The room where I paint is at the furthest reach of the underground space. I share it with Marijose, a Mexican filmmaker in her early 30s. Gradually - ineluctably I’d say - her presence has influenced me profoundly. Our conversations are the kind you’d expect between two migrants, allowing for the difference in our ages, and a kind of shared past. Her parents had studied at UCLA as I had before moving to Australia, and the great metropolis of Los Angeles is of course Mexican in origin. Back in the 1970s when I imagined an academic career for myself it was to be in Latin American history, but that like many others was a dream discarded.

But when I moved the unfinished canvas to the studio and
began to work on it Marijose was the first to comment. ‘It looks just like Cuernavaca!’ That’s where her grandmother lived and where
she spent many school vacations. It’s
also where in 1975 a good friend took a three-month intensive Spanish course to
prepare for her stay in Mexico and our trip to Cuba. It is also now, alas, a centre of the
infamous Mexican drug wars.
All these bits entered into mix and the canvas morphed from Sydney suburbia with Cheeverian echoes to my inchoate dreams of Mexico and what I have come to name it - ‘Cuernavaca’. And it is clear that both canvasses have that feel about them. They are Mexican, in style, in colour. All of which, needless to say, was unconscious.
All these bits entered into mix and the canvas morphed from Sydney suburbia with Cheeverian echoes to my inchoate dreams of Mexico and what I have come to name it - ‘Cuernavaca’. And it is clear that both canvasses have that feel about them. They are Mexican, in style, in colour. All of which, needless to say, was unconscious.

I spent a good part of a year drawing and painting jaguars, as well as cougars or pumas, as they are in Mexico, though I’ve yet to get up the gumption to put one in the space left by the roses. I did other paintings instead, studies for that real one. Our space is filled with Mexico-inspired art, some of it completed, the rest works-in-progress. And suddenly, after the year had ended, I began seeing jaguars. Jaguars were everywhere. Not the animals themselves but their skins, or reproductions of them. Jaguar spots are everywhere. They dance before my eyes. I have seen them on bags, on scarves, on shoes, on boots, on umbrellas, on tights, on tops, on dresses, on hats, on underpants, on iPhone covers and upholstery. Then I saw the underpants modelled in Vogue and the accessories featured in the style pages of weekend magazines. Not a day goes by when I leave the house that I don’t see a woman with those spots covering her torso or her limbs or the bag she has slung over her arm. Twenty years ago leopards were the rage. Now it’s jaguars. It’s given me a very eerie feeling, as if I had unleashed these millions of spots myself.