It may be festival time in Adelaide but for the last week or so I've been painting the outside of the inner city apartment, and I have had little time to do much photography or to explore the various festivals. I just go the local gym, come home for breakfast, paint, walk the dogs in the Adelaide parklands at the end of the day, then pretty much collapse. I'm now sick of the painting. It is tedious.

On the other hand, painting gave me plenty of time to think. I found myself thinking about the ruins and decay in Tasmania--modern industrial ruins--including the useless or old or unusual—an aesthetics of decay. Associated with this is a cultural pessimism—a world conscious of its decline because of the abandoned houses and mines eroding or decaying under the elements as nature reclaimed them. Dereliction and decline in particular places such as Queenstown and Zeehan.

What we have is the cyclical nature of capitalism, whereby new industries suggest rational progress, but only at the expense of destroying old industries, entails a reworking of space in which disorder and mutability are suppressed. If there are any new industries in Queenstown and Zeehan then these are tourism.

Places come and go as people move on or abandoned them because capital has moved on and there are no jobs. The place no longer exists and it is mourned because of the loss.