When after a one thousand two hundred kilometers almost continuous drive, we stopped outside one of these dirty and poorly painted wooden houses, which are nothing better than general stores, scattered every five hundred kilometers, to fill up the tank, have a cup of coffee, and possibly have a snack, I then had sore eyes – my eyes were burning, they seemed to be filled up with sand and in addition, I had the unpleasant feeling that they were abnormally swollen and were about to be litarally expelled from my orbits.

We had our tank filled with the precious liquid, drank a cup of coffee, ate anything and bought an Aboriginal style painting – we found it, rolled up in a corner of the shop, lost among rakes, pick handles, close to a pile of green pears boxes and fencing barbed wired coils, lived up like clockwork.

We didn’t miss such a nice painting thanks to my wife’s intuition. I paid the one hundred dollars required, as she was reading, at the back of the painting, what it was about – gas, coffee, food and masterpiece, the whole lot did not demand more than fifteen to twenty minutes.

After hardly fifteen seconds drive, I noticed in a loud voice that my eyes didn’t ache any more. I asked them what the painting ewactly represented ?

- It’s Kurrajong dreaming

- It is writtened «  we extract the root from which we got a sweet juice, which looks like milk. It is used to cure the flu, it is also used to clear infected eyes ».

That is a very and perfect illustration of the magie, in which I beleive, of travelling Aboriginal land.

Nicolas Kurtovitch Extract of TOTEM, book of short stories published in 1997