Bestowed with a writer's grant from the Queen's Trust, I packed my Kombi Volkswagen to make my way along the Australian Dingo fence.

My destination became a remote roadhouse, Cameron Corner Store, three hundred kilometres north of Broken Hill in outback New South Wales.

It was here my car broke down. Had the engine not failed, I may have continued my journey to Broome and never had this story to tell.

I made my camp-site near a 1952 silver Leyland double-decker bus. Once used as a stockmen's camp, now abandoned on the vast wilderness of Wild Dog Flat. This became my makeshift studio over the course of the next six years. Not far from my camp site there was a lonely gravestone. The epitaph read;

To the memory of Eliza

who died January 1886

Aged 32 years

Her charity covereth a multitude of sins

I was told by a local windmill builder that Eliza was a young woman who had lived down by the waterhole. She would spend her nights with the stockmen camped nearby.

I wondered how she had died... Was it from fever?

Had the stockmen abandoned her for fear of catching disease?

They say her body was discovered by a traveling clergyman from Broken Hill who finally laid her to rest.

I slept near Eliza's grave and felt her silent presence seeping into my solitude. I allowed her spirit to share my seclusion.

By her waterhole, she began to breathe new life. Her twisted feet, her skin covered in tatoos appeared, hidden amongst my charcoal lines.