07/09/2026
We drove to the historic Port of Echuca, and seeing the old steam paddle boats touched me more than I expected. My great-grandfather was a steamboat captain, so standing there beside the Murray felt like another thread connecting me to the past.
This journey is more than a holiday. It is my own little art residency and pilgrimage.
I’m travelling along the Murray River, Australia’s longest river, towards South Australia, where we’ll spend a week living on a houseboat surrounded by the landscape I’ve come here to paint.
Red cliffs, old gum trees growing out of the water, river tracks, caves and that extraordinary Australian light. There is something incredibly beautiful about this part of the country.
And then I’m continuing into remote South Australia, returning to the country where I once went to a tiny school with only seven children.
So much of this journey feels like travelling both forward and backward at the same time.
I’ve brought my paints, sketchbook and notebooks with me. I want to slow down, observe, paint, write and see what this landscape brings to the next pages of Nine Lives of an Artist.
An art residency on the Murray.
A pilgrimage into my own history.
And perhaps the beginning of a new body of work.
