Day 28 Saturday

Early start to meet with Dean Keep who is a media artist using mini-narratives on mobiles and doing a Masters at RMIT. He has arranged a lift out to see Lyndal Jone's Eco House project out at Anvoca. We pick up our lift in Brunswick and after a first torrential rainstorm arrive in time at Lyndal's for a seminar on sustainable practice. Very happy to meet up with Sue McCauley and Michael Buckley-who I hadn't seen for ten years and Debbie Ely who I last saw in Bristol 20 years ago at Watershed when curating a new media exhibition, before she moved out here permanently.

The house is beautiful and impressively restored. After lunch we go on a walkabout with Peter Andrews an ecologist who wrote "Back from the Brink"- and is busy pulling up weeds and explaining how with a lifetime's experience of working the land he has seen the landscape change. Having watched and experimented with the movement of water, he has observed the importance of biodiversity - weeds included. And has concluded that to save Australia we need to return the landscape to its original systems.

We dash back to Melbourne for a meal at the Panama club-one of Melbourne's hidden and exquisite nightspots and then on to Mike Stubb's leaving party, where I find just about everyone I know in OZ-Sean Cubitt with Melinda Rackam and Julianne Pearce who happen to be over from Adelaide. A mighty gathering of the digirati and a very nice barbi to boot. I stay at Mike and Sue's to get an early train back to Bendigo for an open studio session in the morning.