Unexpected Finds

The fourth issue in the new series of Heat, Burnt Ground, reproduces on the cover a segment of a beautiful watercolour by John Wolseley, wrought from his six-month stay in Sydney’s fire-flattened Royal National Park in early 2002. Along with many noteworthy contributions, a further eighteen colour pages of Wolseley’s lush sketches, entitled ‘Bushfire Journals’, make it an issue to treasure. Wolseley has written a diary to accompany his pictures, which tells us how ‘new shoots at the base of many of the burnt shrubs … spume out of their black bases like an army of bunsen burners’, and also illumines his unorthodox approach. With the help of a friend, he rubbed a vast roll of paper along the trees and over the ground: ‘a Banksia[’s] …sooty knobbly bark left a passage of black scales on the paper as if a huge reptile had moved over it.’ Wolseley’s narrative is more uneven than his sketches, but offers valuable insights into the way a painter digests and regurgitates his chosen material.