For over fifty years Juan Cortez has been walking the paths of the Helia Bravo Hollis botanic garden. From the entrance to the top of the hill and the viewing platform.  He knows more than anyone, the regional plant’s properties, its animal’s behaviours, the geography of its mountains and the history of his ancestors, that lived for generations in the same place. He survived one of those, so mexican, earthquakes perched at the top of the viewing platform.   He knows which pla

Located in Mexico’s Central Valley, between the years 200 bc and 650ac, Teotihuacán was a huge religious centre, perhaps the most important in Mesoamerican history. It’s name comes from the náhuatl Word which means “Place of the Gods”. The two principal centres are the one dedicated to the Moon and the one dedicated to the Sun.  In the Avenue of the Dead there are a number of building from where the elites saw the religious ceremonies.   A distinctive Teotihuacán art forms we

It was built on top of Tenochtitlán, the city of the Mexica, the water-city. Reclaimed from the lake and sprinkled with the blood of animal and human sacrifices.   Destroyed and rebuilt for centuries, by conquest, war and revolutions, shaped by religious and political leaders, workers and builders.   Its architects, like the ancient ones, keep on building monuments for its gods, functional, huge and beautiful. We are impressed  and seduced by their size, we are reminded how s

In his “Incomplete history of Mexico”, Eduardo Galeano tells us that the Mexica funded the city on a hill overlooking a huge lake, when one of their chiefs saw an eagle sitting on a nopal eating a serpent.  As the city grew it was connected by canals and thousands of canoes transporting materials, food and traded goods.   For hundreds of years the inhabitants reclaimed land from the lake until it disappeared, becoming fields, roads, houses and neighborhoods. Today the Mexico

Where  nothing is something and nowhere is somewhere a place alive in its stillness a faint idea of the land its ranges, its dry creek...

There is no palette just a deep red of the earth a featureless black of loose rocks the woody pale yellow of spinifex a clear hue of the...

Standing on a sea of burnt trunks of piles of ash and loose objects under a grey cloudy sky away from the bitumen and dirt roads the...

Sunday 24th of August 2025 And we got together, in the thousands, and we took over the street,  and flocks of birds joined the clamour,...

A photograph of a mural depicting Vincent Lingiari and Gough Whitlam

Under the uncertain surface, lies, still untamed, a land of contradictions layers of thought, upon layers of history, upon faint...

The west side of the creek in shade. afternoon passing by hot East side still basking in the sun. Afternoon passing by.   A Southerly...

We are going up the waterfall.   Up the waterfall? Go up on high country and hike around?   No, we swim across the river, packs floating...

The sign of something else something lost, not quite recovered a meandering creek, sneaking down the escarpment following the fractures...

The ripples of an ancient shoreline exposed by water, wind and time rock shades of red, pinks and greys deep contrast with the trees and...

This is rock country he said   I thought this is rock country sky country water country   deep time ever present etched on the land the...

There is lightness in the early morning the murmur of the creek on its way down the escarpment the sound of the pandanus leaves rocking...

We walk through burnt country feels safe                         opened up due East samplings, old trees burnt, their ashes spread,...

Here country has a heart of stone roots are its veins skins of shrubs, of paperbarks, of dry sharp grass. Here Country has emerald green...

There is a palm contrasting the sandstone precipice the iron-red of the rocks ancient seas weathered by the wind, rains and time Two...

Looking for food in the darkness I hear the creek falling down I hear the creek down below splashing into a pool The rocks smooth lost is...