"YOU can never make the same brushstrokes again."
That was the sad reality for many last month as they stood in front of the smouldering ruins of the Waltzing Matilda Centre in Winton, where hundreds of thousands of dollars of artwork went up in flames, along with many memories and dreams.
Karen Stephens was one of those feeling they had been punched in the stomach by the fire, but with the added emotion of losing one of her favourite paintings.
She grew up in Winton and her oil painting of her father's thongs, which was hanging on the walls of the Outback Regional Gallery, was a finalist in the John Villiers Waltzing Matilda Outback Art Show.
"I called it All-Terrain Flippers. It was wet for a dry condition - I was having fun punning," Karen said.
"It was one of my favourite works. When something's created by your hand, they're all special, but that one said so much about my life out here."
Karen was sitting with her mother, Robyn Stephens, in the Musical Fence Cafe at the North Gregory Hotel in Winton's main street just a week after the fire when she spoke to me about how her bush upbringing had influenced her work.
A week earlier, Robyn, one of Winton's go-getter fraternity, vowed to me that her town would recover.
"We're resilient; We'll build bigger and better," she said at the time.
The same sentiments were expressed by Karen when I asked how news of the fire had affected her.
"I walked back into my studio to record how I thought. I called it The Fire in Me because I was thinking about how we can't get knocked down, while I was painting."
Karen calls herself a hybrid rural-urban girl.
These days she lives at Redbank and is a full-time student at the Griffith University College of Art, where she's completing a Bachelor of Arts, but she said her roots were at Winton and many of her works were based on themes from the region.
"You can see why movies are based here - you don't have to go far for inspiration," she said.
She's passionate about Australian art and finds much to take from the landscape.
"It's always had a romantic feel to it for me, spacious but slightly melancholy," she said.
"I like to search in the landscape to find what's unique within it."
That includes burrs and grasses, "all the little things waiting for us to pass over".
Karen goes as far as taking seeds she's collected to Mt Coot-tha's herbarium for close inspection under the microscope, to be transformed into larger-than-life surreal images that she calls a blending of Australian art with international appeal.
Bones are another slightly macabre theme, mixing up kangaroos and roadkill and our national emblem, starting conversations about our roots and what we're keeping close to our hearts.
"What we have in Australia is so valuable," Karen said. "It's what drives me. I can't paint what I'm not."
She also likes to talk about how creatures and seeds flourish in such a dry environment, with a tough exterior.
"I think they're a metaphor for the people out here."
