Humping Hills

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I bought it in the 90s, at a time when an offer to 'show one's etchings' might buy me a ticket to manhood. With a glamorous girlfriend on one arm and a glass of champagne in the other hand I purchased the painting by John Ogburn from a reputable gallery in Chippendale. I felt pretty chipper about it.

The moment of madness had nothing to do with any kudos attached to acquiring artwork, for on this  occasion I was genuinely struck by the subject: the Australian landscape.

Particularly country NSW and the wide-open spaces that spread themselves before you like a seductive mistress the moment you accelerate west from Lithgow. The urge to drive deeper into her heart hits me every time.

Back in the gallery, my deviant mind transformed the perfectly framed hillocks hanging before me into a range of majestic buttocks cavorting in a luscious palette of sunburned shades. Pubic mounds of woodland intersecting steep gullies, a snaking river pushing agonisingly close to a V-shaped dam, verdant splodges of green, a brooding silhouette and blue sky beyond.

I was getting hot under the collar and was convinced the erotic entanglement was rising and falling with my every breath.  Too much Champagne? Perhaps. On that night I christened the piece of artwork 'humping hills' or 'fornicating flora'. In my eyes it was anything but a frigid landscape.

Two weeks ago, wanderlust west reached climax when I found myself driving over the crest of a road 30kms south-east from Mudgee in NSW and discovered the same hills humping before my eyes, this time framed by a glass windscreen. If X marks the spot, this must have been the place where Ogburn propped himself on a rock and transferred his vision from horizon to canvas.

Momentarily transfixed by the rapidly approaching piece of mind art at 110kph, I narrowly avoiding crashing into a fully laden semi-trailer head on and veering off the road into a sizeable gum tree. In a nanosecond the painting disappeared from view as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by new landscapes around the next bend.

This simple outback scene stirs emotion and prompts reflection on where I've been and where I'm going.

It remains my source of inspiration to 'go west young man' and still hangs in my house, along with my manhood.









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