If you travel far enough north of South Australia, you'll find the desert.
Vast, harsh, hot, dry but, incredibly beautiful. Things are measured differently out here. Seasons by the "green feed". Space by shadows. Time by how much heat sits in the ground, as if the earth itself had swallowed the sun and held onto it longer than it should and tenacious sturt desert peas sprout proudly along the tracks.
This place feels like home to me, even in its uneasy vastness. It's part of how I am. Part of my lineage, my family's history.
If I am honest, I have very few memories of Macumba Station as a child. My core memories were formed further west, at Lambina Station — a neighbouring cattle station, and part of this same story I'll return to in this series. But Macumba had already found its way into my life through stories long before I ever set foot on it. It was the place my mum grew up. The place my grandfather managed. The place my lineage formed.
Last year, I travelled back with my family. My uncle, who still works the land, was our guide.
Nothing quite prepares you for the scale of Australia's inland country. Macumba stretches across hundreds of thousands of hectares beneath enormous skies. The silence there is extraordinary. The horizon feels endless, and you're reminded, quickly of your place in the world. Standing in a landscape that trumps perception, I understood something profoundly it's one of the largest cattle stations in South Australia, and somehow still too big to hold in a single frame. You're totally emcpossaed by its sheer size it humbles you almost instantly.
A Place with History
Macumba sits in the far north of South Australia, neighbouring Todmorden and Lambina Stations. For my family, these places tell intertwined stories.
On my mother's side, our history is connected to Macumba. On my father's side, my family owned, worked and lived at Lambina.
For generations, my family were pastoralists , their lives shaped by seasons, livestock, drought, flood, distance and old-fashioned hard work. Those experiences became the stories passed down around kitchen tables, campfires, and long drives along the station tracks.
But this pastoral history is only one chapter. Macumba lies on the traditional Country of the Arabana people, whose connection to this landscape reaches back countless generations, long before stations, fences or homesteads existed. That knowledge cultural, spiritual, ecological continues today.
As I paint this place, and every place I paint across Australia, I carry both: an awareness for my own family's history, and an appreciation and respect that it lives inside a much older story that reaches far beyond.
Uncle Garry and the Lasso Yard
The inspiration for this painting came from our time at Macumba with my uncle. He showed us around a site called the lasso yard; built in the 1800s, a fenced yard once used to hold horses. At one time it was crucial to pastoral life. Now it's falling apart, slowly returning to the earth, as motorbikes and helicopters replace the need for station horses.
His knowledge of that land was extraordinary.
Garry sat on that land, resting on a temporary fold-out chair, inside a temporary fenced yard, watching the sun set over a life that is changing rapidly, in a world most Australians know nothing about. I didn't want to paint him as someone with ownership over the land, and I didn't want the painting to read as legacy. He's simply a visitor here. Like the rest of us.
belonging. As people carrying a difficult history in this country, I wonder if the land will ever truly accept us. Whether we can claim to belong here at all, knowing the hurt caused to the people who were its custodians long before we arrived.
I don't have an answer. Maybe that's part of what this whole body of work is trying to find.
I was witnessing something that could never happen quite the same way again. And I was hit with a deep knowing — that we are all temporary. All except the land itself, ancient and steadfast, the one thing we all eventually return to. Whatever I'd been searching for over the months before finally landed in that moment: impermanence.
The land is the hero of this story. We are only ever the narrative passing through it — and I don't want to dress that up as something more beautiful than it is. What we leave behind isn't a monument. It's a fold-out chair, a fence going back to rust, a life that moved on.
Why I Paint
When my mum was dying, she started telling stories from her life — quickly, almost as though she were fighting to get them all out before she left us. A lifetime of stories, so many of them from station life. When she passed, I understood something I'd never truly grasped before.
With her went hundreds of stories.
Stories of station life. Stories of family. Stories of laughter and hardship. Stories that existed nowhere except in memory.
Her passing changed the way I look at my life, and at painting. I began noticing things I'd never paid much attention to before — a worn fence post, an empty chair, the way the afternoon light falls, how much I love the vastness and rawness of the outback. These moments seem ordinary, until they're gone.
Impermanence
This painting marks the beginning of a new body of work exploring impermanence — not just the impermanence of a human life, but of everything we leave behind.
Everything except the earth is temporary, slowly dissolving back into it. A chair. Clothing. A fence. A person. We are all visitors here. Yet the land remains.
I don't paint to preserve places exactly as they are. I paint them as I see them dynamic, and full of wonder. Painting has become my way of holding onto a moment just a little longer, before it slips quietly into memory, and then into time.
This is the first painting in what I hope becomes a long conversation with my family's history. Through portraits, landscapes and station life, I want to document the traces people leave on the land not as monuments or legacy, but as reminders that every life, every place and every story exists only for a moment.
Perhaps that's what makes them beautiful.