Print Portfolio Gallery

Introduction

Artists who work in any media can join the Overwintering Project, but the core of the project is the Overwintering Project Print Portfolio, a growing portfolio of original prints by artists from around Australia and New Zealand. The artists who have contributed these prints to the project are listed below, and you can find out how to contribute a print here.

To contribute a work to the portfolio, artists are asked to visit their local migratory shorebird habitat and to respond to it. This is to foster a genuine connection between them and their local habitat. The project is long-term, to give people the opportunity to come to it in their own time, and for as many people to join as possible. The Portfolio is a collection of original prints in any medium, on paper 28 x 28 cm, made by artists in response to their local migratory shorebird habitat and donated to the project by the artists.

As the project’s goal is also to encourage people to see habitat as a complex system upon which many species rely, artists are encouraged to make work about any aspect of the habitat to which they feel drawn. This is why you will see some species other than migratory shorebirds in the artworks of the Portfolio, including resident shorebirds such as the extremely endangered Hooded Plover and striking Oystercatchers, other birds such as egrets, ibis and shearwaters, and other animals, plants and depictions of habitat and journeys. Having said that, most artists have chosen to depict these birds that travel beyond our imaginations.

As well as being a visual petition to show how much the community across Australia cares about our migratory shorebirds, their habitat, and the other plants and animals that depend on it, the Overwintering Project Print Portfolio is a snapshot of printmaking at this time. In the Portfolio below you will find examples of every kind of printmaking: linocuts, etchings, silkscreen prints, stencils, stamps, digital prints, photocopy transfers, collographs, woodcuts, woodblock prints, chine colle, and more.

Some artists have come to the project alone, but others have made the project a focus for their local print studio or workshop. I'm very grateful to those who administrate these workshops who have often been the ones to suggest the project to the group, organise the site visits, hang and/or collate the prints and send them to me. It has been a huge job and the results can be seen below.

Workshops that have participated in the project are:
Art House Anglesea (Anglesea, Vic.)
Bathurst Street Printmakers (Sydney, NSW)
Bittondi Printmakers (Adelaide, SA)
Capricornia Printmakers Inc. (Rockhampton, Qld)
Firestation Print Studio (Melbourne, Vic.)
Maryborough Printmakers Qld
Megalo Print Studio (ACT)
Migaloo Press (Brisbane, Qld)
Newcastle Printmakers Workshop (Newcastle, NSW)
Portland Bay Press (Portland, Vic.)
Printmakers Association of Western Australia
Southern Printmakers Association (Gymea, NSW)
Thumbprint Inc. (Mount Gambier, SA)
Warringah Printmakers Studio Inc. (Sydney, NSW)

Each artist has donated two of each editioned print to the project, one to exhibit and one to sell to raise funds for shorebird conservation.
Artists who contribute prints to the Overwintering Project Print Portfolio are listed below in alphabetical order.

Participating Artists and the Prints of the Portfolio

To date, the artists of the Overwintering Project Print Portfolio are:

ACKERMAN, Tanja; ALLSOP, Riki; ALTSCHWAGER, Libby; AMOS, Sabine; ARMSTRONG, Kate; BALCHIN, Nanette; BANCROFT, Ro; BARRY, Lyn; BATINI, Frank; BECKETT, Alexis; BEESON, Jennie; BENNETT, Margaret; BEVAN, Angela; BIGNELL, Julie; BIRD, Cynthia; BLACK, Michelle; BLAKE, Dianne; BOAG, Melissa; BONSHEK, Anna; BRERETON, Kurt; BRITTON, Hazel; BROADWAY, Vivian; BROOKS, Brenda; BUNAIKBUTH, Metasit; BURKE, Gill; CAIRNS, Robyn; CAIRNS, Valma; CAMLIN, Elaine; CAMPBELL, Sacha; CASEY, Lea; CASTALDI, Darcy; CASTALDI, Jennifer; CASTELL, Laura; CHANDLER, Linda; CHAPLYN, Glenda; CHIVERS, Megan; CICCONE, Avrille; CLARE, Helen; CLARK, Colin; CLARKE, Ileana; CLARKE, Leah; CLEMONS, Liz; CLEMONS, Trish; CLULOW, Joyce; COFFEY, Therese; COHEN, Haya Hagit; CONDE, Jen; CONNOLLY, Geraldine; CONRON, Anne; COURT, Moira; COWAN, Angela; COWIE, Nicola; COWPER, Shelley; CRAGGS, Kirsten; CROCE, Beth; DARBY, Judy; DAVIDSON, Brian; DAY, Annie; De LITTLE, Cath; DOWD, Anni; DUFFY, Josephine; DWYER MORRIS, Lola; ELKIN, Ros; ELLIS, Di; EGGPICNIC; EURELL, Jennifer; EVANS, Judy; EZRA, Robin; FORD, Clare Jean; FORMAN, Catherine; FOTHERINGHAM, Rowan; FRANKLIN, Emma; FRYER, Jill; GARDENER, Jorji; GIBLIN, Jane; GLADDISH, Grace; GLENISTER, Dianne; GOODWIN, Trudy; GORRINGE-SMITH, Kate; GOW, Britt; GRAY, Jess; GREEN, Nikki; GUNNELL, Andrew; HABY, Gracia and JENNISON, Louise; HALL, Litzia; HALLINAN, Michelle; HAMMER, Violet; HANASY, Nora; HANRAHAN, Janette; HARDING, Alyssa; HARRIOTT, Elizabeth; HARRISON, Jeanne; HELY, Anna; HENDERSON, Mark; HESTERMAN, Heather; HILLEBRAND, Bridget; HILLER, Kit; HITCHCOCK, Griselda; HOARE, Domenica; HOATH, Aileen; HOLMES, Veta; HUBBARD, Joanna; HUDSON, Kate; HUDSON, Penny; HUGHES, Melinda*; HUNDT, Robin; HUNTER, Anne-Maree; IAKOVLEVA, Margarita; IRINI, Alexandra; IVES, Bron; JACOBSEN, Bede**; JAMES, Jeanne; JOLLEY, Nadine; KAHLE, Jade; KEEGEL, Forest; KEESING, Amanda; KEIGHRAN, Sharon; KERSHAW, Michele; KING, Hannah-Amelia; KING, Martin; KITE, Carol; KLUSACEK, Eva; KNIGHT, Elizabeth; KNOWLES, Carmel; KOCIS EDWARDS, Helen; KONTOOLAS, Kahlia; KOPIETZ, Belinda; KOTSZAPAVLIDIS, Anastasia; KOWARSKY, Damon; KRISTINE, Sophie; LANGLEY, Helen; LAWRY, Penelope; LEANE, Helene; LEASON, Wendy; LEE, Glynis; LESSELS, Lance; LEWIS, Hannah; LEWIS, Megan; LIESFIELD, Jan; LIGHTFOOT, Pippa; LITTLE, Emma; LIVERMORE, Brenda; LLOYD, Peta; LOCKHART, Adrian; LOVEGROVE, Niloufar; LOVEJOY FURNELL, Kate; LOWE, Susan; LUNAN, Hollie; MacFARLANE, Larissa; MADDOCK, Negin; MANCINI, Robert; MANIFOLD, Marion; MARKS, Margaret; MARSHALL, Elsa; MARSHALL, Lisa; MARTIN, Patricia; MARTIN, Sue; MARTINUS, Jennifer; MASTERS, Diane; MATEK, Leah; MAUNSELL, Malini; MAY, Edith; McCAFFERY, Victoria; McCARTHY, Clare; McCONNELL, Ian; McCOY, Cheryl; McCREADY, Stephanie; McDONALD, Gina; McDONALD, Steve; McFADZEAN, Peta; McGINNESS-WHYTE, Janine; McGRATH, Pam; McINTOSH, Valerie; McMASTER, Anne; McPHERSON, Megan; MEW, Stephanie; MILES, Anne; MILTON, Julie; MINGUNDOO ALLWOOD, Gret; MITCHELL, Donna; MITCHELL, Sarah; MONEY, Catherine; MOORE, Michelle; MORRISON, Elizabeth; MORRISON; Jade; MOSS, Nicola; MOSTYN, Rosemary; MURPHY, Melina; MURRAY, Gillian; MYERS, Prue; NEAL, Karen; NEWTON, Josie; NEWTON, Suzanne; NICHOLLS, Mike; NICHOLSON, Bridget; NIXON, Lyn; NORTH, Sally; NOVA, Maria; NYKIEL, Annette; OAKLEY, Yolande; O’BRIEN, Paul; O’CONNOR, Sally; OKINES, Sharron; OPPEN, Monica; ORR, Glenda; O'SHEA, Paula; PAGE, Rosanna; PASCOE, Ian; PETIT, Debra; PHILLIPS, Perdita; PILON, Fay; PLANT, Rhyll; POGGIOLI, Sue; PROEBSTING, Irene; PUCHALSKI, Julie; PULFORD, Mary; QUIRK, Jill; RAVICH, Katie; READE, Gaby; REES, Bronwyn; REILLY, Kathy; RICARDO, Geoffrey; RICE, Trudy; RIGGS, Anne; RILEY, Angelina; ROBERTS, Ellise; ROBINSON, John; ROBINSON, Sandy; ROGERS, Catherine; ROGERS, Jennifer; RUSHFORTH, Susan; RUSHTON, Margot; SANDS, Stephne; SANZARO-NISHIMURA, Jenny; SARASWATI, Sambuddhananda; SARAVANAMUTHU, Petra; SAUNDERS, Nyrel; SCHLAFER, Mez; SCHREIDER, Maija-Liisa; SCHUBERT, Ruth; SCOTT, Gwen; SEE, Pamela; SEEGER, Carol; SEWARDS, Lisa; SHELLEY, Luke; SIMSON, Emily; SMITH, Melissa; SPOHR, Trevor; STRAZZARI, Michelle; STUERZL, Jennifer; STURGESS, Phillipa; SULLIVAN-RHODES, K.*; SWINFIELD, Linda; TANDBERG, Trudy; TASKER, Gwenn; TAYLOR, Fiona; TAYLOR, Kerrie; TAYLOR, Sandra; TEMPLE, Paul; THAMO, Kati; THOMAS, Bridgit; THOMPSON, Ruth; THOMPSON, Sabine; THOMPSON, Sylvie; TIMBURY, Helen; TOP, Sue; TSERONIS, Emilie; TYRELL, Vicki; UPTON, Evelyne; VALPIANI, Cate; VASSELEU, Cathryn; VILLAR, Teona; WARD, Peter; WARNER, Tammy; WARREN, Marama; WATANABE, Kay; WATSON, Eunie; WATTS, Amanda; WEST, Peta; WESTLUND, Rebecca; WHITE, Jenn; WHITE, Margaret; WIBURD, Margot; WILKINS, Jazmin; WILKINS, Therese Gabriel; WILLIAMS, Sandra; WILSON, Penny; WISEMAN, Diana; WOOD, Jo; YEATES, Lindy; YOANNIDIS, Stephanie; YOUNG, Rebecca; ZAKARAUSKAS, Valé; ZUBER, Patricia.

*Melinda Hughes and K. Sullivan-Rhodes collaborated with Lyn Nixon, so their works can be found under Lyn Nixon's name
**Bede Jacobsen collaborated with Annette Nykiel so can be found under her name.

Tanja Ackerman

loud ruddy turnstone
turning stones eating sand hoppers
Tak-a tuk-tuk-tuk

Migratory birds fascinate and inspire me. I await their arrival with a sparkling anticipation every September. Exploring waterways in my kayak or walking along our stunning coastlines it is an honour to be in their presence. The Ruddy Turnstone migrates from East Siberia and West Alaska to ‘Overwinter’ on Australian shores. They rely on the ebb and flow of the tide to feed. A noisy and quarrelsome bunch, they are a delight to spend time with and witness their behaviours, movements and stone turning!

Title: Ruddy Turnstone
Medium: Linocut
Site: Yuraygir National Park NSW

Riki Allsop

My name is Riki and I am of Austrian background. I enjoy Oriental brush painting since 1980’s. In 2019 I was actively involved in the Wall of Wings community project at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery and am now keen to commit to the Overwintering Project.

I focused on an amazing bird, the Sanderling, which breeds in the high Arctic tundra and migrates annually to Southern climes. The Sanderling can be sighted on our NSW coast. This bird is an inspiration to surviving in challenging environments.

We all need to nurture our fragile environment and are depending on good guidance for our planet to flourish in the 21stcentury.

Title: Sanderling
Medium: Collagraph print with India ink on Stone Henge paper
Site: The Sanderling can be sighted in NSW, the conservation status in NSW is vulnerable. I am fortunate to live in walking distance to the coast but have not yet been successful to observe the Sanderling

Libby Altschwager

On the 8th April, 2018 printmakers from Adelaide, Melbourne and Mt Gambier joined Kate Gorringe-Smith at Racecourse Bay, Port MacDonnell for a field trip to study the shorebirds and their habitat.

It was a very successful day with many birds along the shore providing much inspiration.

Title: Ruddy Turnstone
Medium: Solar Plate etching
Site: Racecourse Bay, Pt MacDonnell, se SA

Kate Armstrong

The presence and absence of birds in a place indicates the overall health of that place - of the world. The more species in healthy populations that are present, the healthy the environment. Birds are also beautiful, joyous and extraordinary and they do many things for us assisting in pollination, insect control, soil and sand aeration etc, and they do it all - for free! They are interwoven into our lives in many ways, some of which we are totally unaware of - and yet we are destroying their habitat and ignoring their right to life. The loss of birds that we are now witnessing worldwide, is not only terribly sad, it is shocking and is as much a loss to mankind as it is to the birds themselves. I hope my small contribution to this wonderful project, can in some way help others to stand up for birds in all their forms - not just become aware of their loss, but fight for them.

Medium: Collograph
Site: King Island, TAS

Nanette Balchin

It’s the incredible migratory flight of the Bar-tailed Godwit who in nine days travels over 11000km from Alaska to arrive at Kinka Beach in Queensland that captured my imagination. I share my home with these and other migratory shorebirds every year. I have applied the cyanotype process using the movement of the sand and water across the paper to create one layer of the print: creating a sense of place and a feeling of the calm quietness and flow of the birds’ habitat. The second print layer is a paper plate etching illustrating the bird at rest.

Title: The Bar-tailed Godwit at Kinka Beach
Medium: Multi plate print using cyanotype and paper plate etching
Site: Kinka Beach. Site coordinates: 23,13,30S- 150,47,59E which is located at the southern end of Kinka Beach on a sand spit at the entrance to Kinka Creek, Capricorn Coast, Central QLD

Ro Bancroft

In February 2018, I joined a group of printmakers at Point Lonsdale to be taken by shorebird expert Robyn Atkinson to Victoria Lake, where we learned about the amazing flights of these migrating shorebirds, their feeding habits and the importance of wetlands in their journey each year. Previously I had no idea these little birds flew such amazing distances. But the thing that had the greatest impact on me came out of a conversation with Kate about how the wetlands were not only under threat in countries along the birds flight path but here in Australia as well. So I chose to depict wetland habitat, for if there is no habitat there are no birds.

