I started going to adult education classes which eventually became TAFE. I started going to weekly classes, they had tutors. I joined the Royal Queensland Art Society and then Mervyn came and we went on from there. It was Mervyn who really started all of us in Rockhampton painting. Mervyn got in contact with the Royal Queensland Art Society in about 1971 and said he was coming up to interview the president. The president got all of us together and we met in the Royal Art Society rooms. Mervyn and Helen came and he told us what he was going to do. We put our names down and he came back and started the classes. I was at the first class.

Mervyn said he wanted us to paint the way we wanted to paint. He didn't try to force any particular style onto us. I don't know why but I just went semi-abstract straight off. I had had a little bit of training in technique from the adult education tutors but they weren't very good. They were just people who may have done a little bit of painting because there really wasn't very much in Rockhampton in the early days as regards art. I just started off and liked it, I hadn't even seen an art gallery until I came here.

I started doing Mervyn's art training workbooks but I use to do a tree and say it was representative and they would all say, "No it's not." Mervyn had developed a two-year course and we got a certificate at the end of it. He sent books up four times a year, I think it was, and then we did exercises from those books and when he came back he looked at what we had done and talked to us about it. We all enjoyed it and we all loved Mervyn so much.

If it looked like the plane couldn't come in, we would all be ringing up to see if he could get through in the little aircraft. When we first started we had people from Emerald and Gladstone coming here. We would all be sitting here waiting for Mervyn and some of us would go out to the aerodrome to pick him up. One day we went out there and there was something wrong with the plane. It was going round and round and the ambulance and fire brigade were going round and round on the ground below him. It was nothing much. He came down alright.

I was the rep during that time and we would have about thirty names down but they didn't all get there. Gradually it fell back a bit. One year Mervyn brought Clifton Pugh up and there were crowds for that. He also brought up David Ashton. Keith Looby came one year when Bela Ivanyi was doing the tutoring.

Cooee Bay has also been an influence on my work. By the time Kelvin Grove took over Eastaus Flying Arts. We had had residential art workshops in Tinarro on the Atherton Tablelands for a ten-day seminar in 1975. It was Bela's idea. He was living at Cairns at the time, and Flying Arts helped. Then we went to Highfield at Toowoomba in 1976 for a ten-day seminar. That covered the north and the south and the next was to be held in central Queensland.

We were in the middle of organising it when Kelvin Grove said they wouldn't take on the Cooee Bay camp. I can remember Bela going mad and saying we would ‘go it alone'. He said, "You can be the rep, you can take it on here." He organised the tutors in Brisbane and left the rest to us to do. That was in 1977. When it first started, only Bela did it and we used to all pay him $60. He paid his own accommodation. For quite a few years we used to be just about broke. One year I had to write to everyone and ask them all for $10 more and they all sent it. It was a marvellous concept, Cooee Bay. We were like a family we all helped each other.

One day I was painting away, and I use a big brush, and Mervyn came up behind me, I said, "I'm not thinking" and he said, "subconsciously you are," he said, "you've learnt everything and it's in your head." I do a lot of two-dimensional works and they look like aerials. Roy Orloff used to recognise that. I generally get an idea from something I see. If I'm painting I used to get so involved I would just forget to go to the toilet or have a drink.

We were supported by Flying Arts and the group and we just did what we wanted to do. We carried out what Mervyn had in his books when we started and then we went on. We had some awful things said about us. At one exhibition, put on by our group Central Queensland Contemporary Artists, one fellow said, "Look at those, I could paint them with a dirty rag." That sort of thing went on all the time and we weren't selling many paintings either. People would buy the nice gum trees and that sort of thing. I sold most of mine when I started selling to university people or high school teachers. Rockhampton people hadn't been exposed to much art at all at that stage. I think the whole art culture in Rockhampton has changed since then.