During a roadtrip to Melbourne in January 2023 we stayed a couple of nights in the Victorian Wimmera. The stopover on the return to Victor Harbor in South Australia was a pet friendly cottage along the Western highway between Stawell and Horsham. When we walked around the property in the early morning with Maleko, our silver standard poodle, I was suprised to see so much water in the farm dam.

Whilst walking around the dam I recalled Arthur Boyd’s Irrigation Lake, Wimmera 1950 that was done during month’s residency in Horsham in the Wimmera region in the autumn of 1950. Boyd’s Wimmera paintings highlighted the dryness of this wheat region of the Mallee country. The farm dam I was looking at was quite substantial and we were only 30 kilometres from Horsham.