The 2003 Sketchbook
The 2003 Sketchbook
My First Trip To Australia!
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The Sketchbook starts in Hampshire, since, for reasons too convoluted to explain, my journey started in the appropriately New-Worldishly named village of New Milton...
Scrolling through Hampshire, sketch on the train...
Scrolling through Hampshire, sketched from memory on the flight to Dubai...
Dialogues between odd plant and retro lamp at the Emirates business lounge at Gatwick... I was flying Emirates from Gatwick to Perth, there to take the train to Adelaide for my show at the Greenhill Galleries; then on to Sydney for a day or two before Emirating back to London...
Scrolling from London Bridge to Charing Cross stations, preliminary work on forthcoming paintings in a London RailMovies series, here sketched as we cross the equator...
Sighting Australia for the first time, Perth from the porthole!
In
Perth for only 12 hours
before boarding the long
long train across the
Nullarbor Plain... The
desert is quite a sight,
an endless sight over
nearly two days, made
more abstract - blue over
orange - by the luck of
having no clouds, and
more musical by the
rhythm of the train. 
And there is more to see in the 'empty' desert than in the hills, since every scrawniest scrub takes on climactic interest!
The Indian Pacific, the train across Australia
We set off at 11 in the morning, through suburbs and last hillocks... The transitions seemed to start me sketching busily:
12h45
13h57 
13h58
16h20
16h25
16h37
16h54
This is the winter and the sunset is early and fast and, specially for me, blessed with a moon at the same time... No trouble too great for the Indian-Pacific!
17h10
Up early for breakfast, the scene continuing unchanged since sunset!
Careful assembies of stacked concrete sleepers - hardier than wood against termites - appear now and again by the trackside; they look out of place, shouldn't they be in the Tate?
We stop at Cook in the
afternoon...
15h45
15h50
Adelaide...
Note that on separate pages there are the quick portrait sketches made after a farewell lunch at The Chesser; as well as documentation of the exhibition at the Greenhill Gallery.
Starke's Stralizia,
flowers at the
Greenhill...
Jim's Gum Trees, Torrens
Park...
Jim tells me to have a butcher with Kev at the Ex... Ah, ok.
Well, Kev is Kevin and the Ex is The Exeter Hotel (and a hotel isn't, it's a bar) and a butcher is a wee beer as snatched before labour by butchers delivering to the markets... The Ex has a longish bar down one side of a Glasgow-like drinking room, solid and hearthy.
Amidst Cooper's Beer and Krug empties there is an old Adelaide Advertiser headline board: Tourist Dies of Thirst...
RoadMovie Excursions: impressions as Jim drives us down-
1) to Willunga
The
Sea from Dee's House,
Willunga Bay... 
Wine Hills at Coriole...
2) to the Murray Valley...
and On to Sydney...
From Adelaide to Sydney, a 24-hour train ride, I put the pencil down for a while, the desert is less extreme, less flat, but I wanted the lulling motion to myself for reflection after a ten-day whirlwind of endless hospitality, jollity and welcome.
However, in the morning you wake in the mountains and the sky seems to have collapsed upon the planet; frosty peaks and ridges can be made out; there are fields! Later, as Sydney looms - and loom it does, first sighted from the Blue Mountains as a cathedral of minute, far-off Gaussian columns - the train edges along precipitous cliffs amidst thick woodland, affording sudden views down to the greenery of the coastal land far below. It is sudden and all the more breath-taking after so much desert.
I sketched nothing. All of this is for memory, and on the flight home I did these pages, preliminary workings for paintings to come:
Blue Mountain Reveille: Layout of Canvases for an account of the descent to Sydney from the mountains on many canvases and a big wall.
Recollection
of George Street, Torrens
Park 
Sydney Fantasy: Thinking of going down to the Harbour from Paddington Street...