This was the last painting done for the exhibition, but I really wanted to do this one - I wasn't just filling a space on a wall. It was around the time of the Sydney Olympics and, for a change, I painted just what I felt like - forgetting 'art' and integrity and stuff like truth.

I had only just taken a series of photos of the hills, towards evening, and green rather than bleached brown, and I was busting to put them into a painting, so it all just evolved around the landscape, the trapped monkey, the rings and everything else that was necessary to give it some semblance of reality. We had also just spent Christmas Day at the zoo, where I photographed gates, bars and cage doors - that particular door in the wall is in the tapirs' enclosure.

The flag had to go in to separate the wall from the sky and the pink flowers (I have a whole shelf of artificial flowers) to bring the cage bars to the front of the picture plane, in front of that bright green. No obscure 'meanings' at all.

**There is a comparison of my development in painting the Mount Lofty Ranges on the Compare Hills Page.