Title: Lake Victoria Wetlands, Point Lonsdale
Medium: Linocut
Site: Victoria Lake, Point Lonsdale VIC

Lyn Barry

Migrating birds come to the samphire flats on the Swan River each year. The birds find food and shelter here. The colours of the samphire change with the seasons and the weather, and I love these always changing and different colours.

Title: Samphire
Medium: Silk screen print
Site: Swan River Estuary, WA

Frank Batini

I have enjoyed art as a hobby since school, often stopping to sketch a scene during my travels on work or holiday. I am a member of the Canning Arts Group and have taken classes in watercolour, which is my favourite medium. I paint mainly landscapes and botanical art.

Title: Red- capped plovers
Medium: Drypoint etching and and watercolour
Site: Alfred Cove reserve, Swan River, Perth WA

Alexis Beckett

The astonishing journeys undertaken by small migratory birds to and from their breeding grounds every year are known to many people. But these tiny individuals, their songs, their personalities and their way of navigating the world are a mystery. This work is a memorial to them as their numbers decline along with their places of refuge in my city, Melbourne.

Title: Skeleton Creek Revisited
Medium: Blind embossing, pencil drawing, pinpricking, collage (digital prints of embroidery)
Site: Skeleton Creek quietly meets the sea on the west side of Port Philip Bay. Located south of Melbourne, it is part of the Cheetham Wetlands and close to the Werribee sewage farm. Its low scrubby shrubs and fragrant salty tidal zones are enclosed by suburban sprawl and a big sky. Many wading birds, tiny grey brown fluff balls, spend summer in this refuge resting and fattening up before the returning to the northern hemisphere to breed.

Jennie Beeson

Title: Ramsar 482
Medium: Drypoint and solvent transfer
Site: Peel-Yalgorup wetlands, Mandurah WA

Margaret Bennett

I have lived on King Island almost my entire life and seen the migratory birds come and go with the seasons even though the coastline is in a state of constant change. That migratory birds can and do fly non-stop for days and days always inspires me. Some of these long-distance migrants are very small, weighing only 50 grams. Migratory birds depart King Island in late March, and follow the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. Their mission is to arrive at their breeding site, find a mate, incubate and raise chicks, thereby ensuring the continuation of their species. The dedication of such vast numbers of birds to follow their instinct by flying from the southern to the northern hemisphere to breed and return again when their chicks become independent is one of nature’s marvels.

My print is of some small migratory birds resting in the moonlight.

Title: Moonlight Sea Mist
Medium: Stencilled monoprint
Site: King Island, TAS

Angela Bevan

Title: Now You see me - curlew
Medium: Linocut
Site: Darwin NT

Julie Bignell

The south-east coastal region around Port MacDonnell, includes areas such as French Point, Stony Point and Danger Point. These areas provide a rich source of food for many migratory and residential birds as well as offering shelter and camouflage. During a recent field trip by the Thumbprint Printmaking Group we were lucky enough to see Ruddy Turnstones, Red-necked Stints, Little Plovers, Sandpipers and Sanderlings. Many of these small shorebirds were scavenging on the beach and in the rockpools at Port MacDonnell.

My print depicts Ruddy Turnstones foraging in the beach wrack at Danger Point. Beach wrack incorporates organic material such as seaweed – kelp and seagrass that is cast up onto the beach by the tide, but unfortunately can also include marine debris such as plastic, glass and metal.

Title: Ruddy Turnstones Foraging in Beach Wrack.
Medium: Solar etching over collograph print
Site: South-east coast SA

Cynthia Bird

Title: Bar-tailed Godwit over Huanghai (Yellow Sea) 1
Medium: Screenprint and linocut
Site: Yellow Sea

Title: Bar-tailed Godwit over Huanghai (Yellow Sea) 2
Medium: Screenprint and linocut
Site: Yellow Sea

Title: Bar-tailed Godwit over Huanghai (Yellow Sea) 3
Medium: Screenprint and linocut
Site: Yellow Sea

Michelle Black

Each year, the Bar-tailed Godwit flies non-stop from Alaska to the shores of Australia and NZ to overwinter and feed on insects and crustaceans with their upturned beaks. It takes about 8 days to reach our shores — that’s a long time without rest or food.

Impressions of marks in the intertidal mud flats were used to create the collagraph plate and drypoint was used to illustrate the birds leaving the shores of the Kinka Wetlands to journey back to Alaska to breed.

Title: The Longest Flight
Medium: Multi plate intaglio print, collograph and drypoint
Site: Kinka Beach site coordinates: 23,13,30S—150,47,59E which is located at the southern end of Kinka Beach on a sand spit at the entrance to Kinka Creek, Capricorn Coast, Central QLD

Dianne Blake

Watching out for the arrival of the migratory birds on the shores of the wild coast of King Island Tasmania has become an intriguing obsession and a seasonal calendar.

A deep fascination has developed. To see the first arrive is a special moment, and then watch as numbers grow. I look forward to the return each year with anticipation, hoping the numbers are as strong as the previous year. The perils they face, diminishing habitat, pollution, global warming and climate change all impact on these courageous creatures. The Bar-tailed Godwit is one of many migratory birds that visit King Island. I saw them for the first time last year. The flight of the migratory birds has me astounded and amazed at the extraordinary feat of flying from the Northern Artic regions to our shores. I feel fortunate to witness this, knowing how far they have flown and realise how important projects like the Flyway Print Exchange and the Overwintering Project by Kate Gorringe-Smith are to bring about greater awareness to the plight of the migratory birds both here on King Island and all through the Flyways.

Title: Bar-tailed Godwit
Medium: Collograph
Site: King Island TAS

Melissa Boag

Between September 2018 and March 2019, Hobson's Bay City Council conducted a series of monthly printmaking workshops and local site visits, culminating in an exhibition at Altona's Joel Gallery, the Overwintering Project: Hobson's Bay. The exhibition opened as part of the annual Hobson's Bay World Migratory Bird Day Festival, and closed after World Environment Day!

Melissa Boag was one of the contributing artists who made the exhibition such a success.

Medium: Etching
Site: Altona Foreshore VIC

Anna Bonshek

Mongolian (Lesser Sand Plover)

Derrit drit, derrit drit, derrit drit.

Take flight, from this coast,
Ever distant, to our
Ancestral (penal) home,
From where they are long gone.

Your chestnut-red nape, breast,
Is cut from your white throat
By a black line.

Seen, by encircled eyes — black patch,
Black edge to white forehead--
Is your duller partner's body,
Twenty centimetres, never inland.

Together, will you survive
As they did, miraculously?
Who will notice
As we do, quietly?

Derrit drit, derrit drit,
Derrit drit, derrit drit,
Derrit drit, derrit drit.

Anna Bonshek 2017

Title: Mongolian
Medium: Stencil

Kurt Brereton

I have printed using white (cream) ink on white paper.
This is to emphasise the endangered (loss/disappearance) status of the shorebird.

Title: Pied Oystercatcher
Medium: Linocut
Site: Shoalhaven, NSW

Vivian Broadway

I enjoy lino printing and I love nature! Living in the sandbelt region of Port Phillip Bay, its not surprising my main influences are the local surroundings; from the foreshore reserves to the heathlands, wetlands, even my own garden or my neighbour’s!

I’m so glad to be part of a project to raise awareness of Australia and New Zealand as being the major destinations for migratory shorebirds of the East Asian-Australian Flyway.

Its wonderful to realise that our artist community is getting involved and can play some part in preserving their habitats.
I’m also really looking forward to seeing all the artwork produced for a good cause!

Title: Whimbrel
Medium: Multiplate Linocut
Site: Port Phillip Bay VIC

Title: Bar-tailed Godwit
Medium: Multiplate Linocut
Site: Port Phillip Bay VIC

Brenda Brooks

Painting was a way of getting to know people as a retiree who was new to Australia. Printing with the Printmakers Association of WA has opened a new aspect of art for me and I have made many friends through PAWA who have helped expand my knowledge of the subject. My engineering background appreciates the technicality and precision of the processes required to produce my work. There are always new processes for me to learn. This gives me great satisfaction.

Title: Grey Plover
Medium: Drypoint etching
Site: Swan River Estuary WA

Gill Burke

I’ve portrayed Bar-Tailed Godwits as I’ve seen them, in silhouette, flying over the Central Coast of New South Wales on their way home to Alaska. They overwinter at Tuggerah Lakes having undertaken incredible journeys - one bird flew 11,500km non-stop in nine days from Alaska to New Zealand - the longest non-stop flight of any bird in the world. Despite this tenacity, they’re still near threatened so the protection of local habitats is imperative. While council has undertaken action to protect the important Tuggerah Lakes salt marsh environment this and other sites will require ongoing maintenance and development if we are to continue to welcome these amazing visitors to our shores.

Title: Fly Away Home
Medium: Wood Engraving
Site: Central Coast NSW

Robyn Cairns

My print depicts a haiga poem (haiku and image come together) where one of my students is dreaming of the Latham's Snipe after an outing birdwatching at the Western Treatment Plant in Werribee. This is one of my favourite places to view migratory shorebirds and observe birds because it's a place of arrival, big skies and tranquillity. The Latham's Snipe is in flight as a symbol of the aerial view of the world on its journey from Japan to Australia. Kaizen is a Japanese term that means ‘change for the better’. In creating my print I imagined the Latham's Snipe happy for my students actions to help local habitats for the future of all.

Title: Kaizen
Medium: Linocut collage printed on Japanese rice paper
Site: Western Treatment Plant, Werribee VIC

Title: Sanderlings stitch sunset
Medium: Linocut collage printed on Japanese rice paper
Site: Altona foreshore, Melbourne VIC

Elaine Camlin

Walking through Fivebough Wetlands, an inland swamp located on Wiradjuri land in the Riverina, the ecological impact of a dry season was evident. The species of birds during the overwintering period had been lower than in previous seasons, initial disappointment subsided as we moved through the track, our mere presence in this environment provided overwhelming inspiration. The dragonfly I followed through the native shrubs was a gentle reminder of the diversity of species present. Responding to our visit, I developed a print which embodies the calming sounds of the environment through subtle colours and marks, and detailed and meditative line-work.

Title: Fivebough Wetlands - Riverina NSW
Medium: Drypoint and monoprint on BFK Rives
Site: Fivebough Wetlands, central NSW

Our world stands at the threshold of change, our global footprint is jeopardising intricate ecosystems, causing immediate and direct changes to our planet and disrupting the delicate balance of nature. Every aspect of our life is reliant on our natural environment, it is our most precious natural resource, but despite this we continue to live on the edge.

Temperatures rise, causing frequent heat waves, severe drought, flooding and extreme weather, resulting in water shortages, increased fire threats, weed and pest invasions, intense storm damage, and flora and fauna extinction due to habitat destruction.
Minimising the impact on our precious world is reliant on humans changing current behaviours and taking responsibility for how we make and consume energy. On the edge: Fivebough responds to these concerns, the image was captured during a site visit to Fivebough Wetlands, converted to a negative and exposed with the sun, onto a light-sensitive Cyanotype solution.

Title: On the edge: Fivebough
Medium: Toned cyanotype on BFK Rives
Site: Fivebough Wetlands, central NSW

Sacha Campbell

As migratory shorebirds, Curlew Sandpipers breed in the Arctic Siberian tundra, before flying South, to Australia on the East-Asian Australasian Flyaway. Collective impressions and memories, forged by time spent in the area of Thompson’s Lake, informed my response both to the area, and this project, with the creation of this print.

Title: Curlew Sandpiper
Medium: Woodcut
Site: Thompson’s Lake WA

Darcy Castaldi

Darcy's subjects are focused on industrial areas around Newcastle, Kooragang and Stockton - which happens to be one of the safe havens for the migratory birds to stop and rest. Bridge and rail structures are a feature of Darcy’s work and he seeks to document the big picture as well as the small details.

Title: Terek Sandpiper at Stockton Bridge
Medium: Solarplate etching, hand-coloured collograph, collage
Site: Stockton Bridge NSW

Jennifer Castaldi

Jennifer Castaldi is a printmaker and architect living in Newcastle. She enjoys printmaking for its combination of mastering the technical skills and the element of surprise that evolves from each print produced.

She is interested in how the natural and human built environments interact around the coastal regions. The animals and birds often find a place of safe harbour in manmade structural creations. The Overwintering Project was a way to find out more about a little creature and its habits – The Painted Snipe.

Title: Painted Snipe in Marshlands
Medium: Hand-coloured collograph
Site: Newcastle NSW

Laura Castell

The Esplanade in Cairns (North Queensland) is visited by a variety of shorebirds that seem to happily spend their time feeding and walking along the mudflat. The Black-tailed Godwit is one of these birds which can still be seen in good numbers at specific times. By incorporating some small but obvious areas of ‘landscape’ within the bird, I tried to capture its transient nature in time but also as a symbol of their vulnerability to the conditions of the environment they inhabit in their long travels.

Title: Black-tailed Godwit
Medium: Drypoint and monoprint
Site: The reference for this image was taken on the Cairns Esplanade in North Queensland during October 2016. This coastal area has a very gentle slope that exposes a wide mudflat during the low tides, where the birds spend time feeding and wondering around.

Linda Chandler

This print is my personal response to the importance of conserving the natural environment of the Broadwater on the Gold Coast, Queensland. Currently there is a proposal “The Broadwater Marine Project” which is offering development rights to parcels of government land and seabed on the Broadwater Queensland, in total 81.4 Ha in exchange for the construction and operation of a cruise ship terminal. This development will see the removal of a large shorebird foraging area and the possible destruction of the main shorebird roost in the Southern Broadwater.

My works are a visual reminder of the urgent need to preserve the balance of nature on which shorebirds survival depends. It is my effort to awaken awareness of a little migratory shorebird known as the Bartailed Godwit – Limosa lapponica- which restores itself on the Broadwater for its journey home.

The act of migration is exceptional as is the distance flown by this little bird. In 2007 a female Bar-tailed Godwit was tracked flying 11,680 kilometres from Alaska to New Zealand in nine days straight. It is the longest recorded bird flight on the planet.

It seems perverse that a bird that can fly enough to get to the moon in its lifetime should be so fragile, but the Bar-tailed Godwit and its fellow shorebirds face enormous perhaps insurmountable challenges. These shorebirds aren’t just declining in the abstract sense, they are heading toward extinction. Everytime a species become extinct we lose something we can never get back.

Title: Fly me to the Moon
Medium: Collograph, silver leaf chine collé
Site: the Broadwater on the Gold Coast QLD

Glenda Chaplyn

My print of the Eastern Curlew was created from a coloured pencil drawing used to make a photo stencil. Some of the patterns on the bird are the shapes of the sea grass and mudflats. The design reflects the curlew habitat to which it belongs as it balances the biodiversity of the Queensland east coast. With growing awareness of Morton Bay as a ‘Wetland of International Importance’ hopefully marina developments will not proceed in this precious place.

