brogan bunt

As much as I do my best to adhere to the various rules that I have established for myself in this project, there are always elements of failure. Sometimes it is because the specific rule only occurs to me in the midst of things. For instance, I decided after the second walk to keep all of my used grinding blades. I had already, however, discarded the first blade, so in the end I was left with just six. I could, of course, have just ground another blade until it looked suitably worn, providing me with an apparently scrupulous full set, but this would infringe an even more important rule, that I cannot cheat any of my procedures. It is not just that I am averse to cheating, but that the work depends precisely on attending closely to whatever it is that actually occurs (or seems to occur). Abandon this principle and the whole work collapses.

6 Blades

I must show this one image, if only to express a doubt. The image is a composite of all seven of the cutting actions. The seven sets of four images are each two feet wide and four feet high. They will occupy a whole wall in the installation.

I worry that they transform the event into something too neatly visible (and composed), but it is too late now. A kind of blindness pushes me to this visibility. Events become visible once they disappear.

Composite

All of my walks have been made alone.

A week or so ago, however, on the afternoon of the 11th of April, I organised a group walk around the large Mount Nebo, Mount Keira circuit. Visiting artists, Simon Pope and Julian Priest, together with Kim Williams, Ilka Nelson and Ailsa Grieve, joined me for a convivial walk up to the wrecked car sites. It was a lovely warm afternoon. We started out around 2pm and returned just before nightfall.

I had just completed the 7th walk two days before and at that stage regarded the project as essentially finished.

It felt odd to do the walk in different way and to discover different responses to the wrecked cars.

This walk somehow made me aware that I was not finished. Something more was needed. I wondered whether this was a long piece of reflective writing – a kind of project summary – but realised that I had nothing specific to say that I had not already said. I also realised that I could not write from outside the event structure that I had established. Writing was only possible within the context of walking. But there was no need to collect further car parts. On what basis then could I write anymore?

I could write about the plans for the installation and its practical development, but I have no wish for this to become a journal. These assembled posts do not simply provide a background to the project. They are intimately tied to it. I walk and I write. I have walked and I have written.

I have been advised to leave this writing out – to just display a limited set of documentary materials. Some have suggested that I am leaving no room for imaginative viewer response, others that I am making unreasonable demands on the viewer’s time. This writing risks then two forms of exhaustion – an exhaustion of viewer imagination and an exhaustion of viewer engagement. But I am prepared to take this risk. It is more important for me to avoid obscuring the total complex of practices that constitute this work.

Actually this process suggests new possibilities for me for writing. Writing becomes tied to action. It becomes an aspect of action. It shapes and informs other dimensions of action and discovers a renewed sense of openness and freedom by not being entirely book based, by discovering associations with walking, cutting and image-making, with all kinds of currents of ordinarily silent action.

I realise that the name should change. It should no longer be “A Line Made By Walking and Assembling Bits and Pieces of the Bodywork of Illegally Dumped Cars Found at the Edge of Roads and Tracks in the Illawarra Escarpment”. Instead it should be “A Line Made By Walking and Cutting Out Bits and Pieces of the Bodywork of Illegally Dumped Cars Found at the Edge of Roads and Tracks in the Illawarra Escarpment”. The emphasis is not upon assemblage (sculptural, symbolic, reconstitutitive) but upon a problematic gesture of intervention. The focus is upon action and reflection, rather than upon shaping a transformative aesthetic thing. In a sense the gallery assemblage of metal pieces, photographs and text represents simply another, subsequent axis of action, not dissimilar, in a way, to the action of cutting in that it also signals a removal, an absence, an uncertainty.

Back from my trip away and there was the sense of the changing of seasons – Summer passing into Autumn. I had one last walk to make.

Arrived home on the train late on Friday evening with a lingering flu. Showers from Sydney down to Wollongong and the air much cooler than a week ago. By Sunday, however, it was fine. No chance, however, to get away until 3:30. Day light saving time had finished that morning, so it felt later in the day. Long shadows and ominous clouds on the Western horizon. I hurried up the hill as quickly as possible. Despite the flu, I felt much better climbing today than I had a week ago. I was heading up to the long slide on Harry Graham Drive – the one that I’d seen on my last trip, but not explored.

I walked swiftly up to the Jumpers and then across to Robertson Lookout. I thought of my trip away – the all night drives, the hotel rooms, the volcanoes, the people that I met, the films that I watched on the plane. All of this made the walk go more quickly.

