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bungles before st george
bungles before st george
acrylic on cardboard packing
2002

worked on a similar matte on Australia
movie many years later spookily
reminds me of St George that movie,
caused me a bit of a problem that
movie because I was not able to
express the dreamtime the way I
felt it, especially as I have been
alone at night in the bungles
dreamtime is not a real photographic
matte as Baz Luhrmann sees it
but a living surreal entity that
overtakes your mind. Few directors
have the power to go there.Still
Australia is a good movie
regardless.

Baz's bungles was shot on the lot in fox
studio, it sort of looked ok,
but if they had all camped and shot
as a small team in the central massif
of the bungles for a month, i think a
different reality would have emerged.
Maybe though it never emerges on
a film set, as the production is do
one shot, fast onto the next no time
to think, follow the storyboard.

The true nature of the bungles is not
felt until you walk kms along the
riverbed, at night in the fullmoon,
or from water undercut to the next,
to avoid the searing sun, your mind
lost in the mirage of heat,
conjuring up the spirits of the land,
still the razor sharp spinifex will
stop you wandering too far, at the base
of the bungles great swathes metres high
sit.

Painted in Dundas,sydney, aus

painting copyright phil whiteley