Title: Arrival at Toondah
Medium: Silkscreen print on rice paper
Site: Toondah Harbour, Moreton Bay QLD

Megan Chivers

The inspiring Overwintering Project: Mapping Sanctuary raises awareness of the plight of migratory birds and their epic flyways. I was drawn to sharing the journey of the Short Tailed Shearwater, a seasonal part of growing up on King Island.
Mutton birds or moon birds as they are known to some are migratory heroes, their cycle in Tasmania an ancient rhythm embedded with local rituals.
These lino prints use techniques gleaned from our printmaking workshop with Kate, hand-cut stencils depict the mutton birds' journeying from King Island, over many seas, northward bound. Local seaweed depicts our sea, dried oregano stalks and flowers offer a likeness to our predominatetea trees. Ink colour is the almost regal Prussian Blue.

Medium: Stencilled monoprint.
Site: King Island TAS

Avrille Ciccone

I chose to show the Bar-tailed Godwits in flight because I read that not only do they fly extreme distances but one, E7, broke the world record, flying between Alaska and New Zealand in a 9 day non-stop trans-Pacific Ocean flight. I imagine they must see such varied scenery, including our own spectacular coastline.

Title: Flight of the Godwits’
Medium: Photopolymer etching, a la poupée,
Site: Sydney Northern Beaches NSW

I’ve seen the Common Sandpiper on Sydney's Northern Beaches where I live, in freshwater lagoons and wetlands, it has striking markings on it’s wings. I find it a very decorative bird, along with the patterns of the mud or sand flats that it forages on, picking up small food items such as insects, crustaceans and other invertebrates.

Title: Common Sandpiper
Medium: Photopolymer etching à la poupée
Site: Sydney's Northern Beaches NSW

Helen Clare

The Black-tailed Godwit is an uncommon bird - rare - small flocks or singularly. Frequents coastal tidal estuaries and sandy shores. Arrives in Australia from Northern Europe and Asia during October, departing in March and April. Breeding season June & July in North Europe, North Asia, Mongolia, Siberia. Because of its rarity, the black tail and long legs, I chose to do a linocut, embossed and monotype.

Title: Taking Off
Medium: Embossed Linocut and monotype

Colin Clark

Oystercatchers are residential shorebirds on many beaches around Australia.

Title: Invasion of the Oystercatchers
Medium: Hand coloured linocut

Ileana Clarke

The Common Greenshank is a large wader that is rarely seen in groups and lives in muddy margins of estuaries of the Newcastle wetlands in NSW. They fly thousands of miles from their breeding grounds in Siberia to warmer climates of Australia.After resting and thriving on Australian shores they leave from February to early March returning to their breeding grounds.

My work is layered with a background digital image of stitches, implying a long flight path, overlapped with monoprint and hand painted Greenshank shorebirds taking flight. After resting on Australian shores, they return to their breeding grounds from February to early March. These amazing migratory shorebirds are threatened by coastal developments along their flight path and as such their numbers have lessened.This project has made me aware of the dire situation birds are facing; therefore I will endeavour to protect our environment.

Title: Flight Path
Medium: Monoprint on digital image of artwork and watercolour
Site: Newcastle NSW

Leah Clarke

Title: Early Morning, Buffalo Creek
Medium: Etching
Site: Buffalo Creek, Darwin NT

Liz Clemons

As a recently retired Early Childhood teacher, and a new-comer to the artistic word, I am wallowing in the joy that I once allowed my students; that of exploring and creating in the medium of printmaking.

Here on King Island we are so fortunate in having Dianne and Andrew Blake to guide and support us kindly in our experiences.
Kate Gorringe -Smith expanded our printmaking skills whilst enriching us with a deeper appreciation of migratory shorebirds. Although my everyday interest is with the many birds that visit our garden, I was very happy to go adventuring with Kate. I hope you enjoy my results.

Medium: Stencilled monoprint
Site: King Island TAS

Trish Clemons

I grew up on King Island and have spent many a day walking along the wintery west coast beaches seeing those amazing little ruddy turnstones and being fascinated by the shearwaters (muttonbird) and that their migration went all the way to the Aleutian Islands and back to the same burrows each year.

Experimenting with printmaking has given me an opportunity to represent the flight of these incredible migratory birds.

Medium: Stencilled monoprint
Site: King Island TAS

Joyce Clulow

Wood Sandpiper: An uncommon bird in Australia. Frequents fresh water, swamps, particularly where there is aquatic vegetation, shellfish and insects. It swims well and also perches on trees.

Distribution: Northern Europe and northern Asia, India, Malaysia and Australia. It has been recorded that the Sandpiper frequents all mainland states incuding Tasmaina.

Nest: A depression in the ground.

Eggs: Four bluish eggs with spots and blotches of dark purplish red.

Title: Sandpiper
Medium: Collograph and watercolour

Therese Coffey

I live on the rugged cliffs of Cape Bridgewater in the far South West corner of Victoria. This environment has influenced my art practice in many ways.

Having been a printmaker for many years, primarily screen printing and dry points, I particularly like the imperfections that occur in both processes leaving unfinished lines to conjure the viewer’s imagination.

The Bar-tailed Godwit is an extraordinary migratory bird, and to endure such long distances is unbelievable.

The 'boarding pass' print is a witty presentation of the Godwits' marvel.

Title: Bar-tailed Godwit
Medium: Screen Print
Site: Cape Bridgewater, sw VIC

Title: Boarding Pass
Medium: Digital print

Haya Hagit Cohen

As an observer behind the heavy fauna at the Attadale reserve, along the Swan River, Western Australia, didn’t leave me passive for a long time but essentially required active fuse into moments of magic.

The dynamics of various groups of birds coming and going “hassle bustle”, flying in flying out, sounds, colours, scents light, shadows and so much more kept me wound up. These notions of business, lively and rich interactions between so many types of birds I endeavour to portray here in my artwork.

Title: Change of Time
Medium: Dry point etching, Akua ink, Embossing of branches, Sakura watercolor
Site: Attadale Reserve, along the Swan River, WA

Jen Conde

The Curlew has a haunting distinctive call. These beautiful birds, the largest of all waders, migrate from northeastern Asia, including Siberia and Mongolia to winter in coastal Australia. They can be found at Canaipa Point in Moreton Bay where the artist has observed their foraging and listened to their calls. The Eastern Curlew occurs only in our East Asian-Australasian Flyway so we have a particular responsibility to protect our coastal wetlands for them to survive.

Jen’s prints and paintings explore her love of water and her ‘place’, where she lives on the shores of Moreton Bay. She currently exhibits paintings, prints and artists books in her solo and group exhibitions held across Australia and internationally. Jen has won various awards and has work in the National Gallery of Australia print collection and the National Library of Australia Collection.

Title: Eastern Curlew
Medium: Etching
Site: Canaipa Point, Moreton Bay, QLD

Geraldine Connolly

On his spindly, knobbly kneed legs, the Eastern Curlew struts bravely on the water’s edge of Moreton Bay, in South East Queensland.

From Siberia’s lush feeding grounds after the winter’s thaw, in late spring and summer. The flocks enjoy a feast of insects and grubs. Food galore! Then as Autumn approaches and spring begins at the other end of the world, great flocks take flight to over winter in warmer climes.

On the shores of Moreton Bay, with change of tides, muddy mangroves on the river and creek edges, they find much need for food. For on the journey over they have lost half their body weight!

Avoiding all the obstacles en route – pollutants in the Yellow Sea – oil, diesel floating on the water, plastic detritus, fishing nets, and general garbage as humans encroach with housing and industrial development on once pristine shores. Cargo ships, small boats, planes coming in to land. And then the dangerous pathway between North Korea and Japan with destroyers and missiles from land and sea.

And still only half way there!

But it’s OK. Here he is protected with his speckly camouflage. Here by law he is a protected species.

Let’s keep his habitat safe and clean!

Title: Here at Last
Medium: Hand coloured etching
Site: Moreton Bay, se QLD

Anne Conron

This lino print portrays Double-banded Plovers at the East Inlet, near Stanley in north west Tasmania. At low tide you can walk for miles across the floor of this remote sandy bay which is rimmed with tiers of dunes and hills. These shy little plovers paddle at the edges of tidal pools, scratching around in the sand for crustaceans and molluscs. Amazingly they breed in New Zealand in the summer and then migrate across the ocean to the east coast of Australia for winter.

Title: Double-banded Plovers at East Inlet, Tasmania
Medium: Hand-coloured linocut
Site: East Inlet, near Stanley in North West TAS

Moira Court

I visited the South Western corner of Thomsons Lake at Beeliar Nature reserve in West Australia too late in the year (May) to see any overwintering birds so my print, Sky Tracks, is inspired by the rusting typha reeds fringing that part of the lake and animal tracks in the sand. The typha reeds are printed from a woodcut and the flying Black-tailed Godwits, who are known visitors to Thomsons Lakes, are embossed with a plate made from cardboard.

Title: Sky Tracks
Medium: Woodcut and blind embossing
Site: Thomsons Lake, part of the Beeliar Wetlands near Perth, WA

Angela Cowan

Curlew Sandpiper wading at Kooragang Island.

Title: Kooragang Curlew
Medium: Linocut
Site: Kooragang Island, Hunter River Estuary, Newcastle, NSW

Nicola Cowie

I created this linocut print in response to my visit to Thomsons Lake, south Perth in Western Australia.
I visited in early winter after a very dry autumn so the landscape was wide and marshy with lots of grasses and a little water in the distance.
I loosely recreated the landscape of Thomsons Lake within an organic pebble-filled border which acts as a window on to this small scene to consider the vista before seeing the bird hidden in the grass, which is the experience common to finding these birds in their habitat, usually well hidden.

Title: In the Reeds
Medium: Linocut
Site: Thomsons Lake, south Perth WA

Shelley Cowper

Red Samphire Grass
The Swan River in Perth is home to three A class nature reserves. On a visit to Alfred Cove with SERAG (Swan Estuary River Action Group) I was amazed by the beautiful colours of the samphire grass growing along the banks of the river in the water. The grass, which is also endangered and protected forms part of the habitat of the migratory birds. The colours are a striking blend of browns, reds and greens and have interesting organic forms with small individual pods and long structures. A Pacific Golden Plover, uncommon for that area, was sighted while we were there.

Title: Samphire and Traveller
Medium: Hand-coloured etching
Site: Alfred Cove, Swan River Estuary, Perth WA

Kirsten Craggs

Title: Untitled
Medium: Etching
Site: Altona foreshore, Melbourne VIC

Beth Croce

This work was inspired by shocking news images of thousands of small, darkly feathered bodies littering beaches from Gabo Island to Portland and down to Tasmania, in the spring of 2013. Our local beachside councils were overwhelmed and scientists perplexed. The cause of this die-off eventually became clear: exhausted and emaciated after poor feeding conditions in the northern hemisphere, the short tailed shearwaters were unable to cope with storms en route to their specific nesting locations in south-eastern Australia. The challenges for these feisty birds mount as they rely on evolution and instinct to negotiate a rapidly changing world.
Burrow location where I was up close and personal with Short Tail Shearwaters: Lady Julia Percy Island, Victoria

Title: Journey Uncompleted
Medium: Intaglio etching, chine collé
Site: Lady Julia Percy Island, VIC

Brian Davidson

These prints are inspired by the littoral zone of my home town, Lennox Head, NSW and Hervey Bay, QLD where I often visit and can observe migraters feeding as the three metre tide expose sand flats.

I have been making Lino prints for one year and am pleased to find the medium opens technical and creative avenues. I intend to look to other forms of printmaking in future, particularly wood engraving.

Congratulations for the Overwintering Project and I hope it strikes a blow with all who view it.

Title: Curlew Migration
Medium: Linocut
Sites: Lennox Head, NSW and Hervey Bay, QLD

Annie Day

Incredibly these birds know when it’s time to take off for the Siberian springtime to mate. They raise their chicks then return to sunnier climes to overwinter. Expert Bethany Lindsay explains how... ‘complicated processes involving spectrums of light, electron excitation, and constant recalibrations.’ But to me it’s a completely amazing phenomena!

Title: Time to Go
Medium: Lithograph and etching; 2 plates, key plate is a lithograph and the other plate an etching inked in 2 colours.

Cath de Little

On the sandy northern shore of Southport Lagoon, amid millions of tiny shells, I lie alone in the quiet stillness of the vast amphitheatre formed by water and sky, and bordered by the iconic profile of the distant Southern Ranges. Small numbers of Red-necked Stints, Red-capped Plovers, Double-banded Plovers, Hooded Plovers, Pied Oystercatchers, Sooty Oystercatchers and, very occasionally, Bar-tailed Godwits forage unconcernedly across the wide sandflats left by the receding tide. It is a remote, isolated place of great beauty and peace which has always inspired me. And I marvel at the resilience of the tiny birds which have reached this final southern outpost of their journey.

Printing with collagraphs enables a range of tonal effects which suits this print. I feel they can convey an emotional charge, and in this print, enhance the sense of remoteness and also impending loss.

Title: Going, going.....
Medium: Collograph
Site: Southport Lagoon is a large saltwater lagoon situated 110 km south of Hobart, in the Far South region of Tasmania. It is located in the Southport Lagoon Conservation Area, and reached by a 7 km train ride on the historic Ida Bay Railway, then a ¾ hour walk on a moderately easy trail which ends on the white beach at the northern end of the lagoon. When the tide is out, a few of the most hardy migratory shorebirds and waders are attracted to the vast sand/mudflats revealed.

Anni Dowd

My first sighting of a Curlew Sandpiper was on a visit to Indonesia and I haven't seen them on the wetlands of the Mornington Peninsula.

According to BirdLife they are an endangered species in Victoria are experiencing severe declines along the Flyway due to habitat decline in the Yellow Sea and partly the incremental loss of wetland habitat in Australia.

The Overwintering Project has been an opportunity for me to further focus on and respond to our precious environment and the birds that inhabit it.

Title: Flight
Medium: Linocut
Site: Mornington Peninsula - Mushroom Reef & Warringine wetlands VIC

Title: Wetland Stillness
Medium: Linocut
Site: Mornington Peninsula VIC

Josephine Duffy

Whimbrels are shorebirds of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway which don’t have webbed feet - as seabirds do. The need for stability whilst feeding in mud and soft wet beach sands of the intertidal and wetland fringe zones necessitates a broad splay of toes for balance whilst walking in, and on, a constantly shifting base.

It’s this shoreline that is threatened by industrial development and human interventions. This marginality of place - being a peripheral zone on the land mass - is tenuous, and alluded to by an un-inked embossed ‘ghost’ plate. Verticality of imagery references their north/south coastal migration pathway.

Title: Wading - Whimbrel
Medium: Intaglio etching, hard ground and aquatint, blind embossing.
Site: The whimbrels in my print have been observed feeding and resting at a site on the beach to the north of the lake-channel opening at The North Entrance, NSW. The area has been fenced to protect migratory shorebirds, however people ignore the signage stating this. Unfortunately, human and dog tracks can be seen within the fenced enclosure.

EGGPICNIC

I don’t think I could shake free of the shore’s influence if I wanted to; my time in Sydney was formative. The first time we visited Long Reef 10 years ago, I wasn’t a birder. But it was the very beginning, and it didn’t take long for shorebirds to win over my heart and for us to return year after year, to meet the birds and to watch the birds meet each other as they arrived from their interminable journeys. We would sit there for hours, and I would always imagine the Bar-tailed Godwit flying to the Moon and back, the distance she can fly in her lifetime. If that doesn’t blow your mind, I don’t know what will.

