6/13-16 Canberra

On Monday, June 13 the Land Arts crew plus John reconvened at Jigamy and departed for Canberra, the Australian capital. We stopped by a pretty cool "tip", which is what they call the dump here, then broke for lunch at a park. Outdoor public spaces in Australia have gas grills, which turns on at the press of a button and stays on for a certain duration. And by the way, this is usually free. So, we heated up some sausages and chicken that John cooked the previous night. After this, we began our trek over the mountains to Canberra. The winding road took us through some crazy prehistoric-looking terrain, amplified by the outside fog and condensation on van windows. We arrived at the Australian National University (ANU) School of Art at night and proceeded to divvy up the food between our two flats. In the following days, we got caught up on work (or attempted to) and checked out the town. This was also when our numbers dropped from 5 to 4, as Yoshi had to leave on short notice (see A Celebration with Yoshi). We met up with some of our new found friends from Jigamy —Amanda, Amelia and Heike — for a nice dinner at Heike's on Wednesday night. We saw a cool Turrell at one of the art museums. We walked through the National Museum of Australia sculpture park and viewed their collection of aboriginal art. On Friday morning, June 17 we would leave for our second field location (third if you count Kioloa), Calperum Station in the Bookmark Biosphere. See more Canberra photos.