1. Saturday night, the sky opens up with feathers. We are in the city street. Angels spin and fly above us on ziplines. It’s a summer evening, but these feathers come down like snow. Strangers take to playing in the street, chase each other and dump armloads of feathers on each other’s heads. Everywhere I look people are laughing, unweary, unwary.
2. Sunday, we ride around the island. Everything salty and bleached. We stop at one beach after another, sometimes swimming, sometimes looking out at abandoned osprey nests, the remnants of a shipwreck, the small dugite slithering into the underbrush, innumerable birds.
3. I get sunburnt. Let no-one say otherwise - the Australian sun is brutal.
4. Even now, I find feathers in my hair, in my bag. One sticks to my eyelash as I sleep. I know I left some on the island.
5. Tight forearms from Saturday climbing, weary legs from the Sunday cycling.
6. The best way to carry the weekend with you is on the body.

• 3 trillion flies
• 30 kilometres of hiking through scrubby Western Australian bushland
• 18 of about 70 checkpoints found
• 12 hours
• five (!) bush ticks (on me alone, and counting only those that were actually attached to my skin)
• four awesome members of Team See the Gorilla
• two blisters the size of my thumb, one on each heel
• one burnt out bicycle
• innumerable bad puns

Now that’s what I call a good weekend! The Dark Swamp Rogaine was my first experience of this slightly nutty sport that finds you bush-bashing your way to checkpoints you can only find using a good old map and compass. As this little photo montage shows, the flies were numerous and persistent. Example: that’s not a camera anomaly that has caused the black blur over Mike’s face in the first photo; it’s a fly, landing just at that moment on my lens. In the tent last night, when I closed my eyes, at long last, I had these strange visual hallucinations that flies were crisscrossing my vision, crawling, as it were, over my retinae. 

And don’t even get me started on the ticks. I hadn’t met two of my teammates until yesterday, but by the end of the day we were all merrily taking a peek down our trousers to make sure no ticks had made their way to the warm, dark places they are reputed to favour!

And yet, and yet - something tells me you’ll find me at the next rogaining event. I’ll be the one with the corks on her hat.

Shane Pickett

Djilba (July and August), 2006
Etching on paper
Image 49 x 33cm
Sheet 81x 61cm
Edition of 50 
Price $11,000 for the boxed suite of six.

[If anyone has a spare $11,000, I’d rather like this set, please.]

Something about the light today made me think of this photo of Punurrunha (or Mt Bruce), a mountain in the north of Western Australia, photographed about the same time last year.  Ah, road trips.