The girl in the green dress.

Tidda Series, Tidda meaning (Sister or best friend)

I have finished painting mounting and backing a series of 12 small mixed media art works of which I have thoroughly enjoyed doing.

No.6    in my series of short stories.

No.831 No 9/12. in Tidda Series

The girl in the green dress

The girl in the green dress.

Welcome to my funny confusing world.

What would I do without my art? I don't seem to find the time to write a blog very often. I have so many pictures in my head that I want to put them all on canvas or paper so trying to fit in writing, that idea evades me.

I am once again getting very restless, though this place called Tasmania is pretty unique and sometimes so easy to stay planted. I have to make myself get away now and then. I recently tried Melbourne but the city life is definitely not for me.

I miss the desert and its people.

I met this young girl in her green dress out the back of Roebourne on Cooya Pooya Station way back in the 70's. She was playing with her Blue Healer he was a great dog and she never let up throwing that boomerang which he couldn't stop chasing, I never did see him retrieve it though he never ceased trying.

We first went to Cooya Pooya Station in the 1970's it was even then a rambling old building. The main house was an old mud brick homestead, it was built low to the land, locals and city travellers had been slowly removing parts of the house possibly for there own use or for memories of their time there.

Old sheds with wool bales and bits of wool still stuck to the oily floors, with shearing hand pieces hanging from there framework they had been left after the last shear many years before. Old machinery in the sheep yards with fences of barbed wire curled up around the spinifex and no fence posts as the white ants needed a feed. I do recall an uncovered well that was rather wide at the opening of the hole and it had rotting steps going down into the water. It was a very hot sticky day and I would have loved to jump in that nice clear cold water but who knows what is down there, my imagination is pretty vivid so I left it alone but kept a very good eye on the kids.

As usual we searched around looking for interesting things for me to paint.

Down in the creek bed there were low purpose built dry walls which had been there since the late 1800's when the first settlers to this dry harsh land made there way out into the desert looking for somewhere to farm and or find gold. These walls made up smallish yards and they went for a few hundred metres down the creek they probably built them for containing the sheep. The rocks that made up the walls must have been carted for miles as there were none in the immediate area.

Spinifex was everywhere, each clump had thousands of dry prickly needles as they pushed their way up through the hot red earth. Spinifex is a beautiful desert plant but only if you don't fall or walk on it and it is so wonderful to paint, especially in watercolour.

In my earlier days of painting I loved to paint those old abandoned homesteads and all the broken memorabilia that the early settlers had left behind. We used to live in Roebourne so we passed through Cooya Pooya often on our weekends away camping. I remember camping in Lockyer's Gorge which several years later was put under water to form the Harding River Dam which supplies water for the townships of Roebourne, Karratha, Dampier & Wickham. I think I have that correct. My husband Harry did the electrical for the Pump Station on the dam and our family swam in that dam.