Heading north towards a closing year. The takeaway boulevards, the shallow oppression of urban importance engulfed by the oncoming days. Till the company in the car swung back on itself. Till soon we were scoping the 9th Maleny Folk Festival, an idea that had gathered charm by the country mile.

Mid afternoon found us in a daze of spacious hospitality. Our camp sat four kilometres from a puffing cluster of tepees, tents, cars and bongs which encased the festival site.

Me, my brother Rhys and the writer Neil at our camp pictured soon after our arrival

Dry cobwebs, disfugured chairs, rotting white goods peeling back into the earth. Suspended stakes of dying steel reminding us of the optimism natural elements sometimes show. The lines of earlier communications and material meaning had rusted, fallen into overgrown grass.

Amid all this, sitting back and listening to the hum of a closing day, wandering over the compound, we punched a few back, fell to night in a strangely gathered way. Our surrounds crept as day drew by.

The final morning of 1994 found us well tarnished. We made our way across the plains to the road piled long with goers our way. The walk to the festival site was an event in itself. Disorientation, a touch of bad luck and a very real weirdness had us being chased off the road by Mad John’s lonely stretch bus service.

Well blunted, happy and bleeding, we finally wandered through the Festival gates. Set adrift with an anonymous spectacle. The immediate size undermind by interrelated values, objects, opinions. Focus became a complication. Loose momentum complemented a well tattered attention span. Each site a welcome view, usually engaging, vaguely familiar, uncontained:

A young boy aged by his hold of the sax blew out steam tunes.

Secret alleys, ones you could discover a day late, with maybe light rain for shade.

A black poet, full of travel, hallowed with crows that have counted all his miles.

Eyes with solitude and pride.

Invisible corridors scratched out by fairies of secret flight.

Soul mates stretched across life times.

Liquor sheds planted with greased celebration.

Calm beauty drifting by, staring you in the face with a spacious grin.

Neil Campbell

For approximately six months (1993) I had been consulting on a new magazine that was to become ‘Oyster’. My choice of name for it was ‘Frank’ and about one year later the ‘Face’ magazine opened a new title called ‘Frank’ That was my first dissapointment and there were many others. Through my consultation I had advised that the magazine set about including landscape unique to Australia and that would hold appeal to an international audience. It was also my intention to connect with a domestic airline once we had produced the first magazine and negotiate a sponsorship in order for us to continue to travel to remote and unqiue locations throughout Australia.

Fingal Head was a place I had visited numerous times and had huge personal appeal. It was inside the Bundjalung Nation, the Cudgingburra people called Fingal Head "buninybah" meaning "home of the echidna". (it was the lava flow from Mt. Warning / Wulambiny Momoli). The name was "Europeanised" because the headland has an outcrop of columnar-jointed basalt which was named the 'Giant's Causeway' because it looked like a similar natural feature near either Fingal in Northern Ireland or Fingal Cave on the Scottish Island of Staffa. Fingal was a mythological Celtic giant who tried to build a causeway over the ocean.

It was a big commitment to travel there, over 800 km’s in a rental car I had paid for personally..bags of clothes, lighting, a hair and make-up artist, Nick and a young married couple, Baz and Melissa. They had been married for two years, Melissa being 16 when they did. She was a Texan who’s speech reminded me of Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde and when I explained the journey and my intentions she purred ‘I Just Love Road Trips…’

Getting Baz and Melissa motivated proved difficult, all they were interested in was smoking pot. On the final day when Melissa wore her own t-shirt ‘Marijuana Girl’ I instantly thought she IS ‘Marijuana Girl’. I took pictures of her in it in front of a building known as ‘The Hard Luck Klub’ but started to think about shooting her in it again later that night as a ‘pin up’.

I also realised the ‘Hard Luck Klub’ was owned by people I knew. They owned a shop in Surfers Paradise called ‘Limbo’ and the hat Barry was wearing was mine and I had bought it from Limbo about five years before.

We shot the session in our rented house sometime after dinner. She was actually smoking her homemade bong and would put it out of shot and exhale the smoke.

It proved to be the last picture we took for the entire series.

When the story was published by the Magazine I was upset to see they had spelt the name of Fingal Head incorrectly..thus destroying any hope of approaching a domestic airline for sponsorship as I had intended to do. My financial investment in traveling such a distance wasted.

I had put a lot of research hours into the editiorial before I actually shot the story. Location scouts etc..

What was forever drawing me to the place was the contenment of the locals in their pace and rhythm. I concluded that it felt anti-capitalist without intent.