A Galah reader shares her thoughts.
Dear Annabelle
I have just come back from a morning walk to the desert. Five hundred metres down the end of our street, where the road ends and the Broken Hill regeneration area begins. I’m told the street used to be a creek and that seems to make sense because when we have downpours, the water rushes down the road into this gully. All sorts of trees grow right at this point. Beyond, I see the desert. Many times I come here when I need a reset and my anxieties loom large.
I grew up in a fundamental Christian community and the desert was often described as a place of abandonment. Jesus was “cast into the desert” for 40 days and 40 nights and tempted by the devil. Even today this idea persists of the desert being a place to avoid.
In August 2023 an exhibition by Rick Ball, A Flaw in the Dance, opened at Broken Hill City Art Gallery. It was a culmination of 50 years’ work. “Rick Ball’s art has always been about the human in the land, an ancient narrative,” said his partner, artist Ann Evers, when she opened the exhibition.
I walked around the exhibition that night and I didn’t like the work. The paintings and sculptures don’t answer your questions. They ask more of you. To sit with them. To be patient. To notice and watch.
I came back a couple of months later to spend some time with a few works including They find courage to dance, a unique set of mono prints. On the opening night I just saw squiggles and lines. Now I began to see something I hadn’t noticed before. Image 4 seemed to hold a woman and a child. The woman was bent over, her face turned towards the child, who had its arm on the mother’s shoulders. I cried then like I cry now, recounting the moment of seeing something I hadn’t noticed before: the mother with child.
Maybe there was no child. Maybe I just saw a child because that is what I needed to see. A mother like me bent over with a child, finding the courage to dance through difficult times. I didn’t catch Evers’ full speech that night so when I came back to read it I saw her explanation of this picture. “On a Greek island called Kalymnos there is a popular dance called the Sponge Diver Dance. It depicts the sponge diver, crippled by decompression, as many men were on that island. He is dancing with his comrades as best he can ... Much of Rick’s work is about the flaws in all of us and the courage to dance through our difficult lives.”
When I am out walking in the desert, I’m reminded of the life here. I see birds, a startled kangaroo bouncing away. I see the mulga trees and the bull ants. The waterbush and the saltbush. I have learnt some things since I moved here four years ago. And I have managed to find life in a new place while learning to raise two boys. The desert invites us to see the beauty of the tree that can last without water for months. And all around are reminders that some things just don’t survive, and that new things are there waiting for me to see.
At the start of last year I went for a desert walk and wrote later about what it demanded: “To accept what it offers and not something else. And that there’s beauty to what it is and what it is not.” That’s a beauty I’ve had to accept internally, too. For what my life offered me and what it didn’t, and to be at peace.
Katherine Waite