The piles of rubbish had disappeared from Robertson Lookout. Instead there was a nice, shiny Mercedes. No sign of the owner. They must have been enjoying the view. I half expected to see the earlier trash tucked into the bush somewhere nearby, but it had been scrupulously cleared away.

The Sun passed behind clouds and late afternoon grew dark and gloomy.

I approached the slide with a sense of trepidation. Once again I’d have to find some awkward way down through the adjacent jungle to the pile of wrecked cars. This time the bush was wet, so I was expecting leeches. I descended through a section of thick vines into the forest below and traversed across towards the cars. There were many more than I expected. It was a cathedral of dumped vehicles. I recognised the late model wrecked Land Cruiser that had been visible from the road, but was particularly struck by a rusted vehicle covered in bright graffiti. Initially I assumed that the car had been painted before it had rolled down the slide, but now wonder if it hadn’t been painted afterwards, suggesting that there had been other vandalising parasites before me.

Cathedral of wrecked cars

Settled on a portion of the door panel painted with a large pink ‘B’. My initial. So it seemed suitable as a found signature for the overall work. I took the usual preliminary photographs and then prepared myself for one final effort of cutting. The grinder cut smoothly through the metal skin. There was no backing glue or awkward bit of hidden structural metal. Once I made the final cut, the square piece simply fell out of the larger panel. A few more photographs and I was done.

As I traversed back through the bush to my original point of descent, I noticed a faint track continuing low in the forest towards Robertson lookout. I realised that this was an old walking track that had fallen into disrepair. So instead of ascending back to Harry Graham Drive, I followed the neglected trail back to the lookout. Then it was simply a matter of retracing my path back down to Mt Keira, the Girl Guide camp and home. I half ran down the hill to ward off the gathering darkness, making it back just before 6pm.

And not a leech to be seen.

Graffiti car

'B' panel

Cut out

Square

[Written swiftly on a sleepless night in the small NZ coastal town of Whakatane, prior to leaving at 3:30am to drive back to Auckland. It belongs in ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE only in as much as it provides a general context for my current actions. I will not, however, place it specifically within the numbered set of ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE entries.]

Before I learnt programming or thought about walking
I used to build fences and simple farm sheds
– really just animal shelters.
Both of these involved a concern with lines.
Lines of wire from one spot to another.
Posts lined up straight via a crow bar.
Lines of uprights.
Lines of corrugated iron.
All material – I can particularly remember the heat and flies and
At other times the coldness, the numbness.
But also abstract – notional geometries, notional divisions, notional structures,
Entirely temporary, endlessly in need of maintenance.
So two things – the lived line and the abstract line.
The play back and forth.

I spent close to twenty years as a programmer.
In the end I could write a workable 3d engine from scratch.
But I have abandoned all that. Too old to spend time programming.
Too old to want stare at screens.
Too old to believe the elusive promise of “hello world!”.
But it was through programming that I found a way back to walking.
Although I have no idea what walking represents.
How so?
Leaving aside the meaning of walking, the multiple investments in this practice,
Programming led me to the problem of the iterative subdivision of simple shapes.
This led me in turn to recognise the aesthetic potential of mechanical iteration.
Art does not have to be exclusively conceptual or critical.
Art does not have to defamiliarise or deconstruct.
Art can simply perform.
Art can simply repeat.
Or, more precisely, art cannot escape these operations.
They are not the other of art.
Indeed art exists in this tension between knowledge and skill and
Performance – repetitive enactment,
Which always confirms and undermines repetition,
Which is strangely, despite all the manifest constraints,
And with no effort at deliberate resistance,
Also a space of freedom.
Of a freedom that happens within the interstices of
Determination.

So I no longer wished to have a neatly conceptual relation
To these processes,
So I wished myself to become iterative,
Which is to say open to the possibility of the event (Badiou).
So I returned to walking.
I followed the pattern of walking.
My aim once again is not to defamiliarise,
Not to estrange walking and the experience of space,
But to acknowledge within walking its own staging of freedom.
I know we need artists.
I know we wish to be stirred,
But I also want to acknowledge a field of experience
That requires no lofty justification,
That need not employ the term “art”
That is constitutionally aesthetic,
If not putatively.