Title: Where we meet
Artist: Eggpicnic
Site: Long Reef Reserve, Collaroy, NSW

Ros Elkin

Whimbrel
Scientific Name: Numenius phaeopus
The Whimbrel with its pronounced de-curved beak feed in small groups along the intertidal mudflats of Australia, particularly Stockton Newcastle NSW and is a species of Curlew that breed from North America, Europe, Scotland and Asia.

They nestle among the mangroves, almost invisible blending in with the environment.

Title: Whimbrel
Medium: Linocut
Site: Stockton, Newcastle NSW

Di Ellis

Double Banded Plover, Charadrius bicinctus

The birds and bees are the pollinators of the world, where would we be without them? They deserve to be treasured and protected. Of particular interest to me are the breeds of tiny plovers that make my heart sing when I see them on our ocean beaches. Plovers with their matchstick fine legs, running in a family group along the tideline is sadly an uncommon view now. The sweet little birds who look like the slightest puff of wind would send them rolling and tumbling along the sand have hearts of warriors and although they have the physical strength to cross oceans they are extremely vulnerable when hatching chicks on ocean beaches. Guard them now before it's too late.

Title: Here's Looking at You
Medium: Solvent transfer
Site: The ocean beach of Killarney, VIC , January 2018

Jennifer Eurell

If Noosa (on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast) has one problem, it is too many tourists. But it is not only people that flock to Noosa.

I drove to Noosa on a blustery summer day in hope of spotting a Bar-tailed Godwit. The birds arrive after an enormous flight – 10,000 kms non-stop from Alaska to New Zealand, before flying to Australia. Amidst the hustle and bustle of Noosa there were two types of fliers – birds and kite surfers. The wind blew the kite surfers at great speeds within the estuary while the Godwits quietly foraged on sandbanks. It was an odd combination.

Title: Limosa lapponica – Noosa
Medium: Aluminium plate etching with watercolour
Site: Noosa, Qld. 26.36 S 153.09 E. Noosa is a very popular tourist destination on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.The Bar-tailed Godwits were on the sandbanks in the Noosa River estuary in December, 2019.

Judy Evans

Fairy Tern.

Title: Searching
Medium: Collaged and hand-coloured linocut on woodblock.
Site:Mandurah, WA

Fairy Terns.

Title: Arrival
Medium: Hand-coloured linocut stamps.
Site:Mandurah, WA.

Sharp-tailed Sandpiper.

Title: Follow me!
Medium: Hand-coloured drypoint.
Site: Mandurah, WA.

Robin Ezra

Red Necked Stint (calidris ruficollis)
These amazing little birds are among the smallest of the calidris waders. They make an amazing journey each year between their summer breeding grounds in the northern hemisphere and and their winter feeding grounds in the south. Traveling through the East Asian-Australasian Flyway to overwinter in New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand and make the same journey back to their breeding grounds six months later.

They are classified as Near Threatened due to the loss of staging areas available for use during their migration. The birds stop at many different wetlands and disturbance of one site will affect the entire network of wetlands.
Red-necked Stints are highly gregarious, and will form flocks with other small waders They forages in damp mud and very shallow water, an omnivorous species feeding on seeds, insects, small invertebrates, plants in salt marshes, molluscs, gastropods and crustaceans.

Title: Red-necked Stint
Medium: Waterless lithograph and collograph.

Clare Jean Ford

My image is a reduction lino print, image created from original photography by local bird life enthusiast Des Dunne.

Title: Curlews on Kinka
Medium: Reduction Lino Print
Site: Kinka Beach site coordinates: 23,13,30S- 150,47,59E which is located at the southern end of Kinka Beach on a sand spit at the entrance to Kinka Creek, Capricorn Coast, Central Queensland Australia.

Catherine Forman

The print features Calidris ruficollis (Red-necked Stint) and the background orange/red colours represent Sarcocornia Quinqueflora (Beaded Glasswort) when close to flowering (mid-to-late April).

The Red-necked Stint is the most common overwintering species in South-East Tasmania. The south east is also one of the best locations to see amazing salt marshes, which are a feature in Tasmania. Perhaps if these birds were the size of whales or elephants, it would be easier to protect their habitats.

Title: Minima Viatorem (Small Traveller)
Medium: Linocut with collage
Site: Australian Ramsar site #7 Pitt Water-Orielton Lagoon TAS

Rowan Fotheringham

Do the Migratory Shorebirds at Shoalhaven Heads, with 'Cullinghutti' (Mt Coolangatta) watching over, find maps for their return journey to the northern hemisphere in the patterns in the sands and sea grasses…written by the ebb and flow of the tides?

My whimsical caption highlights the wonder of the journey these small birds make each year between the North and Southern Hemisphere, travelling up to 16,000kms. How this extraordinary feat of navigation is achieved remains a mystery to science.
'Cullinghutti' is a prominent landmark by the mouth of the Shoalhaven River on the South Coast of NSW. It’s a place of significance to the local Aboriginal community who regard it as a launching place for spirits. It connects the earth with the spirit world.

The mountain makes a very appropriate backdrop to the epic journey these remarkable birds make across the heavens.

Title: Cullinghutti
Medium: Linocut
Site: Cullinghutti (Mt Coolangatta), Shoalhaven River, southern NSW

Emma Franklin

Title: Eastern Curlew in a Storm
Medium: Etching
Site: Darwin, NT

Jill Fryer

In this image I hope to convey the fragility of these remarkable migratory birds. Although I have taken my rendition from the image of a Red-necked Stint I have deliberately left identifying markings blurred so that it could be any one of the several species that make this incredible journey. I observed the birds on the Coodanup shore of the Peel Estuary.

Title: Coming in
Medium: Drypoint & ink
Site: The Coodanup shore, Peel Estuary, WA

Jorji Gardener

As a keen birdwatcher, printmaker, and environmentalist I have been inspired by this project since it began.  I have depicted the Oriental Pratincole from studies of the birds in the museum collection, along with photos and some artistic license.
There is something very poignant about these museum labels, like passports for the little birds as they make their long journey through all weathers. I hope that humanity will take the job as stewards of this amazing world seriously and preserve their habitats.

I would like to thank Kay Parkin for letting me use her photos of the Oriental Pratincole taken at Tolderol, as inspiration for this print.

Jorji Gardener works from her studio in the beautiful Adelaide Hills. Finding inspiration in nature, she draws on her background in botany, and horticulture, as well as a love of history, all of which she weaves into the narrative of her work. A large focus of her art is about highlighting the connection we have with the natural world, and her art practice revolves around environment, specifically our native Australian flora and fauna. “I feel our environmental situation is precarious and my intention is for my artwork to facilitate further understanding and appreciation of the beauty and importance of our unique species.”

Title: Status: In Transit
Medium: Cyanotype print, tannin toned, with hand colouring, on Hahnemuhle 300 gsm
Site: Tolderol Game Reserve is on the edge of Lake Alexandrina, South Australia and provides habitat for waders and migratory birds,  including the Oriental Pratincole which has been sighted here, though sadly not by me, as yet !

Tiny and slender “peep” of inland and coastal wetlands, where it is often found in well-vegetated areas such as fields and flooded meadows. Stints are the smallest of the migratory waders, barely the size of a sparrow. A group of Stints are collectively known as a "Spell" of Stints... as this fellow is wading about solo perhaps he could be called a charm? As yet I haven't spied this little fellow with his elegant toes, so thanks to the peeps at ebird who gave permission to use the photo as reference and the info...

Title : Long Journey for small Stint with Long Toes!
Medium: Drypoint etching and wet cyanotype print
Site: Tolderol Game Reserve is on the edge of Lake Alexandrina, South Australia and is a vital habitat for waders and migratory birds.

Jane Giblin

The shearwater crosses the granite boulder shores of Big Dog Island in such numbers at night that if you happen to stay in the rookery into the evening you’ll be whacked in the head. My father holds a rare albino mutton bird, found and left to grow to adulthood, in 1989. The white-faced heron swings across the mudflats of the opposite shore of Badger Corner and up into the Samphire they swoop, way above my head, in 2018, for their particular and much quieter evening in the Furneaux Islands.

Title: Max Giblin and the Shearwater and the White -faced Heron in Franklin Sound
Medium: Lithographic print on Insicioni 20th February 2021
Site: shores of Big Dog Island and Badger Corner, of Adelaide Bay, and Franklin Sound, between Cape barren island and Flinders Island in the Furneaux Islands TAS

Grace Gladdish

Tasmania is significant for its shoreline, being surrounded by it - both contained and restrained.  The rhythm of the seasons is also significant here.  We notice the fluctuations in temperature and rainfall, as well as the influx and exodus of tourists.  We also mark the seasons by the coming and going of our migratory birds.
I am drawn to the edges and fringes of landscapes, where one habitat transitions into another, so I feel an affinity with our shorebirds.  One of my favourite places is the wetland reserve at Cygnet, south of Hobart.  Even in winter, when the tourists and migratory birds are enjoying warmer climes, it is a sanctuary, a place to recharge and to feed the soul.

“Cygnet Sanctuary” shows the Cygnet Marine Conservation Area in winter, providing sanctuary for the birds that stay, and maintaining it for those that will return.

Title: Cygnet Sanctuary
Medium: Hand coloured linocut print
Site: Cygnet Marine Conservation Area TAS

Dianne Glenister

My print practice centres around our natural environment.
I aim to draw attention to the ways in which we are negatively impacting on our environment and the urgent need to reverse this process.

Over the past year my work has included the images of birds, for example the now extinct Dodo as a way of drawing attention to the alarming rate of species loss we are contributing to today. The Overwintering project has been a catalyst for exploring the amazing life of migratory birds, in particular the Latham’s Snipe, which while overwintering in Australia travels to breed mainly in the northern part of Japan. I was delighted to discover that Latham’s Snipe visits Winton Wetlands, an inland body of water near my home. Extensive work is being undertaken by volunteers and professionals to protect and regenerate this area.

Title : Winton Wetlands - Latham's Snipe
Medium : Reduction Linocut
Site: Winton Wetlands. Beside the Hume Highway, between Wangaratta and Benalla VIC

Trudy Goodwin

I have chosen the Eastern Curlew because it is critically endangered. This large wading bird has a very long black bill useful for the bird to forage in shallow waters where seagrass or seaweed is found, eating crustaceans such as crabs. The flight path of the Eastern Curlew must include a chain of wetlands from Russia and North East China, so that they are able to rest and feed. They arrive in Australia along the coastlines and in estuaries and mudflats during the non-breeding season in the north, east, and south east of Australia.

I found the long bill inspiring for the artist because of its elegance and beautiful shape. To reinforce the idea of the Eastern Curlew’s habitat, I placed my bird among the seaweeds.

Title: Eastern Curlew
Medium: Mutiplate etching and collograph.

Kate Gorringe-Smith

The city of Hobson’s Bay, in Melbourne's west, is lucky to enjoy over 20 km of beach and foreshore, as well as many locally and globally significant wetlands. These places includeTruganina Swamp, the Truganina Explosives Reserve, Cherry Lake, the Altona Coastal Park, Jawbone Reserve, Newport Lakes and the internationally recognised, Ramsar listed, Cheetham Wetlands. A total of five creek systems also run through the municipality, including Skeleton Creek, Laverton Creek, Cherry Creek, Kororoit Creek and Stony Creek.

I made these prints for the Overwintering Project: Hobson's Bay exhibition, using species that I had seen on Altona Beach as well as referencing endangered species of the remnant grasslands of the Great Victorian Basalt Plain. The paper was first eco-printed using local vegetation.

Title: The Godwit, the Grass Frog and the Golden Sun Moth
Medium: Linocut on eco-print
Site: Altona foreshore, Melbourne's west VIC

Title: Altona Stint
Medium: Linocut on eco-print
Site: Altona foreshore, Melbourne's west VIC

Title: Endangered: Hobson's Bay
Medium: Linocut on eco-print
Site: Altona foreshore, Melbourne's west VIC

Britt Gow

Latham’s Snipe (Gallinago hardwickii) are residents of the Powling Street Wetland Reserve during spring and summer. It was the existence of this bird that resulted in a VCAT ruling that a housing development be scaled back to reduce habitat destruction. A committed group of residents collected data that provided strong evidence that the site was crucial to the survival of this species.

Title: Latham’s Snipe at Powling Street Wetlands, Port Fairy
Medium: Collograph a la poupée
Site: Powling Street Wetland Reserve, sw VIC.

Andrew Gunnell

The Navigators imagines with wonder the experience of finding your way through skies full of clouds, devoid of orientating stars, shorelines or landmarks. This experience can in some way represent the immense challenges to migratory shorebirds as the effects of climate change remove essential touchstones and reconfigure habitual flight paths.

Title: The Navigators
Medium: Pigment Inkjet and Screen Print
Site: The work began with photographs of cloud above the mangroves on the Barwon River, Barwon Heads, VIC

Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison

'Using the sun and stars as a compass, and navigating by the Earth’s magnetic field, recognising landmarks, the far eastern curlew will fly nonstop to the Yellow Sea, where it fuels up on the mudflats of north-east China. Then it will fly through days and nights across oceans to reach the Australian coastline, an exhausted wreck of a bird that is down to skin and bones. An endurance athlete of the animal kingdom, an aerodynamic wonder, a bird that flies 30,000 km a year, flapping its wings all the way because it can’t or soar or glide, the eastern curlew is a phenomenon of the natural world. It is also critically endangered. It has lost 80% of its population in the past 30 years.
....
The Eastern Curlew is the largest of more than 100 shorebirds that traverse the globe every year. They travel on one of nine invisible flyways that converge in the Arctic region. It is sometimes called the moonbird because if it lasts its 20-year lifespan it would have flown the distance between the Earth and the moon.
....
Migrating birds’ ability to predict long-term weather forecasts, says Randall Wood [a director who is travelling and researching Flyways, a film about globally migrating shorebirds], “is better than the very, very best computer models we have got. They can tell months out when a storm is going to come. They will actually time their departures to literally slingshot themselves out to sea on the tail of a storm and propel themselves across oceans.”’

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/02/to-the-moon-and-back-with-the-eastern-curlew

Title: With a slow and methodical wingbeat
Medium: Cyanotype

Litzia Hall

Title: Murmuring
Medium: Drypoint Etching
Site: Lee Point, Darwin, NT

Michelle Hallinan

The contemplative expression of the Eastern Curlew, with a flying flock of curlews in the background, is suggestive of a questioning thought- staying in the coastal wetlands eating mud crabs or flying with the others to escape a southern winter.

Title: Should I Stay or Should I Go (Eastern Curlew)
Medium: Etching on copperplate

Violet Hammer

Violet Hammer. 2014. Ruddy Turnstone A-wirriyuruyuru.Linocut with ochre.
Lives in Borroloola
Language: Yanyuwa

Biography
Violet was born at Butcher Lagoon, Bing Bong and grew up at Managoora and Borroloola. Violet started adult education in the early 80’s where she studied screen printing and made works on canvas. She was one of the founding members of Waralungku Arts.

