Year - 2026 · Size - 30 x 21 cm / 11¾ x 8¼ in · Medium - Ink on paper

After waking in the early hours to a windy squall I thought I'd have to cancel my second island trip that week. Hours later I woke again to blue cloudless skies — Bournda Island, here we come!

The ocean was already heaving with a building northerly swell and the tide was higher than ideal for the channel crossing, but once on the island I climbed to the top to find a spot. The island is covered in thick matted tufts of couch-like grass with shin to waist high shrubs pushing through. A couple of wallaby trails wind through it, and as you walk them your feet disappear into the vegetation — it feels distinctly snakey, though the island is probably too small to support a full time slithering resident.

I wandered north past the blowhole and the view opened up suddenly — the rising sun blazing a trail across the ocean so strong I could barely look at it, and right in the middle of that blaze, a tiny black island just off Turingal Head. I had found my spot.

I sat down in grass thick enough to lose my brushes in and painted while the seas built around me, the larger sets sending a fine salt mist my way — and the native rosemary, the westringia bushes, growing on happily through it all.