So Rita and Stewart and I are united again.

Our two hour meeting turned into a three hour meeting and Stew and I left Rita - slightly overcaffinated - in a cafe in North Fitzroy, whereupon she began another meeting with someone else. Stew had two massive mochas in quick succession and is now speaking in tongues. I have a brain ache, a stomach ache, a back ache, and, thanks to a late night, a condition I have diagnosed as "droop eye".

Standing There united will never be defeated * except for maybe sometimes.

In other news...

We have many alert readers here at the Standing There Diary. One particularly alert reader deserves a specific mention, however, not merely because she managed to spend a day in the Olympic village disguised as an albino Tongan (seriously) but also because she has emailed me a wombat-related-fact of the utmost importance. Given my time at Bundanon and obsession with all things wombat-related, I am particularly grateful to know this fact, and I share it with you now as a service to the public.

Wombats are the only creatures who poo squares.

Have a nice weekend. xxx

This weekend, there's a Standing There reunion.

That means Rita and Stew and I will be hitting various coffee shops in inner urban Melbourne and discussing everything from scripts to videos to the now rather cliched question of whether or not turning up to Bundanon uninvited and setting up camp would, after a time, constitute adverse posession thereby enabling us to live there forever by law.

Looking forward to it, especially the nice chai and seeing Rita again.

Having spent a month at Bundanon doing an artists' residency, returning to be what can only be described as a daily slogger in residence, there are certain things I really miss about Bundanon:

1. Silence.

2. Wombats.

3. The fact that when you turn the hot tap on, the lights dip.

4. My new friends.

5. Arthur.

Being a Daily Slogger In Residence is sadly not quite as rewarding, although financially it has a little more to say for itself, and I have traded in the above for ready access to good coffee.

I've been putting this off. I sort of thought if I didn't update this page then nobody would know I'd left Bundanon and maybe neither would I.

Sadly, I have outsmarted myself.

I have been thrown back into the thick of things and am currently in Melbourne on my lunch break from work.

Here are some observations about the country versus the city that I've made over the past month:

- Country people don't use plastic bags in shops. Some country towns have a NO PLASTIC BAG POLICY. People in the city do not. Why is this?

- People in the city are angry drivers.

- Someone in the city is always unwell and coughing on public transport and looking miserable. This reminds me of John Brack, which reminds me of Bundanon and Julia and the Nolans and Arthur and cups of tea and wombats and fresh air and outrageously coloured birds.

- Work, while useful, is not as stimulating as it might be, if, say, it were near the Shoalhaven River.

- The coffee in the city is nice. I am unconvinced this makes everything else worthwhile.

So is this guy:

Dear Arthur and Yvonne Boyd,

You don't know me but I've been living at your place. For almost a month. So have two of my friends. We didn't have any parties or leave cigarette marks in the couches or anything (none of us smoke - I did spill some beer on my favourite chair, the white one that looks out my studio window - some of the beer got into my DVD drive and I ended up having to sit there for forty minutes blow-drying my laptop with Rita's hair dryer... but other than that you should find it as you left it).

Over the last three and a bit weeks, I've done more work here than I've ever had a chance to do in one stretch in my life. I've written what I came here to write and I've written things I never saw coming. Stew is a cinematographer and he's been experimenting as well - with stills photos and video. We've combined our efforts in some short videos we're going to post on the website over the next month. In the last week, Rita and Stew and I have had massive meetings, huge debates, workshops and hard slog sessions getting things done by a deadline we can actually meet. Purely on a practical level, the three of us being so busy and so rarely in the same place the rest of the time, this has been an astonishing opportunity.

So I'd like to thank you, and your family who could have inherited this place, for donating it to the Australian people and for instigating the Artists In Residence program, which (and I know I'm prone to exaggeration - it wasn't forty minutes with the hair dryer, it was twenty) I'm pretty sure has changed my life. The inspiring environment, the historical and artistic legacy of the place, and the fact that other artists and school groups and travelers will come here, will look out this window, will stand in Arthur's studio and smell the paints... it makes you want to keep doing what you're doing. It makes you treasure your solitude, find your natural rhythm, collaborate in new and interesting ways, and develop an unnecessarily obsessive interest in wombats.

I've learned a lot about you and about Australian art through your collection and the addictively well-informed Julia and Jen who have generously provided me with access to everything from postcards and phone messages to Picasso and Nolan and books about you guys and what you got up to (or did you? hard to tell).

