11/09/2026
Some places stay with you.
Not as a photograph.
Not as a memory you can quite put into words.
But as a feeling.
I stood before Uluru in 2007.
Almost twenty years later, I still carry the impression of that place with me.
There is something about Uluru that is difficult to explain. A great red presence rising from the earth, surrounded by an immense stillness. You can look at a photograph and recognise it immediately, but the photograph cannot hold what happens when you are actually there.
It is something you feel more than see.
Next month marks 30 years since I began to call Australia home.
Thirty years of living beneath these skies, walking this land, building a life here. I feel enormous gratitude for that.
And yet, beneath that gratitude is an awareness that this was never simply a place waiting for me to arrive.
This land already had its people.
Its stories.
Its memory.
Its deep and ancient knowledge.
Long before I knew this place as home, it was Country.
We hear Acknowledgements of Country so often now that the words can become almost invisible. But I have never made one that came from somewhere personal.
So perhaps this is mine.
Not an attempt to speak for Country, or to speak for stories that are not mine to tell.
Just a pause.
A recognition of the privilege of being here.
Of standing on land whose memory stretches far beyond my own. Of encountering something so ancient that it makes a human lifetime feel almost weightless.
Uluru has stood through thousands upon thousands of seasons.
And I stood there for a moment.
Then I left.
But somehow, it never quite left me.
This tapestry is my way of returning to that moment.
Of following a memory that has been quietly waiting inside me for almost twenty years.
Thread becoming form.
Form becoming memory.
Memory becoming something I can finally hold.
For the land.
For its ancient presence.
For those who have belonged to it since the beginning.
And with gratitude, for being allowed to call this place home.