And it may be that walking absolutely cannot be positioned as art,
Not absolutely.
This may just be an interim stage – a stage of reflection.
Because walking undermines not just the notion of a material work,
But much more radically,
The notion of an audience for the work.
Of a division between artist and consumer.
Just as walking is an ephemeral act,
Just as it signs an essential contract with disappearance
(The walker should never leave any trace),
It also does not require an observer.
Something happens but it disappears and does not need to be seen.
In this way, walking suggests a new amateurism.
Or an art without art.

I can imagine other, possibly smarter and wittier, works.

I could, for instance, fashion replica national park wildlife information signs that contain information about the nature of illegal dumping activities. These could be placed prominently next to various dumping sites. They may drolly refer to the nocturnal activities of the genus scumbagus wollongongus, etc. Additionally there could be wildlife tours of the relevant sites, with little brochures and maps depicting particular routes, features and views. But all of this, however potentially useful as an intervention, strays away from my genuine, unfunny, confused response to the wrecked vehicles and associated rubbish. That is why I prefer a less sophisticated response.

Remaining with my current strategy of cutting, it is clearly possible to imagine carving something more elaborate and precise, even whimsical, but this risks detracting from the naivete of the square shape. Crucially, for me, the roughness of the latter indicates a kind of failure of response. If it is eloquent at all, it is precisely in terms of its directness, simplicity and manifest inadequacy. It is as abject as the cars themselves.

No intention any longer to connect the pieces together with hinges. Instead I will simply hang them up from the ceiling in a line at roughly upper body or shoulder height. I am envisaging that they will be suspended by vertical wires at the top left and right corner of each piece. It will be possible to walk around the squares, but not between them. The side facing out from the relevant near wall will be the exterior painted side. The interior side, which is often in better condition, will face towards the wall. The wall itself will display a line of seven overall images, each composed of a column of four photographs. The line of photographs will correspond to the line of suspended pieces and will display the four states that are recorded for each cutting event: a wide general view prior to cutting; a mid shot of the uncut panel; a corresponding mid shot or closer shot of the cut panel; and a final shot of the removed square. I am also considering including a hand drawn map of the various walks and places where I found illegally dumped cars, but I doubt that I will have sufficient room. This may have to go in accompanying pamphlet that contains these blog posts. I am also contemplating arranging an actual walk that takes in all the sites, not so much as an opportunity to view the cut out panels in situ, but as a means of conveying something of the experience of walking through the escarpment bush – the strange mixture of beauty and desolation this entails.

I am also coming to the nagging realisation that I should be exhibiting this work in Wollongong. I will look into local exhibition possibilities once this Sydney show is finished.

So I had a whole day in front of me – all of Good Friday – to collect the final piece. That would have concluded things nicely. I am going away for a week tomorrow. But I woke up feeling unwell. Some kind of virus thing has finally caught up with me. The weather too has changed. It is much colder. I could hear the wind blowing all during the night and waves of little Eucalypt seeds falling on the roof and deck. So I decided not to go, to leave it another week before I make the final walk. Not certain about this, but it gives me time to think. It makes things less rushed. I was shocked by all the garbage on the last walk. Need to think more carefully about my relation to this trash before I climb up again to Harry Graham Drive and remove one last square.

To be a parasite upon an unhealthy host. To vandalise vandalism. To intervene by making an inconsequential mark. No point in cutting a whole car in half. I am not, like Gordon Matta-Clark, responding to systems generally. I am not trying to create something large. The squares are small, deliberately small. They are a size that I can easily carry home in one hand.

Ok, all nostalgia gone. Must get this project done while the weather holds. Indian summer can’t last. So though I hadn’t slept the night before, and the night before that as well – bloody moon – knew that I had to get walking or I had no chance of getting the two last squares before I’d be away for a week.

Spent the morning at work. Headed off up into the escarpment just after 1pm. Very hot. The pack felt heavy and no amount of pushing the pace seemed to get me into the necessary zone. Everything felt hard. I had a meeting in town at 4:30pm, so needed to hurry.

My plan was to make the big circuit – up Mt Nebo, then south in the direction Mt Kembla, up and west to Harry Graham Drive, north along the road to Robertson Lookout and back down finally via Mt Keira and the Jumpers. I was hoping there would be cars somewhere along the Harry Graham Drive section, but wasn’t sure. I had a back up plan in mind – if all else failed I would remove a piece from another wreck in the Jumpers – but was keen to discover a new site rather than just continue to move back and forth between the Jumpers and the Mt Nebo slide. Discovered a small green car panel at the edge of the track as I walked through the gate on the water board land up beyond Mt Nebo. Thought of just stopping there and cutting that, but knew that I needed to do the full circuit up to the very top of the escarpment, linking together all the various sites into a single walk.

