After a full day of painting above Standley Chasm, Charmaine, Richard, Kate, Judith and I are walking in the dark. There has been a slight transport mix up. The temperature is hovering around zero. The night is still, clear and with a full moon. We’ve been walking for an hour or two punctuated by stops for chocolate. We pretend that we’re Scott of the Antarctic and joke that if someone drops down dead we have to keep pressing on without a backward glance (although I’m fairly sure I’d go back if Judith drops dead because she’s wearing my jacket and it’s really warm).
Then, a pack of six or seven dingos just ahead of us, ghost grey in the moonlight, completely silent (they’d been howling constantly while out of sight), cross the road and drift out of sight. It’s a beautiful, sublime image.
We finally get back to camp around 9pm, hungry and feeling slightly heroic. However, the rest of the group have been getting stuck into the Henschke and appear not to have noticed that we’d been missing.
(from the catalogue for ‘The Larapinta Exhibition’, Defiance Gallery, December 2011)