I woke up one morning with the house at Mt Buller in my head, and the whole of it arrived in the first second of being awake. Each of the four levels was one of the four elements. Earth, water, air, fire, bottom to top.
I spent that morning sketching it before I lost it. Then I went looking for someone who could paint it.
Earth
The underfloor was already earth. It is storage, dug into the hill, and it did not need anything done to it.
Water
A brick wall with a hole punched through it, and through the hole is the 1960s. Anything in the present is in colour. Anything back through the wall is sepia and black and white, except where the past bleeds forward into the front of it.
The house is on Beehive Lane, so there is honeycomb running down both top corners and over the mushrooms. We keep bees at Locksley as well. Mt Buller is full of rabbits and a few of them live in and around the ski house, so there is a hare sitting in the brickwork. The green Beetle is ours, and it is late 1960s, and so is the house, and so is the fire tower on top of the mountain. That is what the decade is doing in the wall at all.
The skier out the front is nobody in particular. She is a 1960s athlete in the clothes of the time, which is the whole point of her. On the chairlift behind her are Hans Grimus and his dog Captain. Hans came out from Austria in 1960 and built Hotel Pension Grimus at the end of the decade, and there is a bronze of the two of them on the original Bourke Street chair at the village entrance now.
The water itself runs blue under a stone bridge along the bottom. The card in the corner is the Ace of Cups, which is the water suit. Across the beam at the top is a line from Tool’s Pneuma.
Air
Alpine gums and gang-gangs, up the stairwell, airbrushed straight onto the wall like the water below it.
The two birds are Leah and me. He is above her with his head down and something in his beak for her.
Fire
The top level was fire, and by the time we reached it fire had stopped being an idea.
In January 2026 fire went through the whole farm at Locksley. The house and the shed were the only things that came out of it.
When we were getting ready to lose the house, I took one thing out of it. A Les Paul Custom.
The piece
The top level could not be a wall. It became a piece on composite board, made to hang, and Robi built it back in Tasmania. It was finished in early June, the last of the four.
It reads across. On the left it is Locksley in summer: the fire, the smoke, the dead trees, the ground still going underneath. The guitar grows out of the old wood. I am there as well, as a spaceman leaving the suit and going into the guitar through the green spirit vapour.
The house stands in the middle of it. Everything to the right of the house is Mt Buller, and that side is snow and blue ranges and the two of us again. I am on skis. Leah is up on the horse ahead of me, and there is a rope running between us.
That is the year, end to end. Dry grass and smoke at one end, snow and ice at the other, the same house in the middle of both, and Leah on the other end of the rope. All four levels went up in the one year, the year the fire came through.
The artist
The piece and the walls are the work of Robi Glimar, who works as The Glimar Man, out of Tasmania. He has been airbrushing for more than twenty years, across commission work, corporate and community pieces, and cars. He came up to Mt Buller for the water and the air, and made the fire and ice piece at home. He took my sketches and made them into something far past what I had drawn.
He has given me his blessing to use the imagery from this piece as the backgrounds on this site.