The rough track up to Harry Graham Drive was overgrown with weeds, so much so that in places the track was scarcely visible. I did my best to walk confidently to scare off any snakes.

I was still struggling to move swiftly up the hills. My tee-shirt was utterly soaked in sweat and I regretted carrying so little water. But eventually I reached the dark top section of rainforest and came out at the derelict mining depot on Harry Graham Drive. No sign of dumped cars.

Derelict mining depot

Dumped tv

Just a short way north along the road, however, I came across a large slide full of fresh household waste and wrecked cars. An associated fire had burnt out a portion of the bush opening up a fantastic view of the Port Kembla steelworks, Five Islands and the sea. I tried to take a photograph of both the hillside strewn in trash and the distant view, but it wasn’t possible. The contrast was too great. The distant view was too bright and the sordid forest scene too dark. So I photographed them separately, though they properly belong together.

Coast view

Slope

I had to make my way down to the twisted mess of burned out vehicles, but could not safely descend the trashy slope. Managed to squeeze down through some tangled vines and then traverse across to an exposed rusted door panel beside a sordid double mattress. I took the photographs that I always take, put the battery into the angle grinder, donned my safety equipment, switched on the grinder and, taking care not to stand too close or to cut too deep, removed a square from the panel. Once again, even though I made a lot of noise and was working right beside a paved road, I attracted no attention whatsoever. More photographs of this incomprehensible place and then an awkward scramble back up to the road.

Only a hundred metres or so further I came upon another longer and even more desolate slide. I realised at once that this would have to be my destination for the final trip.

A little further again, at the entrance to Robertson Lookout, there were a number of heaps of household garbage. This area has become more remote and less frequented since Mt Keira Road closed, making it easier to dump with impunity. Clearly all sorts of people prefer to sneak up during the night and trash the local state conservation park rather than pay the new higher tip fees. Standing there, having seen this place deteriorate so much over the past few months, there was no way that I could regard this in terms of some blurring of the natural and the cultural. It just seemed like the most abject vandalism.

Robertson Lookout car park

Continuing on it occurred to be that the only saving grace of people who do this kind of thing is that they are not hypocrites. They don’t care about the escarpment. They don’t care about the consequences of their illegal dumping. They are happy to consume and discard wherever suits them. But what about me? I oppose their dumping and yet continue to consume stuff. Do I really imagine that there is some proper place to dispose of all my junk, some effective remedial process that makes it somehow safely and inconsequentially disappear? I guess I am confident that there are better ways than tucking it away illicitly in the bush, but how genuine are these alternatives? Is it conceivable that all of my junk can be discretely recycled without having any wider deleterious impact on the environment? And not only the environment that I may wish to walk through, but also the environment that escapes my immediate attention, that is way high up in the air or ten feet underground, that may be difficult to see or muddy, slushy, inaccessible and un-beautiful?

With these gloomy thoughts in mind, the square of rusted metal in my hand and an eye on the time I hurried down the final track home.

Rusted panel

Close up

Cut out

Square

A work, what work?

It seems to me that the work is constituted precisely in terms of a complex of ambivalent elements. Walking that is not simply walking. Cutting that is not simply cutting. Writing that does not simply represent events. Images that gesture towards the unseen.

And the set of cut out squares are just a residue. They are not a sculpture. They are a set of samples arranged in a line.

Note to self: read up again on Land Art.

Hunch: the Land Art tradition intervenes in the natural landscape to produce monumental statements. I intervene within an impure environment to produce small, inconsequential statements, phrased as simple, inexplicable absences.

Observation: so these cars have spilled down the escarpment hills on dark and drunken evenings (or so I imagine, perhaps the truth is less colourful and violent, perhaps the violence only takes proper shape when the cars slip over the edge – when gravity kicks in – perhaps prior to that there is only the dull thought of getting rid of an unwanted thing), but as soon as they halt their slide, as soon as they come to rest, they gradually become something else. They are absorbed within the forest. They become habitat for lizards and possums. Their skin grows mottled and less reflective. That is what I notice the most – the shininess disappearing, passing into something else – something that I cannot quite describe. Abject and desolate perhaps, but also calm and oddly transcendent. Transcendent not of the forest, but of whatever originally shaped their existence. The wrecked cars remain at once very obviously cars, but at the same time, as dumped things, as things slowly decaying in the forest, manage to transcend their identity as cars, manage to transcend even the sense of ruin and simple decay. They gain another indeterminable skin.

