PARAGLIDER'S VIEW OF THE FARM

When I was fifteen or sixteen, my father, who had a dangerous fondness for adventure, decided our wheat farm on the Central West Slopes and Plains of NSW was a good place to hold a makeshift paragliding competition.

He’d been hanging around the Thredbo paragliding gang for years. I’d been lucky enough to leap off Kosciuszko in tandem with the Austrian several times. But Dad had finally decided it was time to stop being the passenger and have a proper crack at flying solo.

So he rigged an industrial winch to the John Deere and threw a fly party.

For one strange and brilliant week, our farm went international.

People arrived from all over the place. French and Welsh women, a German couple, Austrians and Norwegians, a handful of Canadians. Paragliders and gear were strewn around the place. I was one of the retrievers, jumping on the quad bike or into the old Holden to collect the pilots once they came back to earth. Accents crackled across the CB radio, and the paddocks I’d known all my life suddenly belonged to a much bigger world.

The best part came after dark.

Everyone would gather around a bonfire in the front paddock, dusty and windblown from the day, passing drinks around and swapping stories about where they’d flown, where they’d crashed, where they were headed next. I’d weave in and out of conversations, listening to people from the other side of the world tell stories beneath the same enormous country sky I’d grown up under.

Something got under my skin that week. The idea that the world was enormous.

And that you could simply go and have a look.

Check out the close-up

Oil on stretched canvas / 30cm x 30cm / framed in Tasmanian Oak and ready to hang.

* This painting is still drying and will not ship until early November 2026.