Washed away in the flood.

 In a year full of historic events, Brisbane experienced a 'once in a century' flood event in February. Except we also had one eleven years ago.

My house was all safe in spite of 80% of our usual annual rainfall arriving in one week, and I was just about to breath a sigh of relief. Then I was notified that my art and document archive, located in a storage unit in inner Brisbane, was inundated, and closed until the water had gone down and it was safe to enter.

Two days later we were allowed in, and water had reached chest height in my unit. Many things were out of reach of the water, but more things had been drowned. The entire exhibition of art painted on books, which I showed at Toowong Library (there's a post about it with pictures further down the page), had to be thrown away. Lots of other works on paper had to go, but I'm doing my best to salvage The Fiddle Icons series, which are oil on board with gold leaf. They are in a muddy state of disrepair, but they seem stable, so I've started by working my way through the archive of family documents and photos. Many photos have been too badly damaged to save, and I'm deeply sad to see family history for the Murray, Fenwick, Mathiesen and Gilchrist families in Scotland, England, Denmark and North Queensland and Victoria, in ruins. 

I'm scanning many things, and then disposing of many of them. Some are able to be saved. I've been doing this for two weeks now, and I can see an end somewhere in sight. There is a lot of grieving to be done while peeling apart all these papers. Thank you to many of my dear friends who helped with all sorts of things, from moral support to hefting wet things out of storage, to helping with logistics and acquiring a dehumidifier (one of the world's wonders).

At the moment, I'm not too proud to say all donations to my "donate" button will be gratefully received.