And now I am feeling sad that I have only two more walks left. Before I was focused on getting the seven walks completed as quickly as possible, but now would like to slow things down.

Left late in the afternoon. Low cloud settling over Mt Keira. Up in the direction of the Jumpers. The tree that had once been attached to the broken branch that had held up the daft mountain bike jump had itself fallen down, so jumped across its fractured branches. I was walking quickly, even running at times, because I was worried about the light. Also needed to get breathing and to summon the late afternoon heat. Up to the Jumpers where I knew there were the remnants of blue car. It lay right beside the track. I’d walked past it on the way to the non-existent Broker’s Nose 4wd. So this was a calculated target. I had no doubt that it was there. I figured that at this time in the afternoon – really early evening – that there would be no one else around. The descending clouds made all the greens of the forest more intense. I walked up the steps beyond the archery centre with a sense of rapidly disappearing from view. Didn’t take long to reach the Jumpers and the wrecked blue car. Took more photographs than I needed and then prepared for the cut. For some reason this time, I forgot to put on my gloves. A bad oversight, but luckily with no bad consequences. If anything, my lack of long trousers was more of a problem as hot slivers of metal shot off against my legs, becoming ingrained like burrs in my socks and shorts. But I was consumed in the cutting, which can’t be halted once started, which can only be stopped once the square is removed. Once again, for some strange reason, I was having trouble maintaining a neat straight line. It occurs to me now that perhaps I was pushing the angle grinder too deep. Rather than lightly making an incision, I was roughly carving the skin from the larger shell. I could see the grinding blade rapidly wearing down. Although I carried a spare, I was determined to complete the job before the single disk was altogether spent. Eventually, with some final grinding and manual twisting, I pulled the piece out. More photographs. I also took some photographs of the overall scene. I continued to take photographs most of the way down. Each time I stopped and balanced the metal square against my leg and each time it cut into my skin. Mt Nebo was grey and yellow in the distance. The softness of the clouds. The softness of the forest. The most intense yellow flowers that I rapidly walked by without any effort to hold on to them, to somehow preserve them here.

Trail to the Jumpers

Blue panel

Cut out

Square

Didn’t really feel like cutting up cars Saturday afternoon. Very hot day and I was already bedraggled from mowing two lawns and pruning some trees, but put a new blade on the grinder, charged the battery and headed off. Inspiration would have to wait.

Walked up again in the direction of Mt Nebo – steep for the first twenty minutes or so, then a prickly traverse to a dirt section of O’Brien’s road and an easier stroll along the top of a ridge. Kept looking down on either side of the ridge for dumped vehicles. Came across washing machines and sinks, but no cars. I could sense that I was being drawn back inexorably to the long slide of dumped cars described in ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE_04, but still hoped to stumble on something more accessible. The hornet hum of Mt Kembla trail bikes in the distance reassured me that nothing that I could do could possibly attract audible attention. Took a detour down to a saddle clearing that I’d visited some years before. I recalled a small decrepit shed and various piles of rubbish. Perhaps there would be a car? The shed and rubbish were still there, but the weeds had been cut back and some stray boulders pushed into piles. In any case, no sign of a wrecked vehicle so headed back up to O’Brien’s road and the slippery-dip automotive graveyard.

Turned left at the slight trail and made my way down once again through the steep forest that runs alongside the slide of dumped cars. Part of the way down I followed a deer trail across to the other side. A white Ford Falcoln ute hung suspended in the bush above me. But since I already had two bits of white car, I left it alone, retraced my steps and continued downwards. I reached my previous low point and wondered what to do next. Then I spotted a single red car panel poised on the final slope above the creek. I took some initial photographs and considered how I could remove a square section as cleanly as possible. The cutting proved difficult. It was wkward to stand on the steep slope. I wore through an entire grinding disk before eventually freeing the square.

I spent some time at the bottom photographing the cut out shell and the view back up through the forest. In the darkness of this hidden and inauspicious space, I felt as though I were a diver tarrying a little too long at an unaccustomed and dangerous depth – yet still not wanting to leave.

