“Winter 2021, my wife and I on a trip through SW Qld. Covid had closed the borders so you could travel all day hardly seeing a soul. The country is arid, hard, beautiful. Vehicle tracks are ubiquitous. I started thinking of 4WDs in TV commercials as modern-day Ned Kellys roaming the landscape, as hard, dangerous and inscrutable as Sidney Nolan's outlaw. This painting's title, 'Be what you wanna be', comes from one of these ads. It's part of a series called 'The Enormous Vastness', borrowing a line from Kev Carmody's 'Droving Woman'. The landscape is hard country north of Birdsville.”