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"I have never been to Australia, but I’ve inhabited a self-created mythical version of it through the many ways Australia has been used as a liminal place. Its landscape, its native aborigines and their rituals, its history and environment all combine to create a place in my mind that modern humans try to master but refuse to understand. There is something alien about Australia. I imagine the girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock being drawn to something in its landscape and somehow crossing over from this world to another, leaving behind unanswered mysteries regarding their disappearance, haunting and seductive and calling me to explore the country myself. Would I understand the place any more than anyone else? Would I want to, or would I just want to experience the surreal mystery of straddling the border between our world and another?

"I used to celebrate Samhain. The "veil" between this life and the afterlife is supposed to be thinnest at that time, and I imagined it was a day in which I could be the closest to my mother. I wondered what was actually meant by the "veil" separating the worlds. Was it a piece of translucent fabric? A penetrable membrane? Could my mother reach through that border and touch me on one specific night of the year? Could I cross that border and physically vanish from this world? Would the people I left behind seek the answers to my disappearance, or would I haunt my friends imaginations.

"When I was a child I had a dream about the end of the world. Humanity knew the end was near, and collectively chose to walk into the ocean and drown together. In my dream I was standing on the shore holding my dad’s hand, feeling scared at the journey ahead of me and sad that it had to happen. Years later I discovered the work of many, many artists also haunted by the idea of a "drowned world." There wasn’t a sense of a heaven or hell, just a crossing between two worlds. The world we would enter after embracing death was a mystery.

"These things were all on my mind as I listened to my friend John talk about Sarah’s disappearance. They had lived together for a number of years when she became depressed and gradually withdrew into herself little by little, becoming more quiet, more still, more haunted. She wouldn’t talk about what she was going through, but later John found the journals she had been fervently writing in at the time and discovered drawings and paintings and photographs stranger than anything he’d ever seen her produce as an artist. Ghosts seemed to be inhabiting the same space as living people aware of their presence and able to talk with them. One drawing showed what appeared to be a man pulling at the fabric of the world around him, rendering what should have been a solid three dimensional world into nothing more than a backdrop hiding another dimension behind it. Holes appeared and disappeared in all of the scenes she had created, and figured of people walked through these holes without looking back.

"One night John woke up to find Sarah was not in bed with him. He got up and searched the house for her, finally finding her in a corner of her studio. She was naked, shaking, sweating, and completely unaware of his presence or his attempts to talk her back into bed. She was hugging her knees into her chest and staring past him, as though focused on something that just wasn’t there. He sat with her for hours and eventually fell asleep only to find both of them back in bed in the morning as thought it was a dream. This dream repeated itself every night for a week, until the last night he had it. In that dream Sarah was more tense and frantic than she had been previously. When he awoke the next morning, she was gone. There was no sign that she had been sleeping in their bed, and no sign that she had been in her studio the previous night as she had been in what he had thought was a dream.

"John never found her. He read and re-read her journals and studied the drawings she had made those last few months. Her writing indicated an obsession with the unseen, with another world that she was intent on traveling to. He believed that she had somehow managed to cross that boundary, leaving this world. He knew he wouldn’t see her again."