Looking back up

The wander back home was uneventful. Late afternoon, early evening. Light clouds in the sky.

Red shell

Skin

Cut out

Square

The conceptual scheme: To illicitly cut out portions of illicitly dumped vehicles. To render bushwalking in illicit terms. To render illicit activities in terms of bushwalking and art, thus to make them, in some sense, licit. To confuse the licit and illicit, in the same manner that the dumped cars confuse the disturbingly alien and the intimacy of the native. They are alien and native at once – especially in their desolation.

Made an early start today. Decided to do the long walk, the walk over in the direction of Broker’s Nose. Hoping to find that 4wd vehicle abandoned, bogged, whatever in the marshy creek. So up Mt Keira, then out north along Clive Bissel drive, with a small sidetrip to a nearby lookout, and plenty of stops at the various blocked water board exits, with their piles of dumped rubbish – bricks, asbestos, etc. – and on towards Mt Ousley Road, which can be heard from a long way off – a constant roar of trucks and cars. Getting close I came across the remnants of a crummy couch spread out on the side of the road, all conspicuously labelled with “Illegally Dumped” stickers. Nobody picks any of this stuff up. It just becomes a series of fake crime scenes, with not even a remote chance of catching the culprits.

Illegally dumped

The guy waiting for his coffee at the caravan truck stop on the corner of Clive Bissel Drive and Mt Ousley Road observed me curiously as I headed left to follow the traffic along the freeway. There is no way across the freeway itself. It is entirely pedestrian unfriendly, despite the existence of walking tracks on either side. Nothing connects them. The only way to get to the northern escarpment is to walk down the freeway to the Picton turn, go along there for a way and then turn back to Wollongong, which leads finally to an overpass to the other side. What could be thirty metres or so is turned into two kilometres or so of frightening walking at the edge of a major freeway. Don’t imagine that many people ever attempt this. Kept expecting to be crushed by a wayward truck or pulled over by the police. I could imagine the latter treating me as some dangerous vagrant, especially when they discovered the angle grinder in my pack. But nothing like this happened. In fact one person even pulled over to offer me a lift. Very nice of them.

Of course, having walked all that way, having finally found my way to the small creek crossing where the vehicle had been some months ago, I discovered that the 4wd was long gone. Not a trace of it in the muddy creek overflow. So I guess it may not have been genuinely abandoned. I took photographs of the empty scene. Then I noticed that the rear flap of the tray was sitting in the creek, repurposed now as a small bridge. I contemplating cutting out a portion of the tray, but thought better of it. Unlike the various other bits and pieces of illegally dumped cars, this thing lacked any sense of abject desolation. Instead it was serving a useful and ingenious purpose. If I’d cut one end off then it would no longer have reached properly across the creek and may have damaged the tires of some mountain bike (I suspected mountain bikers had made the bridge). So I left it there and began the walk back, regretting that I’d walked so far without managing to collect anything. I was also dreading the thought of having to retrace my path back along the freeway, but there was no other option so I just walked as quickly as possible.

The car was gone

Tray flap bridge

It was a relief to get back to the quiet of Clive Bissel Drive. I stopped to take a photograph of a pretty crop of roadside flowers.

Roadside flowers

Having missed out on my intended target I kept a vigilant eye open for traces of wrecked cars beside the road. Very luckily, I came across a a car door in a small clearing that was clearly convenient for illegal dumping activities. It looked in fairly good order and there was no sign of the larger vehicle it was once attached to. I’m not sure what it was doing there, but it meant that my day was not entirely wasted. I took some initial photographs, dragged the door further away from the road, took some more photographs and then carried the door down to a more hidden spot and cut out my usual square. The skin was in good condition so it took a bit longer than usual. The grinding blade wore down considerably. Then I had trouble lifting the cut piece from the car body frame. Some strange gummy stuff that holds the body work to the internal car frame was causing problems. A bit of twisting freed the square. I dragged the door back up the hill and took more photographs.

I had what I was after so just a matter of walking for a final hour or so home. But by now I was getting a bit leg weary, so I dropped my pace and dawdled. Finally got home around midday.

Car door panel

Moved further from the road

Cut out

Square

I realise that I said nothing substantive about the walk up Mt Keira in ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE_05. I said nothing about the initial walk up my driveway, which later I would discover was misrecognised by our next door neighbour as the gait of an escaping burglar. Particularly suspicious was my swift exit into the nearby bush. When I returned, he was quite convinced that it hadn’t been me, that I was wearing different clothes, that I was possibly bigger and more malevolent. Of course, I know quite well that it was me, while at the same time I very much regret that I failed to make a clean escape.

