Don't we all dream of escaping to somewhere different from where we are!
As a child I lived in a world of escaping, I did anything I could to get away from my mother, whether that meant hiding in my bedroom writing stories or playing games, riding my bike far away, or playing in the cubby house.
My mother didn't like my company and everything I did seemed to ignite her, even if I just sat there, so to avoid hostilities, I kept away.
We had just moved from Adelaide to Belgrave, Victoria and spent 99 days in a tent until a suitable house could be found.
That house was in the next town along in Monbulk, it was beautiful! down the back right corner of the property was a small chook shed, it was leaning to one side, it looked like the next puff of wind would see it fall like a house of cards!
My parents restored the house, my father went to knock the chook shed down, but I begged and pleaded for him to build it back up for me as a cubby house, so we worked on it together.
I found magazines under the floorboards, in the kitchen, dating back to the 1930's, I kept them and cut out the pretty pictures and put them on the walls of the cubby, mum made some curtains and before long I had a small playhouse.
I built a small fire pit out of disused bricks under the house, took an old frying pan from the kitchen from our camping days and some tea towels, I used it to cook chips in my house, real potatoes cut up and fried in oil, it was grand!
When I had a dream to paint my cubby, I decided to combine some other memories together to make one picture.
The memories were of the black eyed Susan flower we had draping over our garden shed and the beautiful Sherbrooke Forest, which spanned between Belgrave and Monbulk; we had no supermarket at the time, so we had to traverse the gorgeous road to Belgrave every week, with tall trees, ferns as far as the eye could see, to this day I still love this kind of road.
