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Returning to Cairns in 1994 after a three year absence I noticed that much had changed. Gone was the athmosphere that had attracted me to this tropical paradise of North Queensland as early as the mid seventies . The city and its surrounding rain-forest and beaches then were like mystical havens of peace and tranquility. Much of its vegetation now is being cleared to make room for magnificent mansions surrounded by manicured gardens not unlike those I was used to in the big cities , where I had lived for most of my life and what I had wanted to escape from .

Seeing these rapid changes from what it first was a "sleepy coastal town in the tropics" into a busy "tourist destination" got me to create nearly 70 paintings expressing my feelings about these changes.

The series was given four showings ,the last one being at the Queensland Arts Council Gallery in Brisbane . The exhibition in Brisbane was in conjunction with poetry created by Poet Victor Barker who like myself was also from Cairns and who also had felt these rapid changes. Victor had moved away and now lives in Sydney while I stayed on.

I had always loved the freedom of the tropics where every thing lives and grows as it pleases no matter how much we , who came to enjoy its beauty tend to interfere. It is this freedom in all that is surrounding me that gives me the incentives I look for when creating my art. The other is a profound love and respect I have for past history from the early settlers to the migrants of the fifties and later years . How these first settlers were responsible for having laid the foundation of what is now Cairns , a tropical paradise ,.. "cité de mon coeur".

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