March 2002. Back home in the little puff of smoke again I begin gathering information from funding agencies and local art galleries. Some groundwork in Adelaide in order to bring a clear set of possibilities to Kupa Piti. Nina B has begun talking with some of the Kungkas on an individual basis about the residency and apparently they are enthusiastic about it. Although it is early Autumn it is burning hot, and most of the community is still out of town, staying with relatives in the cooler places down south. Slowly they are returning, for the Opal Festival at Easter.

Even putting together a portfolio with the Kungkas has a heap of cultural learning attached to it. If we want to include photographic images of the land where the Kungkas live, or where they come from, one must have an awareness of process and protocol. Is it okay, "palya", to film certain land forms, certain places? You need to check it out, ask the questions, every time.

I’m remembering an earlier trip to Lake Eyre last April as part of a witnessing crew invited by Arabunna Elder, Uncle Kevin Buzzacott, who is fighting the destruction of his fragile desert lands and once pristine mound springs by the uranium mining company WMC. We’re witnessing with our eyes and our cameras and audio recorders evidence of the devastating environmental consequences of WMC’s unrelenting theft (under a complicit and highly dodgy South Australian State Government-sanctioned “pastoral lease” – curiously I only saw nine cows in all of these ‘pastoral’ lands we travelled through, they must be very thirsty cows obviously) of up to 42 million litres of ancient sub-artesian water each day to wash the yellow cake (uranium ore). At one point as we are sitting around the morning campfire Uncle Kevin points to a landform and tells us we can see her from a distance, and enjoy her beauty and love her, but we need to respect her and not go any closer.

How different this relationship to the land is from my own Western experience. How does one go about recording and disseminating people’s words when people are wanting to share their stories? What happens to depictions of artworks made by someone who has now passed away? There is much to learn in order to transform the burden of history this land and all of its people still carry.