Title: Ruddy Turnstone A-wirriyuruyuru
Medium: Linocut with ochre
Site: Borroloola, NT

Nora Hanasy

The Eastern Curlew’s status under the EPBC Act is Critically Endangered. This beautiful bird takes an annual migratory flight to Russia and China to breed, arriving back home to Australia in August to feed on crabs and molluscs in intertidal mudflats. I chose this bird to raise awareness that this species will most likely be lost in our lifetime. Their habitat is disappearing, and where there is still mud, dogs and drones are scaring them. We need stronger nature laws to protect our precious shorebirds.

Title: The Eastern Curlew
Medium: Drypoint etching
Site: Kinka Beach. Site coordinates: 23,13,30S- 150,47,59E, located at the southern end of Kinka Beach on a sand spit at the entrance to Kinka Creek, Capricorn Coast, Central QLD

Janette Hanrahan

The Cecil Hoskins Native Reserve is classified under the Ramsar Convention as a wetland that is important for conserving biological diversity. This 110 acre wetland is situated in Moss Vale in the Southern Highlands of N.S.W. and is an important resting place for many Australian migratory waterbird species. However, the only sighted migratory bird of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway is the Latham’s Snipe, a member of the wader water bird family.

Title: The Cecil Hoskins Nature Reserve
Medium : linocut, paper drypoint, collage
Site: The Cecil Hoskins Nature Reserve Southern Highlands, NSW

Alyssa Harding

Title: Great Knot on Mudflats
Medium: Drypoint on Collograph
Site: Lee Point, Darwin, NT

Elizabeth Harriott

Black-tailed Godwits at Rest depicts a group of Black-tailed Godwits feeding in calm shallow waters after and before their long migratory flight. These Godwits were viewed at the Boyter’s Lane Bird Refuge South West Rocks. I have printed a blue monoprint background representing the sea and weather, overprinted with a lino print of South East Asia and Australia which makes up the habitat of the Black-tailed Godwit. It is the habitat of the Black-tailed Godwits which is threatened by development and is causing its numbers to decrease rapidly. Over the two first layers I have printed an etching of the Black-tailed Godwits.

Title: Black-tailed Godwits at Rest
Medium: Monoprint and etching
Site: Boyter’s Lane Bird Refuge, South West Rocks, Sydney NSW

Jeanne Harrison

The Great Knot breeds in Eastern Siberia. But during the summer months they migrate to our coastal lagoons, including Stockton, NSW, where they forage in the moist mud and roost in nearby low vegetation such as mangroves. It was here that I observed them jabbing their long bills into the soft mud of the intertidal mudflats. My print, which is a combination of etching and drypoint, seeks to capture this bird as it prepares to take flight.

Title: The Great Knot
Medium: Etching
Site: Stockton, NSW

Anna Hely

Title: Untitled
Medium: Stencilled monoprint with chine collé
Site: King Island TAS

Mark Henderson

Heather Hesterman

Flock reflects the mass departure of migratory shorebirds. Using numerous systems of navigation, these birds fly along the East-Asian Australian Flyway, a pathway traversing 23 countries from the north to the southern hemisphere. With intertidal zones and habitats under threat from human development, stop over areas are reducing. Several shorebird species are in critically danger of surviving. This artwork was created from a photo taken of shorebirds taking flight at Cheetham, Victoria by Ken Gosbell. I want to acknowledge Ken’s generosity in giving me permission to use his image.

Title: Flock
Medium: screenprint on rag paper
Site: Cheetham wetlands, VIC
Image: Ken Gosbell

Bridget Hillebrand

The summit of Mt Arapiles in the Wimmera provides spectacular views of many fresh and saltwater lakes that attract a large variety of migratory birds.During my frequent visits to the region I await the arrival of the Sharp-tailed Sandpiper which prefers the grassy edges of these shallow inland freshwater lakes.

Title: Sharp-tailed Sandpiper
Medium: Linocut, chine-collé
Site: Natimuk-Douglas Lakes, Wimmera VIC

Kit Hiller

Title: Ruddy Turnstones
Medium: Hand-coloured linocut
Site: Morelands Beach near Devonport TAS

Griselda Hitchcock

Lake Mealup is a freshwater lake lying to the east of the Harvey Estuary. It used to be a valuable food source and refuge for waterbirds in late summer until it started to dry up and became filled with bulrush. Recently it is being returned to its original state by diverting water run-off from the Mealup Main Drain into the lake – and the birds are back.

April at Lake Mealup. 2019.
Black-winged Stilt Himantopus himantopus
Yellow-billed Spoonbill Platalea flavipes
Black Swan Cygnus atratus
Australian Pelican Pelecanus conspicillatus
Red-necked Avocet Recurvirostra novaehollandiae
Pacific Black Duck Anas superciliosa
Pink-eared Duck Malacorhynchus membranaceus

Title: Mealup, April 2019
Medium: Hand-coloured drypoint
Site: Lake Mealup, WA

Domenica Hoare

The Red-Necked Stint (Calidris Ruficollis) is an omnivorous wader that migrates bi-annually in large flocks. It makes an eleven thousand-kilometre journey in July-August from its breeding grounds in Alaska and the Siberian Tundra to Australia to escape the Northern Hemisphere winter and returns there approximately six months later for the northern summer. In Australia, it can be found foraging on wetlands, tidal mudflats, marshes and beaches. It takes its name from its breeding plumage colour when its face, neck, throat and upper breast are pink-red to pinkish-brown. It is the smallest migratory bird, weighing twenty-five grams and with a wingspan between twenty-nine and thirty-three centimetres. Its tiny size adds significance to its feat of physical endurance and stamina coupled with its superb navigational skills. The Red-Necked Stint is a truly remarkable creature that lives its days in endless summer.

Title: Endless Summer
Medium: lithograph

Aileen Hoath

Based on observations along the Swan River, Alfred Cove and Peel Estuary, Mandurah, WA. My own stretch of the Swan River sustains many bird species, yet it took the Overwintering Project to alert me to shorebirds that return each summer to feeding grounds further downstream. These remarkable creatures require an advocate. Their muted presence and seasonal absences can obscure the significance of the remnant urban wetlands they rely on. My mixed-media print abstracts the elements to evoke interconnecting cycles: the rhythmic pulse of longhaul flight, of tidal pull, late afternoon wind shimmer, and the disruptive wake of powered craft.then, thrillingly, Bar-tailed Godwits quietly probing the shallows with long sculpted beaks.

Title: Feeding Ground
Medium: linocut and drypoint
Site: The Swan River, WA

Veta Holmes

Bulldozers have begun clearing the Bush Forever site at Ocean Reef to make way for the redevelopment of Ocean Reef Marina. An important bird species that visits at Ocean Reef is the Rainbow Bee-eater, Merops ornatus which is “Specially Protected” under the Wildlife Conservation Act 1950 as it is a migratory bird protected under an international agreement with other nations. The Rainbow Bee-eater visits Perth in the summer where it breeds in sandy banks that can be reasonably degraded. Clearing of bushland for the marina redevelopment is going to cause a loss of nesting sites and foraging areas for the species.

Title: Save Ocean Reef
Medium: Linocut
Site: Ocean Reef, WA

Joanna Hubbard

The stylised Eastern Curlew was one of a series I drew from a trip to the Noarlunga Downs Wetland Trail. I’ve included on the bird’s back some of native Swamp Weed (Selliera radicans) which speaks to the fact that the bird and its habitat are mutualistic. Likewise the moon and title (“To the Moon and Back”) speaking to the long trip the bird will take in its migration.

Title: To the Moon and Back
Medium: Linocut with wax metallic embellishments
Site: Noarlunga Downs Wetland Trail, SA

Kate Hudson

I have chosen the Sooty Oyster Catcher and positioned him on the map where I have seen him. To me, this bird and this beach represent sanctuary and a welcome home to the migratory birds that overwinter here. Maitland Beach, heading towards Grinder Point, is a beautiful quiet place, every time I have been there I see Oyster Catchers, both Sooty and Pied and Hooded Plovers and once an Eastern Curlew. There are rock pools interspersed with small sandy inlets, a sprinkling of shells and different kinds of seaweed and sea stars. The beach is fringed with Banksias and scrub.

Title: Sooty Oyster Catcher
Medium: reduction linocut 2 blocks
Site: Maitland Beach on Waratah Bay in the Cape Liptrap Coastal Park VIC

Penny Hudson

I live near Lake Claremont in Western Australia and my walks around the lake are a joy to me. The animal and bird life is prolific. There is an active group of birdwatchers, a bird hide and the local community and schools are involved in maintaining the habitat of the Lake. On of the migratory shorebird species that visits Lake Claremont each year is the Black-winged Stilt. My etching, titled Black Winged Stilt at Lake Claremont WAis inspired by this bird and the lake environment. I’ve made my etching in layers, showing the different environments of the lake: the plants around the lake, the lake itself, the shore in the background with the Black-winged Stilt in the middle. It was a privilege to be part of this worthwhile project. It took my thoughts around the world and back again, and made me appreciate the complexity of the ecosystem I live so close to.

Title: Black Winged Stilt at Lake Claremont WA
Medium : Hand coloured etching
Site: Lake Claremont, WA

Robin Hundt

Red-necked Stints are regular overwintering visitors to Ling Reef on Sydney’s northern beaches. The Wildlife Protection area and the intertidal rock platform in the Aquatic Reserve provide a safe habitat and a rich source of marine life for waders – ideal for restoring their strength before the return flight north.

As the tiniest of migratory shorebirds the Stint, the size of a sparrow, appealed to me for its ability to survive the threats of long-distance travel, predatory raptors and human interference – a remarkable achievement. Sadly, some don’t make it.

Title: Some Don’t Survive
Medium: Screen print, pencil; 28 x 28 cm, Arches 300 gsm
Site: Long Reef Aquatic Reserve on Sydney’s northern beaches NSW

From the beginning, the name Red Knot fascinated me. I was further fascinated when I learnt that this shorebird has a specialised body-part. The Red Knot’s highly sensitive bill tip enables it to find the only food it eats as it moves through the mudflats. Even before it touches a mollusc, its bill can sense the bivalve’s presence.

The mudflats at Stockton Sandspit in the Hunter Estuary on the northern edge of Newcastle are a rich source of molluscs for the thousands of Red Knots that arrive there annually to rest and fatten up, before returning to their Siberian breeding grounds.

Title: Lunch at Last
Medium: Screen Print, pencil
Site: The mudflats at Stockton Sandspit in the Hunter Estuary on the northern edge of Newcastle NSW

Anne-Maree Hunter

The Mongolian (Lesser) Sand-Plover is an endangered species that may be a rare visitor to the sandy beaches and mudflats in and around Fullerton Cove, Stockton Bridge - Kooragang Island and within the Hunter Wetlands National Park. I like to imagine these tiny birds spot Nobbys Headland, take a turn so as to alight on the beaches and mudflats at the mouth and along the Hunter River all after their long trip from th Northern Hemisphere.

Title: In the Shadow of Nobbys
Medium:Dry point, Lino-Print, hand-stamped text and image, thermographic ink
Site: Under the Stockton Bridge - Kooragang Island, Hunter Wetlands National Park, NSW

Without depicting the Wood Sandpiper itself, I have instead portrayed the bird’s distribution across Australia and the wider world.

Title: Cardinal N.E.W.S.
Medium: Dry point with colour roll, hand-stamped text and image
Site: The Wetlands Centre, Shortland, NSW

Margarita Iakovleva

The Whimbrel Numenius phaeopus is a medium-sized curlew. It is mostly streaked brown, with twin dark streaks along the crown and bill. The bill is long and curved down. From Russian, Western Siberia and Alaska, through Kazakhstan, China and Indonesia, Whimbrels travel to Australia. When they come close to Queensland's shoreline they see a chain of islands with Thursday Island at its head - the first sign of the so desired land. So, the birds know that it is their Golden Land of Plenty, where they can finally relax and get back their energy. I depicted that moment when the bird can finally see Golden Australia - The Land of Plenty.

Title: Whimbrel. Golden Australia - Time of Plenty ahead
Medium: Intaglio etching, hard ground and aquatint on 2 plates, with chine-collé
Site: Gold Coast. Labrador. Whiting Street. This Street runs into Marine Parade next to The Broadwater. From here, the sandbank is about 200 m to the east and Wave Break Island is little bit to its north.

Alexandra Irini

Title: Eastern Curlew
Medium: Woodcut

Bron Ives

28 Gramsis an etching inspired by the thousands of migratory shorebirds that overwinter at Victoria’s Western Treatment Plant - a peaceful and very special sanctuary. One of the migrants, the Red-necked Stint, arrives from arctic Siberia weighing approximately 28 grams - the weight of 28 Smarties.
I find my subjects in nature - often animals or landforms, and abstract their shapes and patterns. Etching multiple plates I create layers of transparent colour to show both the fragility and resilience of the natural environment.

Title: 28 Grams
Medium: Etching
Site: T-Section Lagoon Pond 5, Western Treatment Plant, Werribee VIC

Title: Echelon
Medium: Etching

Nadine Jolley

Watching these birds is a delight. I missed seeing the migratory birds as they had already left by this time, however the Sooty Oystercatchers provided great inspiration. I was charmed by their personalities as they very busily searched in the sand for shells to open. Once they found one, they called out, and the others flew over to a rock where the shell was opened with the help of the rock and consumed.

Title: Sooty Oystercatcher
Medium: Linocut
Site: On a visit to the beach, I observed the Sooty Oystercatchers from Flinders in Victoria, just to the right of Mushroom Reef over in a rocky area, right on the shoreline at high tide. One of the birds I observed has a white flag tagged to its leg. I saw three and one appeared to be juvenile. The white faced herons' were also present.

I was born in Brisbane, but raised on the Mornington Peninsula. I like creating representations of places I have visited using various techniques, including printmaking. I work from images I record on digital camera, that I can pick through in the studio to find an image that I would like to work with. Capturing a visually accurate representation of the place is not my aim; the representation within the final image is a reminder of the impression of being at this place, or felt upon reflection of the visit.

My inspiration for this work came from a walk during a windy winter afternoon when the tide was very low. I was able to walk along the beach at Flinders Pier and made it all the way directly underneath the gunnery. I made sure that they were not doing firing practice that day! Both the pier and Mushroom Reef can not be seen from here. This is a spot I had never come before and I really enjoyed this part of the beach. Mine were the only footprints there was no one but the birds there with me.

Title: White-faced heron
Medium: Linocut
Site: Flinders beach VIC

Jade Kahle

Trekking in foreshore swamp in not so sensible shoes, the micro landscape underfoot, with patterns of leaves, mud, foliage and rocks provides a layered and textured background for a Latham’s Snipe.

The hand stencilled colour shapes that reflect the overcast clouds, silvery sky and pink grounds are based on a camouflage pattern.

Title: Looking for Snipes
Medium: Drypoint etching with hand coloured stencil.
Site: Green Hill Lake, Ararat, VIC

Forest Keegel

These bags were created for Lorne Sculpture trail 2011

Mapsacks Intertidal nesting zone
2011 Lorne Sculpture Sculpturescape
Flyways – Invisible highways in the sky followed by migratory sea birds as they seasonally loop in a figure eight from Siberia to Southern Australia. Engaging beach-goers in the creation of shelter and refuge for sand nesting and migratory birds. This work aims to highlight the vulnerability, as well as the need for protection and shelter during breeding season when Hooded Plovers and other sand nesting birds lay eggs on the beach above the high tide mark so their chicks can feed at the water’s edge. The beaches they rely on are also frequented by humans, dogs and feral predators.

