In The Stillness, I Remember And Walk Forward…

These Victorian bushfires had me fearing that my property with its old shearers’ shed that is becoming my studio and home might be lost.

Thankfully, it looks like the little town is safe.

With smoke lingering across the state, I locked myself away inside, painting quietly, steadily.

In that stillness, a new series has been born: Country Girls.

Inspired by the song A Little More Country by Max Jackson, and by the country girls of the Wimmera who came before me their grit, tenderness, and enduring presence in this land.

And in the thinking of the girls who lived the hard Wimmera country life before me, my thoughts return again and again to my 2 x great-grandmother Eliza.

She worked the land as a mother of four, until she lost her hardworking husband. She later married again, and bore another eight children to a man whose drinking left her carrying both home and land alone.

Eliza laboured without rest. Field and hearth, children and survival, all of it fell to her hands. She died young, quite simply, of exhaustion.

My great grandmother and her siblings were left to fend for themselves while many still children themselves.

And perhaps this is why Studio Kre’at had to find its home, on Wimmera land to remember, to honour, and to keep alive the quiet strength of 2 x great-grandmother Eliza, and the women like her who held this country together without ever being named.

And so the yellow brown paddocks of the wimmera wheatbelt bear symbolic presence to me as I step forward as I walk for the country girls of yesteryear, today and future generations.

“May the strength that carried others before you now carry you gently.”