Leaving all of this out is perhaps understandable, but why no mention of the green and overgrown path, the fallen tree across the start and the bits of scattered pine where the insane mountain bike jump had been – the jump that had ascended in the air from the flat, continued along at head height and then just as abruptly ended where it was poorly supported by a broken branch? And why especially no mention of the steepness of the track and the dappled light in the forest? Why nothing of the stinging nettle that grazed against my leg, the tall greenery all around and the place where the rocks slid down away precariously from the road? Not to mention the closure of Mt Keira road; it is only possible now to drive up as far as the archery centre, though I tend to more commonly walk. I could have also mentioned the track work just after the girl guide camp entrance, with each step now nicely filled with fresh dirt and the surrounding few feet of plants whipper-snipped into submission. But this only suggests further omissions.

I could make an effort to describe everything. Perhaps I should. But I won’t. I should make an effort to be concise, to say very little, but I won’t.

Instead I will continue to represent what is essentially an iterative procedure in terms of a set of narrative events. That is, each walk will be described in rather prosaic subjective experiential terms, with the odd predicable poetic observation thrown in (I wonder, for instance, whether I actually even really noticed the sea in ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE_04 or just cynically employed it as a convenient conceit for inconclusively ending the piece?). Now it is not altogether wrong that I adopt this approach, because I am interested in the problem of running embodied procedures, of setting myself a task and then dutifully following my own instructions. And this is really a straightforward process. There is nothing especially inspired or ecstatically phenomenological about it. It just has to be plainly and simply done and then just as plainly and simply described. No point also in writing too much because people get bored. I am thinking of people generally, but also myself particularly. What do any of us care about the actual process of my walking? Nonetheless, I will continue to describe it. There are another five walks to go. Who knows how similar or different they can be?

Mountain bike jump (prior to falling down)

I had thought of using the cut out metal squares as pages in a book. They would be drilled out with small holes in a grid-based fashion to represent a vision of multiple suns. The first square would contain one sun right at the centre of the square. The second square would contain two suns, one in the centre of the left side and the other in the centre of the right side. The third would have four at the centre of each quarter and so on, until the final square contained 128 suns/holes.

Study for suns

This would have transposed two additional interests – the representation of the sun (and the multiplicity of the sun) and the nature of digital counting. In some ways I like this idea, but then what would have happened to the simple idea of cutting out and assembling square sections of illegally dumped car bodies? It seems preferable to avoid additional layers of meaning. At least for now.

I have decided to collect seven squares altogether and link them together with hinges. They will be arranged concertina fashion so that both the outer and the inner skins are visible.

Seven squares demands seven walks.

Mid-afternoon start again. Contemplating walking over in the direction of Broker’s Nose. It’s a long trip that involves heading most of the way up Mt Keira, then north to the freeway and across into a marshy expanse of bush that holds, as far as I can recall, a bogged and abandoned 4wd vehicle. But after walking for a little while and noticing that there are only a couple of hours left in the day, decide to work with the first dumped car that I encounter.

I’m expecting that’ll be up at the “Jumpers” – a top section of the Mt Keira circuit that seems to have been named precisely in terms of the suicidal trajectory of the various wrecked cars. Before I even get there, however, I see a set of green car panels down in the bush beside the path.

I decide upon an appropriate panel, this time a bit more scratched and rusted than the first one, and take a set of photographs of its original state. Then I cut out a square section with the grinder. I notice the burning smell of the cutting and the hot sparks against my legs. Even though I am close to the path and road this time, I have no sense of being observed. Once again it is something about the ear muffs and the neatly defined procedure that lends the process a curious sense of inexorability.

The process reminds me of tattooing. Both activities involve piercing skin and are similarly methodical. It is reassuring and addictive to cut out the shape of the square and neatly lift it free of the framing panel.

I take some more photographs, gather up my gear and the square, and head back in the direction of home. For some reason the edge of the square is more ragged this time, with occasional shards of steel sticking out. I need to hold it carefully, shifting it from hand to hand.

Halfway back, I realise that I am enjoying the walking portion of the event more today. It feels more just like normal walking. I am less concerned to hurry things up.

Just off the track

Green skin

Cut out

Square piece