CHRIS CUST COMPLETES SEVENTY LAPS

My old mate Chris Cust visited today. He has just clicked seventy laps of the Sun. He painted that portrait of my dead brother Andrew looking out from the back of his hat. I think he's still the only westerner to be invited to paint backdrops for the Noh Theatre, which has run since the 14th century in Japan. 

Chris is a TPI Vietnam veteran whose current artwork is the settlers' cottage and garden he constantly retunes. 

Like Andrew and me, Chris is colourblind. He has to get help from a whatever you call em person with a Pantone chart to mix his colours. Andrew collected sheep ear tags from many stations he worked on and got a person who could do it to rank them in the colours of the rainbow, in order, to help with a reference should he have to talk colour in the bush. 

He was a bushman wise well beyond his years at nineteen. Here he is at the tailings dumps at Radium Hill, beside Devonborough Downs, the station he managed. He was always out there somewhere a day's drive north in the bush, ready to save me when society collapsed.

Andrew could survive in the desert. He had learned to find water.

He never came to town without a bag full of special snakes for the zoo and a whole mob of undescribed mosses for the Botanic Gardens and the Museum. He spent a lot of time lying on his stomach looking into cracks in the rocks with his pocket microscope.

He could always find a place in some little ordinary-looking gully where a cannabis plant would grow. He had a pet wedgie called Wolfgang. Wolfgang could come and go at will through the bedroom window.

This is the time of year when I remember Andrew's death with my beloved cousin Jennifer in a car crash on their way to our grandmother's funeral. Holy gothic fucking shit that was.

Two of my brothers, Stephen and Paul, somehow survived that prang. 

They got t-boned at Edenhope. Terry Plane helped me.

And here is the Chris, contemplating. Many have much to remember.