IN 2008, I made an impetuous decision to rent the manager’s cottage on a rural property on the outskirts of Bundanoon, a picturesque village in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Bundanoon is situated where Gandangara and Dharawal countries meet; its name is thought to be a corruption of a Dharawal word meaning ‘deep ravine’ or ‘place of deep gullies’. Soon after I moved there, Uncle Max, a well-known Elder of the Yuin people, warned me that behind the seductive beauty of the area there was something dark. He had been approached to do some healing work there following a cluster of suicides in August and September 1997, but funding wasn’t approved and he didn’t get the chance to carry out the cleansing rituals he’d planned. The suicides were not the only deaths in the area that called for healing work: between 1989 and 1992, seven backpackers had been brutally murdered in the nearby Belanglo State Forest.

Driving into the village on a sunny day in mid 2018, my mind was occupied not by such disturbing matters but rather by the loveliness of a Japanese-style brown and olive-green glazed bowl. It was the last survivor of a set I had bought from a talented Bundanoon-based potter when I lived there almost a decade earlier. Hoping to buy some more of his work, I drove past the olde-worlde shop fronts of the main street and made a beeline for his studio.