Rita and Stew and I were talking about whether we would, if we could, donate something as beautiful as this place to the Australian people. We decided the hardest thing would be: you'd want people to use it properly. You'd want them to understand it, to love it as much as you did. We realised, as we came home to pack our stuff away and go back to our real lives, that we'd be (despite our best intentions) a teensy bit jealous if someone we knew got a residency here. We'd feel possessive and dislocated. So we decided maybe that would be the worst part - letting go and hoping it turns into what you intended it to turn into.

So, we'd like you to know this place is integral to Standing There Productions now - all our future projects will, in a way, come out of this. Maybe if you saw our work, you wouldn't like it, maybe you would. Thank you for the artists in residency program especially because of that.

For what it's worth, I think the residency program is run exactly how you'd like. Everyone here has the perfect approach (we've been left alone to do what we need to do but after a few days it feels like home - everyone is lovely and we're always reminded of artists and their work - which makes it feel worth doing and worth loving). I wonder if you know this. I wonder if you know that when you see someone coming (Barb, Tanya the visual artist, Tracie) you think "Oh goodie! Now I can catch up on the gossip!" Usuallay it's about the lamb (leg getting better), the next artist moving in (writer's cottage - pianist), how Tanya's work is going (interesting - what do you think about Koalas?) or something truly scandalous like the time Tanya went to Nowra and ended up being chased out of a bar by a bunch of 21 year-olds wanting to beat her up for sitting next to a boy with peroxide hair (Tanya: I don't F---n think so). It's a wonderful place to be, and that's not even factoring in the sunsets and the wombats.

We're leaving tomorrow morning. I'm about to pack up my studio. I have no idea how I'm going to cope back in the real world, but I will miss this place deeply. Rita and Stewart and I have been dragging our feet and sighing at sunsets and staring off into the middle distance on and off for the past few days and tomorrow is crunch time. Rita is going to live in Sydney. Stew and I are back to Melbourne. Today we spoke to some school groups in here and I found myself pointing to the Gonsky apartment and saying "I live over there". I don't, which is good, because other people deserve it, but should you ever need a house-sitter Yvonne, please let me know.

Yours,

Lorin Clarke. Standing There Productions.

I spilled beer in my laptop.

That is all.

Today, at Bundanon, gorgeously and relentlessly, it rained. Pretty much all day. Like this:

That bird on the post is, we think, a Bower Bird. This has created considerable excitement (they are velvety and sleek and proud and big and shy) as have the many other birds who spent the rain and post-rain periods dancing about being loud and excited. HOWEVER.

However. When you want to shoot a short video, and you have a limited time in which to do so, and the video requires sun, and you have spent the past few weeks preparing for it, and it is very much site-specific, you don't necessarily want it to rain. So Stew and Rita and I had to bench our plans of shooting a video and spend the day getting other things done instead.

This is Rita being very busy and important inside, away from the rain:

You will note our studio has changed a little since we first moved in. Yes there is still an adorable wombat on the back wall, but yes there is also a lot more clutter. This is called art.

Speaking of which, Rita and I went for a walk this afternoon just before the Bundanon people went home and guess whose light was on? Arthur's!

Yup, this is Arthur Boyd's studio, with the lights on, in the light rain. It made you wonder whether Arthur himself was somehow spirited back into the place. All very romantic and mysterious. We didn't look inside because we liked to think Arthur is with us on this rainy September day, listening to the sounds of the rain on his tin roof and the frogs in the pond. Was he there this afternoon, watching the mists lift from the hills after the downpour? 

Was he watching the kangaroos out his window as the dusk fell, just like I was?

Yairs. We're not so different, Arthur and I.

Or, sure, it could be one of the Bundanon peeps. Maybe. But you never know.

In other news, tonight we went on an evening excursion up the hill with some hummous and beer to the musicians' cottage, where a dancer/choreographer called Cobie is staying and working. We were invited because the musician (Stu - a different one) from the cottage down near us had agreed to play the gorgeous piano. We were treated to an excellent performance, an extended version of which is going to be played at the Opera House in Sydney next week. It was a pretty special Friday evening, as Rita pointed out later. That was when I thought to myself, Oh It's Friday! How nice!

Stu and Ash had walked in the dark, in the rain, to the musicians' hut holding only two candles (he had earlier proposed to her in the Bundaon hills). These are the candles. The lillies grow outside the cottage. You can't quite see him but Arthur is just out of shot, thinking the hummous was nice but maybe we could have brought some eggplant dip as well.

Either that, or it was Stew.

Either way.