Diana Boyer

After three years of sales of my memoir, Left Field, I have decided to publish an illustrated vesion on my website  It is appearing in installments. With this in mind I contacted Norman Boyer to ask if he had photos of life on his family's Argentine estancia, taken at the time of my stay in the early 1960s.  He kindly sent me some great shots that bring my time there back into vivid memory. You can see them in the chapter 'Gaucho & Sailor'.
His wife's brilliant watercolours are in the Diana Boyer collection at the National Museum of Australia and I would like to pay tribute to her work here.
This is what the NMA say about her art:
Diana witnessed violent conflicts between student protesters and soldiers acting on behalf of the military government. Largely in response to this political turbulence and the brutal persecution of dissidents, Diana and her husband Norman decided to leave Argentina. They migrated to Australia in 1980 and in 1981 they bought Bobbara Creek.
The Boyers ran a mixed grazing and cropping farm near Binalong, about 100 kilometres north-west of Canberra, while Diana continued to work as an artist.
After a series of wet years in the 1980s and 1990s, drought took hold across south-east Australia. Temperatures rose. As scientific warnings mounted of an impending climate catastrophe, Diana’s work focused on the local ecological effects of global warming in the Binalong district.
One of Diana’s major works was the Time Change animation completed in 2006. Using a series of watercolour works, the powerful and at times whimsical animation shows the life of a female farmer in the Binalong district in the future, when global warming has profoundly altered patterns of farm activity and the land.
‘Time Change’, Diana Boyer collection is at the National Museum of Australia