Weekly drawing 75: Underwater gardening

Realising the joy of underwater gardening.

Before: I built the stone steps and oyster-free swimming cove

I was just out of Art school doing odd jobs and my friend Matt offered me some work, building stone steps for a property at Cottage Point. I have always enjoyed landscaping with stones, so I jumped at the opportunity.

The stones for this particular job were all gathered from the site. Experience has taught me, when working with stones it should be within a 5-1o meter radius from were I want to use it. By doing this the stones will suit the environment and I won't break my back moving them around. To my joy, I also discovered stones are a lot lighter to move underwater. So I used this to my advantage and saved a lot of time.

The time I saved making the steps, I used to landscape underwater, creating a small oyster-free cove for launching a row boat or a place to swim. Unfortunately the couple who paid me for the days work thought I was just mucking about in the water.  To give you an idea of what they must of seen, use your hand and cover the underwater part of my coloured drawing - I just look like I'm just playing in the water.

It wasn't until I'd gone home, they went down a had a closer look and realised what I'd created for them. A functional and subtle design which the fish also loved.

Weekly drawing 72: Camping in St Ives bushland

Anthony and I camping at St Ives, 1989

When I was 14, Anthony and I spent many weekends camping in the bushland at St Ives . We would walk down from Acron Oval to the Cascades and then along Middle harbour creek to our favourite sandstone overhang, were we would camp overnight. 

I felt a great feeling of freedom in the bush. I was relived to get away from the bland suburb of St Ives and it's ever growing shopping centre. At times while camping I would imagine how the local Aborigines once lived in St Ives, fishing in the creek and sleeping in the same sandstone shelter which we used for our camp site.

Unfortunately we couldn't enjoy the same simple pleasures because the creeks were now very polluted from urban and industrial runoff. So we had to carry everything we needed into the bush and ration our food and water for the journey. To conserve water and save energy we cleverly hid water bottles at certain secret places along the track (behind trees under leaf mulch) 

To me pollution doesn't mean it's all over and everything is destroyed. It just makes me think we need to clean up our act, so one day we can have clean waterways again. Imagine one day going for a walk in Sydney bushland and confidently drinking or swimming in the water, it would be awesome.