And also used at
Migratory Bird Haven
Migratory Bird Haven is a Participatory Estuarine Laboratory developed for the Deakin Sculpture in Schools program of Lorne Sculpture Biennale 2018. Forest Keegel worked with Lorne College Year 10 Biology students and Estuarywatch to monitor the estuary and explore the habitat requirements of the critically endangered Hooded Plover and East Asian Flyway migratory shorebirds.

Sandbags printed with Hooded plover eggs and the East Asian flyway were placed just out of the tidal zone

Title: Mapsacks: Hooded Plover (above)
Title: Mapsacks: Flyway (right)
Medium: Silkscreen

Sharon Keighran

Region: Borroloola, Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Territory
Language: Yanyuwa/Garrwa
Biography: Sharon was born in Borroloola, NT. She attended school in Adelaide where she could get special education for children who are deaf. She returned to Borroloola after her education and worked in different organisations. Her mother Marjorie Keighran is a strong art centre artist and encouraged her to join in Art Centre Activities. Sharon has worked in the Art Centre as an Artist & Education Support Worker since 2013. She began making artwork when she joined the art centre team and has discovered her talent. She has made screen & lino prints and painting featuring local wildlife.

Title: Eastern curlew- murumurrmururrngu
Medium: Linocut with watercolour
Site: The Sir Edward Pellew Islands, located in the Gulf of Carpentaria about 60 km north-east of Borroloola NT

Michele Kershaw

This migratory wader of the tundra, with a matchbox weight, undertakes a mighty journey via the Yellow Sea to our local shores, to overwinter before returning to Siberia to breed.

Their plumage colour begins changing here to a red ochre in preparation for their Arctic return.

At Kinka, they rest and forage with a rather hunched posture, picking constantly and rapidly at the muddy surface and then dashing to another spot.

We can only hope that on this migratory path their habitats remain intact.

Title: Red-necked Stint
Medium: Paper drypoint
Kinka Beach site coordinates: 23,13,30S- 150,47,59E which is located at the southern end of Kinka Beach on a sand spit at the entrance to Kinka Creek, Capricorn Coast, Central Queensland Australia.

Hannah-Amelia King

My work incorporates native animals and common design elements. I do this to connect the viewer to the work (personalise the work). The messages are often in response to environmental and sustainability issues within Aotearoa (New Zealand).

The location/s for this piece were Makorori Reserve Gisborne and Te wherowhero Lagoon, Muriwai, Gisborne.The birds were essentially similar at both locations with the edition of grey Heron’s at Makorori. The arrows convey the birds to-ing and fro-ing from the locations with the dotterels and Heron staying in the locations longest. I hope the numbers continue to rise in our migratory bird populations. I have left the negative space within the picturespace empty to convey the “plastic environment”. The birds all look to the audience pleading for help in this respect.

Title: Targeted Flight
Medium: Drypoint on 230gsm rag paper
Site: Makorori Reserve Gisborne and Te wherowhero Lagoon, Muriwai, Gisborne, New Zealand

Martin King

Title: The Crossing Revisited I: The Convergence
Medium: Etching with chine colle

Carol Kite

'My journey (Clifton Springs to Swan Bay, Vic.): 11 km.
Shorebirds' journey (Australia to Siberia): 13,000 km.'

Title: Siberian Postcard
Medium: Drypoint with Mixed Media
Site: Bellarine Peninsula VIC

Eva Klusacek

Between September 2018 and March 2019, Hobson's Bay City Council conducted a series of monthly printmaking workshops and local site visits, culminating in an exhibition at Altona's Joel Gallery, the Overwintering Project: Hobson's Bay. The exhibition opened as part of the annual Hobson's Bay World Migratory Bird Day Festival, and closed after World Environment Day.

Eva Klusacek was one of the contributing artists who made the exhibition such a success.

Title: Sharp-tailed Sandpiper
Medium: Linocut
Site: Altona foreshore VIC

Elizabeth Knight

This is an unusual view of a Red-necked Stint. One dawn, at the beginning of February 2018, I headed over to Port Fairy. I was hoping to catch sight of the Shearwater Mutton Birds leaving Griffith Island. But I missed them. I was returning to my car, walking along the causeway from Griffith Island to Martin’s Point, when I spotted these little birds and took some photographs. I chose the view of this one feeding among the basalt rocks and shallow water to use for my print, its soft white feathers showing from underneath.

Title: Red Neck Stint
Medium: Etching
Site: the causeway from Griffith Island to Martin’s Point, Port Fairy VIC

Carmel Knowles

One small thing that could happen on Kinka Beach to help prevent these heroes of the sky slide towards extinction, is keeping their feeding ground free of domestic dogs during migration season.
Reducing their presence on the beach could allow the birds time to recover, restore and repeat.

Title: Dog gone
Medium: Screenprint over relief print
Site: Kinka Beach site coordinates: 23,13,30S- 150,47,59E which is located at the southern end of Kinka Beach on a sand spit at the entrance to Kinka Creek, Capricorn Coast, Central Queensland Australia.

Helen Kocis Edwards

Superheroes entered the contemporary lexicon via comic heroes in 1930s. Defined as a character possessing super powers, wearing distinctive costume, they fight threats to humanity. Similarly, the Bar Tailed Godwit, weighing 600 grams, has the extra-ordinary ability to fly directly from Alaska to New Zealand in seven days. Mating plumage transforms from dull brown to showy ochre. Migratory birds don’t fight enemies of the planet but survive despite threats of pollution, urban and industrial development on wetlands and coastal areas. Their health indicates successful functioning and sustainability of complex ecosystems and habitats encountered along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway.

Title: Super Godwit....able to fly Alaska to N.Z in a single bound
Medium: Drypoint etching on giclee print on hahnemuhle museum etch paper 350gsm
Site: Ocean Grove VIC

Belinda Kopietz

let me keep the
freedom
in my feathers

I’m on the return
I must keep
going
wind thrashes
rain tears
sun dries
parched
will it be the
same
will it be as
I remember
will I feel safe
again
to build up my
strength
to duck and weave and
pick and choose
and strut
and stalk and fluff about
and stand and
drink
it in

I am a speck
in the sky
a speck in
space
I can only see
ocean and sky
cloud colours it
charcoal
moon turns it
silver
sun repaints it
blue and aqua
and so many
hints of green
I am in
synchronicity
with this
constant motion
when I land
will I know the
place
I left behind

they say you
can always see
better
with some
distance
but when I am
close up
will I see
degradation
drained dry desolate
disaster
will I see fence mangle
plastic air- filled bags
floating plastic bottles
broken coloured lids bumping
shattered glass shards

tangled fishing line
and hooks trapping
unexpected
stinking sludge

Oscar Wilde
Once explained

each man kills
the thing
he loves

I am small
in this big world
but I am brave
and driven
by my spirit
to survive

my rhythm
is your rhythm
a simple
equation it is

if my home goes
then so do I
and then eventually………

let me keep the
freedom
in my feathers

Title: Constant
Medium: Collograph

Anastasia Kotzapavlidis

Title: Curlew - in negative
Medium: Wood engraving

Damon Kowarsky

The bird in this image was drawn in New Zealand, the landscape is from Seoul, Korea. In bringing them together I wanted to show something of the geographical extent of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, and how a single bird can span the 9,600 km distance between these two countries. With coronavirus reshaping the world in 2020, and the former ease with which we travelled great distances now on hold, it seems more important than ever to reflect on the invisible and delicate paths birds make across the natural world.

Title: Reflection, Seoul
Medium: Etching and aquatint with hand colouring
Site: New Zealand and Seoul, Korea

Sophie Kristine

Around the length of a ruler and weighing only 200 grams, the Latham’s Snipe migrates the 8,000 or so kilometres from Japan all the way to south-eastern Australia each year. It is one of 40 migratory shorebirds that regularly visit Australia, and around 20 or 30 of these beauties visit the Jerrabomberra Wetlands from August onwards before their return trip to breed and hatch their young. Accelerating habitat loss along their migration route is threatening the species, so for the Latham’s Snipe to survive the wetlands they rely on need to be protected.

Title: Latham's Capital Snipe
Medium: Hand-coloured linocut
Site: Jerrabomberra Wetlands, Canberra ACT

Helen Langley

Title: Snipe
Medium: Linocut
Site: SW coast VIC

Title: Greenshank
Medium: Linocut
Site: SW coast VIC

Penelope Lawry

Bar-tailed Godwit populations locally are small. Increasingly proactive attempts to protect the nesting sites of rare little terns offer benefit to other migratory birds. Cheeky and active, the Bar-tailed Godwits scour the edges of the lagoon sandbars for crustaceans, worms and crabs amongst terns, pied oystercatchers, cormorants, pelicans and seagulls.

Title: Landing, the Bar-tailed Godwit
Medium: Linocut
Site: Sawtell Headland Lagoon at Bonville Creek and Bongil Bongil National Park, Coffs Harbour NSW

Movement in the wetland undergrowth and unusual bird song tempt me to look up from my artwork and out the studio windows. A creeping excitement grows as with camera in hand, photos are taken before the instigator disappears back into the wetlands.
Identified by excited birders as the elusive and furtive Latham’s snipe, ensures I establish ongoing observation in hope of a return visit.
It returned!

Title: Visitor
Medium: Reduction Linocut
Site: Wetlands, Reid Drive, Coffs Harbour (back yard) NSW

Maori legend tells of the Kuaka leading early Maori explorers to Aotearoa, of their observation of their migrations and theor inability to discover the breeding grounds or chicks of these magnificent birds. The feats of the Kuaka and their migrations along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway connected with me. As a kiwi living longterm in Australia who observed them during their summer stopovers, I wanted to acknowledge their beauty, strength and a selection of the feathers that made these long distance migrations possible. The feather images are based on photographs of a collection at the Australian Museum.

Title: Kuaka
Medium: Reduction linocut
Species: Bar-tailed Godwit/Kuaka

Helene Leane

The Bar-tailed Godwit (Limosa lapponica) has the longest known non-stop migration path and also holds the record of the longest journey without pausing to feed. (9 days) It is, however, one of the birds listed on the Near Threatened classification list.

The godwit is only 37 cm long and weighs only 260 grams. The adult has blue-grey legs and the neck and breast breeding plumage is brick red, which only would be seen in the Arctic coasts. When they make the long flight to Australia (11 000 km), they are off- white and blend in wonderfully with the sand and grasses. They feed on insects and crustaceans. I viewed the godwit at Stockton Sandspit, Newcastle, NSW.

Title: Bar-tailed godwit en route #1
Medium: gouache monotype
Site: Stockton Sandspit, Newcastle, NSW

Wendy Leason

'and we’ll fly south together alone
against the winds and seas
our annual journey
from Siberia to Werribee
and after the Northern winter
we’ll fly back again for summer'

Title: Overwintering - Siberia to Werribee
Medium: Drypoint etching

Glynis Lee

Title: Lee Point Sandpiper
Medium: Photoetching
Site: Lee Point, Darwin, NT

Lance Lessels

Between September 2018 and March 2019, Hobson's Bay City Council conducted a series of monthly printmaking workshops and local site visits, culminating in an exhibition at Altona's Joel Gallery, the Overwintering Project: Hobson's Bay. The exhibition opened as part of the annual Hobson's Bay World Migratory Bird Day Festival, and closed after World Environment Day.

Lance Lessels was one of the contributing artists who made the exhibition such a success.

Title: Untitled
Medium: Etching
Site: Altona beach, VIC

Hannah Lewis

I started a series of dresses in January 2020. The dress is a metaphor for nature wrapping itself around you, enveloping and embracing you. I visited Stockyard Point with a group of artists, one of whom was wearing a gorgeous dress covered in birds. I was struck by the beauty of the windswept coastal habitat; the pink tips of pigface, knobby club rush, the silver grey of coastal grasses, moonah trees and sand sculpted by the wind and soft pads of weathered peat along the shoreline. Nature is part of the fabric of my life.

Title: Red-necked Stint - Stockyard Point
Medium: Hand-coloured linocut
Site: Stockyard Point, Jam Jerrup VIC

Megan Lewis

Title: The Ruff – Kooragang to Kazakhstan
Medium: Collograph
Site: Stockton Sandspit, Newcastle NSW

Jan Liesfield

Terek Sandpiper, occasionally seen near Geelong but breeds from Finland to northern Siberia. The Overwintering Project: a great reason to create a bird print, one of my favourite themes.

Title: Dreaming of warmer climes
Medium: Linocut
Site: Geelong VIC

Pippa Lightfoot

Pelican Point is on the Swan River close to the city and bordering the University of WA. There is something primordial about water and it unsettles the senses. The idea of water as a sacred element, synonymous with time and life itself…is a feeling that resonates with me. For most of my life I have lived within walking distance of the Swan River and it is a touchstone…a constant source of renewal.

It is a theme I constantly return to...a reminder of the power and fragility of the natural world. We take for granted the simple shoreline gifts and the pleasure of observing birdlife in all its quirky richness.

Title : Refuge...
Medium : Linocut with hand colouring, over screenprint
Site : Pelican Point - Swan River, Perth WA.

Emma Little

Title: Untitled
Medium: Stencilled monoprint
Site: King Island, TAS

Brenda Livermore

Latham’s Snipe overwinter (from Japan) in small groups in freshwater wetlands. While displaying bold patterning in black, white and brown they are remarkably well camouflaged among the reeds and grasses of their habitat.
One such habitat is Cecil Hoskins Nature Reserve, Southern Highlands, NSW. A favourite destination and place of personal significance where my husband and I became engaged.

Title: Journey's Plumage
Medium: Linocut
Site: Cecil Hoskins Nature Reserve, Southern Highlands, NSW

Peta Lloyd

According to Birdlife Australia, this medium sized wader is the most ‘dinky-di’ of all shorebirds that visit Australia. Like the ‘grey nomads’ from Southern Australia, the Sharp-tailed Sandpipers spend their summers on the Capricorn Coast, soaking up the sunshine, whilst building up their energy supplies to make the long migratory flight back to the Northern Hemisphere. They enjoy feeding on aquatic insects, larvae, worms, mollusus, crustaceans and seeds. They share the mudflats, mangroves and rocky shores with other shallow water waders at beautiful Kinka Beach. A quirky defining feature of the Sharp-tailed Sandpiper is it’s white eyebrow!

Title: Sharp-tailed Sandpiper
Medium: Multi-plate print, soft plastic and collograph plates
Site: Kinka Beach site coordinates: 23,13,30S- 150,47,59E which is located at the southern end of Kinka Beach on a sand spit at the entrance to Kinka Creek, Capricorn Coast, Central Queensland Australia.

Adrian Lockhart

The importance of the natural world probably started for me in Tasmania in the nineteen sixties. I became a very keen surfer then and with surfing in its infancy in Tasmania, I, with my friends, travelled the state looking for beaches and headlands that might have rideable waves.

