"The imagination flourishes. When it can transport itself to a location fixed in the description of some far off other place outside the everyday.

Five hundred, even two hundred years ago, there were such places on earth where Europeans had not been, exotic places at best described and illustrated in the journals, or traced on the coastline maps of explorers. Cook's discovery of Australia's East coast located a missing continent and brought to light the existence of a place filled with fabulous creatures and exotic fauna. A place for the European imagination to go. 

Today, it is not so easy for the imagination to voyage, at least not on our globe. It has all become by degrees, a used and prosaic place. Our most intrepid explorers are now micro chips and radio transmitters, with little atomic hearts, heading out towards the heliosphere and sending back digital encodings of new worlds made of fantastic vivid colours - colours made all the more vivid by imaginative enhancement. It is here that the imagination can still project itself, a space for the minds eye."

Michael Markham, Melbourne 1989