There were six or more piles of logs scattered across paddocks at a village called Charleston, SA. I took photos all round all of them but only this one, from this aspect, had the power which had made me stop and keep going back. In the absence of the owners, I even trespassed, to the fury of a couple of heeler dogs.

The actual logs were all pine, which has an ugly bark and is also difficult to paint effectively, so I filled the studio with branches, photos of River Red gums and a fallen Mallee gum tree, though native flora could not have been so wantonly hacked down and piled up.

Having made the dummy, I hesitated about using it - it went in quite late. As a UK migrant, I am familiar with the concept of a dummy on a bonfire, from Guy Fawkes Night, but once it was included I realised  that the Guy Fawkes reference was irrelevant anyway.

Also, I had intended to use several crows in the foreground, but the scale made them too small to have sufficient compositional weight, and the inevitable solution was the dog again.

**There are more notes on the dog on the Compare Use of Black Dog Page.