There was the pristine, isolated, natural beauty of the island. Although not actively looking for it at the time, there was also the wildlife. I took for granted that it would always be there. Not any more.

On a recent trip to Tasmania, spending a month revisiting old haunts with my wife Caren, a keen bird watcher, we observed many birds, and saw this Pied Oystercatcher on an east coast beach, shrouded in mist.

Pied Oystercatcher
(from Bird Book by Caren and Adrian Lockhart https://adrianlockhart.com.au/all/books/)

Walking along a Tasmanian beach
Collars around our ears
Blanketed in a rolling white sea-mist
We could see a smudge of red and black
Through the swirling veils
But we encroached too near
And it flew off
To a safer distance
Resuming its search amongst the rock pools and foaming shoreline

Title: Pied Oystercatcher
Medium: Etching
Site: East coast TAS

Niloufar Lovegrove

The journey of birds chasing the warmer season over the oceans holds an instinctive bravery and a beautiful showcase of following a unified goal. Hence, in my approach to The Overwintering Project, I have attempted to picture the glory of birds flying across the oceans.

Title: Flying Back North
Medium: Linocut
Site: Kinka Beach site coordinates: 23,13,30S- 150,47,59E which is located at the southern end of Kinka Beach on a sand spit at the entrance to Kinka Creek, Capricorn Coast, Central Queensland Australia.

Kate Lovejoy Furnell

This edition is based on the migratory Pacific Golden Plover that overwinters on the NSW coastline. My image plays with the idea of the coastline being a runway for the birds, but a runway that is being changed into a desert. The changing landscape of coastal areas and the increase in development are endangering these migratory species. The birds have 'flown' thousands of miles but their presence on our coastline will also have 'flown' if we are unaware of sustainable progress.

Title: Flown
Medium: Photopolymer with viscosity printing
Site: NSW coast

Susan Lowe

Between September 2018 and March 2019, Hobson's Bay City Council conducted a series of monthly printmaking workshops and local site visits, culminating in an exhibition at Altona's Joel Gallery, the Overwintering Project: Hobson's Bay. The exhibition opened as part of the annual Hobson's Bay World Migratory Bird Day Festival, and closed after World Environment Day.

Susan Lowe was one of the contributing artists who made the exhibition such a success.

Title: Twilight in the Marsh
Medium: Linocut
Site: Altona VIC

Hollie Lunan

Title: Ecosystem
Medium: Etching
Site: Darwin, NT

Larissa MacFarlane

I feel lucky to live not far from some amazing wetlands in Williamstown and Altona, including the Jawbone Marine Sanctuary. Due to its history as a Rifle Range, it has been fenced off for over 80 years, protecting a distinctive and wide biodiversity that is also home to the only remaining site of basalt plain mangroves in Victoria. And I am grateful to the people who have worked so hard over so many years across the world to protect such coastal wetlands that are not just essential for the free global passage of migratory birds, but also keep our planet alive.

Title: A Summer Stint in the Jaw Bone
Medium: Linocut
Site: My site is the Jawbone reserve in Williamstown Melways 55 G8

Negin Maddock

My print portrays the Curlew Sandpiper in flight, against the backdrop of the clouds at Long Reef Marine Reserve. Look up! Although not tangible, the sky; the very air they breath and fly through is being polluted on a daily basis. Inhalation exposure to pollutants such as urban and industrial emissions can cause a number of adverse effects. I used relief and monoprinting techniques; the sandpiper is a linocut, the clouds are hand carved stamps, and the sky background is a monoprint.

Title: In Transit
Medium: Linocut, stamping, and monoprint
Site: Long Reef Marine Reserve, NSW

Robert Mancini

Having had a lifelong interest in all nature, but especially birds, I found myself deeply fascinated with migratory waders. I spent many hours on my own in the saline and brackish environments of Melbourne's west with hundreds of thousand of these special long-distance travellers. Unfortunately their numbers have severely declined over my lifetime. In my personal work recently, I have focussed on these birds to highlight the amazing feats of endurance and the threats and challenges they face. I’m so pleased to be involved in this ambitious project which has seen so much creative output to assist these birds on their fragile and precarious journey. Safe travels.

Title: Watch
Medium: Relief print
Site: Cheetham Wetlands VIC

Title: Here and There: Eastern Curlew (Moreton Bay, Queensland)
Medium: Digital print
Site: Moreton Bay QLD

Title: Here and There: Sand Plovers (Moreton Bay, Queensland)
Medium: Digital print
Site: Moreton Bay, QLD

Marion Manifold

Latham’s Snipe overwinter on the Gellibrand River estuary wetlands at Princetown, SW Victoria. The Snipe’s fragile habitat appears to be threatened by a proposed $8 million development with accommodation, restaurants, swimming pools and major road infrastructure. The development also appears to be at risk of flooding; it is amazing the government is not intervening as lives could be at risk.

Title: Camouflaged – Latham’s Snipe Princetown Wetlands Medium: Linocut
Site: Gellibrand River estuary wetlands Princetown, SW VIC

Latham’s Snipe is a visitor to the Gellibrand estuary, Princetown Victoria. It has been a beautiful pristine environment, but there is increasingly large amounts of plastic washed up the estuary. Soon we will have coloured plastic sands with the piece sizes getting smaller. The Snipe’s habitat is also at risk from the impacts of a proposed large multi-million dollar development to cater for the nearby 12 Apostles tourism industry. I fear for this species, that the next footprint I see will be the last.

Title: Plastic Pollution – The Last Snipe
Medium: 2 colour aquatint and linocut
Site: Gellibrand River Estuary, Princetown VIC

Margaret Marks

Title: Red Knot Bird
Medium: Hand-coloured linocut

Lisa Marshall

A chance sighting of a Buff-banded Rail (Gallirallus philippensis) on the foreshore of Pittwater, Newport on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, inspired me to document its short and timely visit. I saw the Rail in a sheltered cove within remnant mangrove. I regularly walk through the site, which is next to an open stormwater drain and collects trash or treasure washed up by the tide. Secretive by nature, the Rail meanders through the pneumatophores and rank vegetation where it forages, pecking and probing in mud to catch crustaceans, worms and other invertebrates. Its habitat ranges across SE Asia and the SW Pacific.

Title: On my patch
Medium: Collograph and etching
Site: the foreshore of Pittwater, Newport on Sydney’s Northern Beaches

Title: Godwits Soaring Above
Medium: Stencilled monoprint with embossing
Site: King Island TAS

Patricia Martin

The print shows three Latham’s Snipes resting on reeds in a wetland habitat. This wading waterbird migrates to Tasmania during spring and summer, after undertaking a flight of 8000 Km from its breeding site in Japan.

The snipe’s boldly-patterned plumage of black, brown and white provides marvellous camouflage as it forages in the reedy wetlands habitat that it favours. The Egg Islands are a favoured habitat for these migrants, as it is safe from predators: lying midstream in the Huon River in southern Tasmania. These tranquil Islands give me, also, a much-appreciated source of tranquillity and peace.

Title: Latham's Snipe
Medium: Woodcut with chine collé
Site: The Egg Islands, Huon River TAS

Sandpipers migrate from their breeding grounds in Europe and Asia, to ‘overwinter’ in Australia during our warmer months. I have often encountered them in the quiet waters of the wetlands of the Pitt Water – Orielton Lagoon, which is located near Sorell in southern Tasmania. The lagoon is a wetland of international significance, recognised as both a Tasmanian Nature Reserve and an international Ramsar site.

This print shows a solitary Sandpiper landing on the shallow waters of the quiet lagoon. They glide down; hovering briefly above the water before landing then flutter their tails back and forth, before beginning a machine-like head-bobbing as they try to dislodge molluscs and other marine critters from the mudflats. I associate these birds with calm waters and my peaceful enjoyment of the quiet solitude of this Ramsar Site.

Title: Sandpiper
Medium: Drypoint engraving collaged onto a textured linocut background
Site: Pitt Water – Orielton Lagoon TAS

Pipeclay Lagoon is a beautiful, tranquil tidal inlet east of Hobart. The lagoon has strong tidal influence and migratory birds are attracted to the shelter and food offered in its extensive, sandy mudflats when exposed at low tide. The bar-tailed godwit takes refuge here, after flying 11,500 km from its Alaskan summer breeding grounds in order to ‘overwinter’ during our summertime. Pipeclay lagoon is a quiet and peaceful place, set between pastured hills and ocean beaches. My print depicts one elegant godwit in flight, above a flock that is circling-in to land on the lagoon, while another flock flies off into the distance.

Title: Godwits, Pipeclay Lagoon Tasmania
Medium: collagraph, hand-coloured
Site: Pipeclay Lagoon TAS

collagraph, hand-colouredPitt Water – Orielton Lagoon is a wetland of international significance and providescritical feeding and roosting area for migrating birds of the East Asian-Australasian flyway. A distinctive feature of the wetlands are the extensive beds of brightly coloured, slow-growing succulent saltmarsh ‘samphire’ species, which I capture in the reds and yellows of this image. This vegetation provides good camouflage for the speckled-plumage of flocks ofPacific Golden Plover that seek warmth, shelter and foraging grounds here, during the Australian summertime, after migrating tens of thousands of kilometres from their Alaskan-summer breeding grounds.

Title: Pacific Golden Plover, Pitt Water, Tasmania
Medium: collagraph, hand-coloured
Site: Pitt Water-Orielton Wetlands TAS

Flocks of tiny Red-necked Stints converge on the sandy mudflats of Pipeclay Lagoon during the summertime, after migrating thousands of kilometres from their breeding grounds in Siberia and Alaska.

On Pipeclay Lagoon they rest and feed on the exposed parts of  the mudflats or the shallow waters, probing for small invertebrates as they gorge themselves to build up fat stores to fuel their annual migration.

The lagoon is a beautiful, quiet place to visit. It is surrounded by gentle hills of farmed land, and Mt Wellington can be seen peeping over the horizon.

Title: Red-necked Stints, Pipeclay Lagoon, near Hobart, Tasmania.
Medium: Drypoint &  watercolour.
Site: Pipeclay Lagoon is a protected marine reserve near the coastal towns of Lauderdale and Cremorne,  about 70 km east of Hobart TAS

Sue Martin

I have chosen to depict images of the Curlew Sandpiper, which is found at internationally important sites around the coast of Australia. The birds congregate on the intertidal mudflats in sheltered coastal areas, around non-tidal swamps, lakes and lagoons near the coast an occasionally inland. Curlew Sandpipers do not breed in Australia, but leave in March in order to reach the breeding grounds in Siberia during June and July, returning to south-east Australia in late August, September and sometimes into December. Small numbers of Curlew Sandpipers are also found in parts of Western Australia. The birds are threatened by wetland degradation in east Asia where they rest on their annual migration and also in Australia by coastal development, land reclamation and pollution around settled areas.

Title: Beachcombers
Medium: Hand carved rubber stamps
Site: Western Port Bay VIC

Jennifer Martinus

Between September 2018 and March 2019, Hobson's Bay City Council conducted a series of monthly printmaking workshops and local site visits, culminating in an exhibition at Altona's Joel Gallery, the Overwintering Project: Hobson's Bay. The exhibition opened as part of the annual Hobson's Bay World Migratory Bird Day Festival, and closed after World Environment Day.

Jennifer Martinus was one of the contributing artists who made the exhibition such a success.

Title: Brown on Brown
Medium: Etching
Site: Altona Beach VIC

Diane Masters

During the summer of 2018-2019, my husband and I were privileged to be living as sole occupants and volunteer caretakers of the remote Maatsuyker Island off southern Tasmania.

The island is the southern-most shearwater rookery in the world and an estimated 600,000 pairs of short-tailed shearwater return from Siberia in late October to breed. The migratory cycle begins again in late March as the adult birds leave followed by the juveniles one month later.

The cacophony of sound in the morning as the birds leave to feed is matched only by the magnificent sight of thousands of birds returning en masse at dusk each evening.

Title: Shearwaters' evening return
Medium: Linocut with rainbow roll
Site: Maatsuyker Island, South West Wilderness World Heritage Area TAS

Malini Maunsell

Making this work was a non-stop “flight” / labour (ouch, exhaustion during and after, like the birds no doubt) one drypoint mark per notional kilometre for 10,800 kilometres…I was feeling the birds during the 5 hours and 44 minutes it took to make the plate, and needless to say lots of things came up during the time e.g. my hand hurts and I want to stop but I won’t because the birds don’t have that option, etc.

Title: Flyway
Medium: Drypoint etching

Edith May

Birds have been using the tiny lakes and wetlands south of Geelong as refuges for thousands of years. This image shows these areas surrounded by medieval Geelong, the bays, the ocean and farmland being recorded by me and Charlie the Poodle.

Title: Overwintering in Medieval Geelong
Medium: Linocut with hand colouring
Site: Geelong VIC

Victoria McCaffrey

Windy, exciting
why? Red-necked Stint scurry
at the old wetland.

(I have chosen a Haiku as my statement)

This piece was created after an outing organised by Kate at the Western Treatment Plant, the Red-necked Stints scurrying about the wetlands. I learned so much that day about migratory birds, it was a turning point in my developing interest in birds.

Title: Red-necked Stint Scurry
Medium: Linocut on Japanese tissue
Site: Western Treatment Plant VIC

Above left: Mudflats, monoprint. Above right: Stint, photocopy transfer. Site for both prints: Altona beach VIC

Clare McCarthy

The Swan River is a vital presence in Perth. It is essential to the survival of the migratory birds who travel vast distances to overwinter here. Artists from the Printmakers Association of WA were fortunate to have the knowledgeable guidance of members of the Swan Estuary Reserves Action Group Inc to guide them in exploring this habitat. I often focus on my experience of my local environment in my artwork. This experience has added new depth to my appreciation of the beauty and also vulnerability of our river and the birds that depend on its unspoilt areas for survival.

Title: Printmaker Looking for Birds
Medium: Etching
Site: Swan Estuary Marine Park, Alfred Cove, Perth, WA

Ian McConnell

Title: Snipe, Peterborough
Medium: Linocut
Site: SW coast VIC

Title: Arriva
Medium: Linocut
Site: SW coast VIC

Cheryl McCoy

I am participating because I am deeply concerned about our environment and the cascading effects on our flora & fauna. I am a printmaker who aims to create meaningful artwork that draws upon life experiences that reflect a connection between the human condition and the environment to evoke inquiry and emotive responses from the viewer. For a large part of my adult working life I spent travelling and way to many occasions by plane. The addition of the third run way at Sydney’s Airport and the increased recreational activities at Towra Point Reserve has impacted heavily on the Whimbrel’s flight path, breeding, feeding & rest locations. They are vast travellers and determined survivors and depend on our ability to address their habitat losses.

Title: Furtive Whimbrel (Numenius Phaeopus)
Medium: Relief print
Site: My location is the Central Coast (postcode 2250) but the Whimbrel's threatened habitat is in postcode 2231 NSW

Stephanie Mc Cready

My work depicts my local shorebird habitat: Botany Bay in Sydney. I find it rather incongruous, but also encouraging, that an expanding metropolis like Sydney can continue to provide an important overwintering site for many species of migratory shorebird. My work shows the contrast between largely unspoilt wetlands on the southern shores of the bay, which includes the Ramsar listed Towra Point Nature Reserve, and the highly developed northern shoreline, which includes multiple industries and Sydney Airport. Here, a flock of Whimbrels are arriving. Despite the pressures, I hope that Botany Bay will always remain a sanctuary for these beautiful birds.

