When we came to Monto and ‘Rawbelle', which is a big cattle property, I heard that Flying Arts travelled to Monto and Theodore and that you could have painting and drawing lessons. It wasn't until we moved closer to Theodore that I was able to access them. I heard that Mervyn Moriarty was ‘god' to everybody who went to Flying Arts. This would have been about 1974 and my first tutor was Bela Ivanyi who almost cured me of doing anything more about art. There was a little old lady who had been on a trip to New Zealand and she very carefully pinned the postcards to her easel and had done a perfect reproduction of the postcard. Bela didn't seem to have a very high opinion of that at all. He said some rather cruel and hard things to her and I thought, if this man is going to talk to people like that I think I'd better get out of here. I didn't go back the next day because we had three inches of rain, I honestly could have if I'd wanted to, but I used the rain as my excuse. Brisbane watercolourist, Wilson (George) Cooper, gave me some lessons. He would sit beside me and every now and then touch my hand and say, "Stop tickling your painting Ellie."

I heard that Mervyn was flying in to Monto, and because it was Mervyn, I thought I'd give it another go, so I loaded up the one ton truck with great big paintings - about six. They barely fitted on the tray of the truck and I took them over for Mervyn to have a look at. He was really very kind and very helpful because they were not good paintings.

My work changed fairly rapidly and there were other influences besides Flying Arts, but Flying Arts was the only consistent one. I think what Mervyn managed to get through to me was that it is not just a matter of getting the paint down. That's fairly important because even if you do things that are just random marks you still have to think about the random marks before you make them.

I only ever had Mervyn once as a tutor because I came in right at the end of his time. At that time it was purely a hobby, I had no vision of doing anything other than painting purely for a bit of pleasure. I have always worked very loosely and thought it was awful because it was loose. When I ran up against Irene Amos I realised that painting loosely might be a good thing to do rather than a bad thing. I think, looking back, my work was more representational than anything else. When I fell off a horse and did considerable damage to my neck and shoulders, and the use of my arms was limited for a time, I thought my great painting career would be gone forever. I was introduced to etching by Peter Indans at the Institute at Rockhampton and I just liked the way marks were made on the plate.

Eventually I needed an etching press. I tried driving the car over sheets of tin and lifting the corner of the house with a wallaby jack and letting it down but nothing worked – it didn't print. I got a press with compensation for my injured neck and we had a party when it arrived. Roy Orloff attended this party as he was one of the Flying Arts tutor. I often had the tutor and the pilot to stay.

Beverley Budgen, Jeanne Macaskill, Wendy Mills and Ruth Propsteen were also important to the development of my work. When I was well enough again, I just picked up every workshop I could go to. I went to Flying Arts and the McGregor Summer School and to Irene Amos, and John Rigby when I was coming out of using only black and white or sepia and cream. That was all I could do in etching and I wanted to learn colour. There were just a huge number of people that had input and they were all very generous with their time and their friendship. I remember saying that it wasn't a good idea to send the same tutor for two years because you started to paint like they did and it was better to sample the work of a range of tutors so that you didn't become the clone of anybody.

Bev brought laughter, to be able to look at your work and to realise that it wasn't any big deal and not to be to precious about it. She certainly taught me to laugh at myself - nothing's precious. It helped at exhibitions when people would comment that any kid could do the work. I think what John and Irene did was to make you think about what you were doing. It wasn't just a blank mind and a hand creating. It was: if I do this what will it do to that, and if I do this how many more changes will I have to make before it will work again?

I tend to work in series and it has been about the land because that has been my experience. I won the easel painting section of the Martin Hanson Memorial Art Competition twice in the last ten years. Each section would have two or three hundred entries.

When I first looked at the bottle trees I was dammed if I was going to paint those things. Everybody else did so I wasn't going to. Then I walked down the hill here and felt the bark. They almost took on a human life of their own and they simply demanded to be a decorative part of the landscape. I don't know how, but they just made me do it. After drawing bottle trees for about five years I thought I could draw bottle trees that weren't really bottle trees and they developed quite sinuous lines of their own. Sometimes they'll appear to be talking to each other in bottle tree language and sometimes they will be turning their backs on brigalow trees which also live around here. There are two different types of bottle trees and I couldn't do one without the other. There will always be both kinds in the painting, they seem to belong.