couple of blowies. Ahhh, it was great to be back!
The bitumen ran out and the gravel stretched straight for miles, the ute kicking up a billowing cloud as Pavarotti’s huge interpretation of Verdi’s Il Duce, from Rigoletto matched perfectly the rising walls of the Ranges riding shotgun to my passing. I sensed the Maestro bouncing back from the reddening rock walls and again found myself reflecting on wasted, desk-bound time.
Lights were softening to pinks and what I knew as a deft wash of Payne’s Grey as the evening brought a peaceful endorsement to my errant flight to the Flinders’ Ranges. I stopped to open the homestead gate, took a leak and rolled another smoke. Those cliffs never fail to get me going; a little slurp of Burnt Sienna, a tad of Raw Umber and Coral Red mixed into a generous dollop of Cream White will do the trick – tomorrow.
Last light silhouetted a huge old gum, creek-side and just to the right of the track. Its scarred and battered self, insecurely anchored with roots exposed from innumerably floods looked promising. I made a mental note to come again.
But I silently cursed that third bottle of red and the several nightcaps as Lynette suggested next morning that we walk down to the creek running past the Resort, past the homestead and off across the plains. I gathered my scattered mind, paints and boards and shortly stood beneath last night’s tree – a being of huge proportions, proudly matching this broad expansive landscape.
Clean, creamy limbs are streaked with Cadmium Yellow, Burnt Sienna and the dag-ends off the pallet while delinquent branches abruptly angular, grey, capped and truncated reach for the sky. Flood-washed, tangled roots belie unending drought but it stands sentinel, defiant – able to match the next millennium.
Lynette fills me in on the history of the tree as we paint. Apparently, some guy named Cazneaux photographed the tree in the ‘30s – the photo going on to become an iconic symbol for the spirit of the Diggers in the Second World War. We paint on and we return, slapping paint happily onto canvas, the evenings spent slumped comfortably. An open fire, music, good red, companionship and days passing easily as we paint … that tree.
I idly ponder whether new and pressing engagements can delay my southern recall, again?