Two packed cars are weaving up through the dusty-hot mid-morning high-summer mountain air. Cars filled with city-suburb people with interesting hats or scarves or haircuts and quirky sunglasses and patterned socks and decorative boots. Carrying Eskys and wine bottles and phones and snacks and cigarettes. 
And eventually, the cars just stop on the side of the road. All the people and their dogs head down some stairs off the roadside and climb down the bank off the stairs and gather on a plateau of rocks. Water flows down from somewhere – over the rocks, over the plateau, over the toes of the dogs and the people, off a cliff, down a kind-of canyon in the mountain's side – to somewhere.
It's a very simple thing. We're here to swim in the icy water. To sit on the edge of the mountain. To lie in the sun and drink wine and mutter soft conversations. To be quiet, alone, outside, and bordered by something other than collapsing fences on three sides and the back of a house on the other. 
 

Just a quick little time-lapse drawing of my sketchy ink/watercolour/highlight processes. 

So excited to see my drawings scattered throughout the pages of the Collective Hub magazine issue 30!
Read more here. 

Vintage dress, rings vintage and Cobracult, vintage turquoise necklace, the 2 Bandits Wrangler neck cuff,

This is the place.
You know how I said I stood under a stand of gum trees while two baby hawks fought over prey right over my head? These are the trees.

This is my front yard, growing up, where we saw a big carpet python, where we rode steady horses through long grass, where I collected gum leaves and insects, where we let off a bag of fireworks we found in the shed, where we hauled logs and tidied up when my sister got married.

I started the year sitting on my parents' verandah: listening to the summer rainstorms, working on drawings, occasionally playing Shovels&Rope out of my laptop. But mostly I just observed the daily schedules of the local birdsongs, grabbing my camera, racing across the lawn and jumping the fence whenever I heard the baby hawks in the trees. (I never got a good shot of them... but my mum and her friends did). 

So here it is: where I grew up, wearing my father's hat, blossoms from the swamp gum my mother nutured, wearing a dress, bandana and necklace from the markets and op-shops I haunted for all my teenage years. But also rings from one of my long-time favourite silversmiths across the Pacific Ocean – Cobracult. 

Truly some of my favourite things.