This is based on the scene to the south of the “Big Monks” hill in the south of Canberra, Australia, looking away from the city and toward a ruggedly mountainous national park. First and foremost I wanted to capture the feel of hazy late afternoon, with sunlight filtering down through thin cloud cover illuminating everything in a golden glow.
On the hill on the foreground stands a solitary tree, a “Kurrajong” tree which are native to Australia’s eastern forests. It’s believed they may have been planted by the first nations people as they provided a reliable source of food from their seed pods, and they appear quite often on hill tops around Canberra. This one is quite old – how old, nobody knows, but it almost certainly predates the creation of a city in this region, and probably the arrival of European settlers as well.
There’s a tradition among the aboriginals of trees being silent witnesses of the events that take place in their vicinity, and I can’t help but wonder what this tree has seen in its vigil over the valley below. The arrival of white settlers, the mass clearing of the forest for sheep grazing land, the construction of the city, the invasion of foreign pests and weeds, the neglect … yet still it, and the valley, remains hauntingly beautiful.
The visitor to this scene is no invader, rather she is out walking in this wild place to find solace and restore her inner compass.
“The Witness Tree” is mixed media on cradled 76x61cm birch panel.