Title: Arrival
Medium: Drypoint etching, inked in phthalo blue and sepia a la poupée.
Site: Botany Bay, view from the southern shore at Quibray Bay looking north toward Sydney CBD.

Last Summer I was thrilled to observe a flock of Bar-tailed Godwits, as unexpected visitors to Gunnamatta Bay, not far from my home in Sydney’s south. This is the bayside of popular beach suburb Cronulla, which swells with human visitors during the Summer months. Despite the many walkers and dogs, the godwits appeared to be healthy and coping well. I spotted them on numerous occasions probing the large expanse of sandy shoreline exposed at low tide for food. Local council has recently erected signs to educate the public about migratory shorebirds and why they need to avoid disturbing them.

Title: Taking Flight
Medium: Drypoint etching
Site: Gunnamatta Bay, in the Sutherland Shire of Sydney NSW

Gina McDonald

The Latham’s Snipe is known to the Japanese as the ooji shigi bird and travels each year from Australia to the island of Hokkaido to breed. In the Hunter region where I live it can be seen in grassy wetlands like the Hexham Swamp and Hunter Wetlands. It is renowned for being very hard to see because of its ability to blend into the background and hide. However the male puts on a spectacular display prior to mating, soaring, splaying its tail feathers and falling to the earth with riotous sounds that have earned it the name of 'Thunderbird'.

Title: Flying to Japan - ooji shigi bird
Medium: Etching
Site: The Hunter wetlands, NSW

Steve McDonald

I embrace the ocean and its magnificence. To think this small bird journeys over nearly 27,000 kilometres across this ocean each year is a wonder. Since being involved with this project I have come to develop not only appreciation but admiration for the extraordinary capacity of migratory birds. What mysteries are at work that guide and sustain this bird for flights of over seven and a half thousand miles without stopping across the ocean and all its encompassing elements?

Title: Soaring beyond the storm
Medium: Drypoint etching

Peta McFadzean

I am a teacher on King Island, fortunate to be a part of the printmaking scene at the King Island Arts and Cultural Centre for many years. We have hosted many inspiring and enabling teachers including Kate Gorringe-Smith, who has not only whetted our appetite for printmaking, but has also drawn us to think more deeply about the plight of our native birdlife.

I was shocked to discover that the top three birds at risk of extinction in Australia are native to King Island, and that they are likely to disappear from the face of the Earth in the next 20 years unless Australia improves its protection of threatened species.
My print is in honor of the King Island Brown Thornbill, the Orange-bellied Parrot and the King Island Scrubtit. I have created it using fresh thyme from my garden and it is simply entitled “Out of Thyme”, although I optimistically hope that we aren’t.

Title: Out of Thyme
Medium: Stencilled monoprint
Site: King Island TAS

Janine McGinness-Whyte

Between September 2018 and March 2019, Hobson's Bay City Council conducted a series of monthly printmaking workshops and local site visits, culminating in an exhibition at Altona's Joel Gallery, the Overwintering Project: Hobson's Bay. The exhibition opened as part of the annual Hobson's Bay World Migratory Bird Day Festival, and closed after World Environment Day.

Janine McGinness-Whyte was one of the contributing artists who made the exhibition such a success.

Title: Sandpiper and Saltbush
Medium: Linocut and botanical print
Site: Hobson's Bay VIC

Pam McGrath

This print is to honour the work of all those involved in protecting the Moreton Bay Wetlands for overwintering birds such as these Far Eastern Curlews. An inspiring part of the Far Eastern Curlew’s journey is the initial fly around conducted to indicate to the entire flock that the long flight is to start. This print celebrates this ‘Lift Off’ with the hope that the conservation efforts in Moreton Bay will similarly provide an effective start to the conservation of the Toondah Harbour site.

Title: Lift Off!
Medium: Linocut with background hand painted.
Site: Moreton Bay, QLD

Valerie McIntosh

With this print my aim was to show the vast extent of the journeys undertaken by migratory birds from the northern hemisphere to Australia and New Zealand. The flight paths, shown collectively in various documents, have a rhythm of their own, and it was this, rather than scientific accuracy that I wanted to depict.

Valerie is a member of the Maryborough Printmakers in Queensland.

Title: Pathways
Medium: Linocut over collagraph

Anne McMaster

This print was made in response from many coastal walks along the Lee Point in Tropical Darwin, Northern Territory. While researching this project in the dry season I would often walk along the Lee Point coastal habitat of the migratory shore birds. It was very empty of bird life. I managed to see a few birds around October, then one evening in middle of December I witnessed masses of murmuring shore birds arrive back to their habitat. It was an amazing sight, and it was interesting that they just sat down on the water line, looking rather exhausted.

Title: Lee Point, Darwin
Medium: Etching, collograph and stamp
Site: Lee Point, Darwin NT

Megan McPherson

Mediated site.
RAMSAR site 266
Near the mouth of the Yarra-Yarra.
West-side.
A site for waiting for a stint.
Still waiting.

Title: Measured for affect
Medium: Relief printed etching, pigment ink, archival glues, rice paper, rag paper.
Site: RAMSAR site 266 (Hobson’s Bay and Port Phillip Bay
Altona Coastal Park); a migratory home for the Red-necked Stint from Siberia

Megan wrote an introductory article about the Overwintering Project: Mapping Sanctuary for Imprint, the membership magazine of the Print Council of Australia. Here is a quotation from the article that more deeply describes Megan's research into her site:

June 23, 2017: Place and space
Waiting in the whipping cold wind on Altona’s dog-friendly beach. From where I sit in between Cherry and Kororoit Creeks, the coastal park lies in front of me, and beyond it I see the urban coastline. Over the grey bay at the mouth of the Yarra—with its transition name of Batman’s River and even older naming, the Birrung—I can see the Port of Melbourne tugs assisting today’s container ships arriving into port. The gantry cranes stand proud, ready to disembark the load of patchwork rectangles containing all the stuff we think we want and need. Right now, though, with my feet on the soft, dry bit of the shoreline amid the debris and remains of seawater and city, I am waiting. I am in someone’s else home. I know it to be a Key Biodiversity Site. I’ve checked. I’m on the borderlands of Boonwurrung and Wathaurong lands of the five southern lands of Kulin nation. It’s also now Seaholme, a tiny suburb next to Altona, a heavily industrialised suburb in Melbourne where I know, on the other side of the Kororoit, three petrochemical plants and a big waste recycling depot are sited. It’s also an overwintering site. Kate Gorringe-Smith sent me the link to the bird map. This is the habitat of the Red-necked Stint, one of the tiniest migratory shorebirds to attempt the annual 25,000-kilometre round-trip from their Arctic breeding grounds. More than 80 percent of its global population live here on our shores and each year, come August, some of them will end their journey right here.I have to wait and to recognise, in the hope to see.

from 'World Travellers', Imprint 52 (3) Spring 2017: p.41.

Anne Miles

I have for many years visited the reefs of Port MacDonnell and Carpenter Rocks at low tide. These are areas rich in food for local and migrating birds.

The rockpools in the exposed reefs are endlessly fascinating to me, capturing many small creatures and colourful sea weed until high tide returns. I am drawn to the soft colours and shapes found in these pools.

Title: Rockpool
Medium: Reduction linocut
Site: Carpenter Rocks and Port MacDonnell in the lower South East of South Australia.

Julie Milton

I was introduced to migratory birds by Kate Gorringe -Smith, her passion and enthusiasm for these wonderful creatures stirred something in me. I’m a bird lover although never really thought about migratory birds. I became interested in the tiny red necked stints after a visit to Flinders, where I saw and took photographs of these delicate creatures. I am fascinated with the transformation of their body organs, enabling them to store excess fat, which keeps them nourished for their extensive journey across many oceans from Australia to the Tundra.

Title: The Journey
Medium: Relief print, acrylic and gouache
Site: Flinders VIC

Title: The Beach Gathering
Medium: Monoprint with linocut and collage

Title: The Huddle
Medium: Mokuhunga and chine collé

Gret Mingundoo Allwood

Region: Borroloola, Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Territory
Language: Yanyuwa/Wombai
Biography: “I’ve always painted as a hobby even when I was a small child I enjoyed and love sketching and painting. I never realized that people admired my work so they started requesting me to do a painting for them. Now that I'm a fixture at the Waralungku Art Centre I've been painting extensively.
I was asked to do the NT Coat Of Arms for the new Borroloola Court House. I was very proud and honoured to do so.”

Title: Grey-tailed Tattler- A-wurnngarliku
Medium: Linocut
Site: Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands, NT

Sarah Mitchell

Just down the road from home is one of the largest intact saltmarshes on the east coast of Queensland. Cooloola Coastcare has taken action to ensure that this RAMSAR listed wetland in the Great Sandy Straits is protected. Signage, information, bird walks, bollards and songs have all helped!

Beyond the Samphire, Sea Purslane and other succulents, the migratory shorebirds shimmer in the distance. The Terek’s Sandpipers forage and fatten up along the mangroves’ fringed far edge. They are particularly fond of flies, and their long beaks find crabs and polychaetes - rich nutrition for their long and sometimes perilous journey.

Title: Tereks Sandpiping
Medium: Editioned lino cut, printing ink and gold gouache on Stonehenge Paper
Site: The saltmarsh is at the southern end of the Great Sandy Straits, between the small coastal towns of Cooloola Cove and Tin Can Bay QLD

Catherine Money

Like all good 'kiwis', the Double-banded Plover likes to escape the winter and fly over the Tasman Sea to holiday on the Sunshine Coast, in this instance, the northern end of Pumicestone Passage at Caloundra. Pumicestone Passage is also a desirable place to live for many Australians. A city of 50,000 already under construction in Caloundra South is certain to impact on water quality as it drains directly into the Passage.

Title: Pohowera
Medium: Linocut
Site: Caloundra, northern end of Pumicestone Passage, Moreton Bay Marine Park, Qld

Nicola Moss

This Bar-tailed Godwit strolls on the watery sandflats of Waterloo Bay within Moreton Bay.

These are desirable locales for living, for both people and other life. A high biodiversity region; areas have become patch-worked through development, conservation and cultural use, stretching networks of subtle and fragile relationships.

Title: Life on the Edge - Flight Path
Medium: Collograph, linocut with collage and piercing
Site: Waterloo Bay, Moreton Bay, Qld

Melina Murphy

The sooty oyster catcher crosses my path on my regular visits to the beach for a surf. They really appeal to me because they appear quite comical. The strong red colour contrasting with the black, the big eyes and the super long beak all contribute to making them look somehow toy like. These birds breeding habits are being compromised because they are beach-nesters making them vulnerable to human and canine traffic on top of their natural predators. We hold the key to their survival otherwise we may only be left with memories, photos and toy versions.

Title: Toy World
Medium: Digital
Site: Grassy Head Beach, NSW

Prue Myers

Title: Arrival
Medium: Linocut
Site: Altona beach, Melbourne VIC.

Title: In Flight
Medium: Linocut
Site: Altona beach, Melbourne VIC.

Title: Prevent This
Medium: Linocut
Site: Altona beach, Melbourne VIC.

Karen Neal

In October 2017 a group of printmakers gathered at Flinders Ocean Beach to see the local migratory and resident shorebirds. We were very lucky to have a spotting scope that made it possible to see a large group of Red-necked Stints that consequently inspired this print and the circular format.

Red-necked Stints are very small birds, approximately 15cm in size, and hard to spot as their brown bodies blend very well with the brown of their overwintering habitat in the intertidal area. Some were roosting on all the washed up seaweed, shells and debris. Others were running down to the waters edge and back as the waves came in. We were able to observe them from a distance with the scope as they carried on their daily activities. It is amazing that these little birds can fly to the other side of the globe to their breeding habitat then find their way back to the same location.

Title: Spotting Stints
Medium: Linocut
Site: Flinders, Victoria

Kate had arranged our field trip to the WTP and also for Ken Gosbell from Victorian Wader Studies Group to talk to the group sharing some of his amazing knowledge about migratory shorebirds. We were very lucky to see so many birds on the day and such a diverse cross-section of migratory and non-migratory shorebirds, swans, ducks, ibis, spoonbills and a couple of brolgas.

We visited a number of the ponds and my image is inspired by the view across one of the ponds. The sun was glistening on the water and I found feathers caught in the surrounding straggly vegetation. Feathers are a wonderful indicator of the local birds that have visited the area as they leave these traces of their presence in the area.

Title: Traces
Medium: Linocut
Site: Western Treatment Plant, VIC. Saturday March 10th, 2018

Josie Newton

References:
True light and shade: an Aboriginal perspective of Joseph Lycett’s art by Prof John Maynard, 2014
Journey to the end of the night. Louis Ferdinand Celene, 1934.
Wayward youth: trans-beringian movement and differential southward migration by juvenile sharp-tailed sandpipers, Handel and Gill, 2009.

The title of my print, Journey to the end of the night, is from the title of the same book by Louis-Ferdinand Celine.  It’s a dramatic and expressive tale of improbable travels, idiocy and hypocrisy of society.

The bird I have chosen, the Sharp-tailed Sandpiper (Calidris acuminata), is a long distance migrant, travelling each year from breeding grounds in the Russian Arctic (Lena Delta, Siberia 78.181114, 125.315834) to non breeding areas in Australasia (Coquon -present day Hunter River 32.833778 151.691422)…………..25,000 kms non stop ……….via Alaska.

The bird is unique in that juveniles take a detour to western Alaska for body mass gain before proceeding on southward migration. Sandpipers are the only second well documented case of differential migration among birds that involves different routes for adults and juveniles.  It’s also thought the stopover in Alaska relates to the temporal and spatial distribution of food which has the greatest influence in determining how major events are organized in a birds annual cycle –for scientists, the behavior provides grounds for testing migration theory and life history strategy!

The work: My image is an allegory of the perilous journey.  I have used the feathers’ many meanings, from the symbol of air and wind – the realm of the bird – to spiritual adornment, protection (wings) and ultimately survival and pays homage to trans-migratory birds . On visits to the Hunter River wetlands with sky and water separated by a concrete overpass, I couldn’t help but wonder at the journey, navigation by night, planets, innate sensibility…..Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. You just have to close your eyes. It’s on the other side of life….. Emile Littre.

Title: Journey to the End of the Night
Medium: Etching
Site: the Hunter River wetlands

Suzanne Newton

Travel exposes one to the unknown and can create a sense of vulnerability. This work seeks to capture the fragility of migratory birds. They seem so small to make these long journeys across the darkness of the ocean waters and under the night skies.

My work as a printmaker has been preceded by many years working in libraries and cultural institutions. I try to imbue in my work a strong narrative style and tend to favour the printmaking methods of solar-plating and collagraphs. Whilst I often draw upon my own stylised photo-based imagery as a basis for creating a body of work, I also enjoy the unpredictability that is inherent in the nature of printmaking.

Title: Traveller
Medium: Solar plate, ink drawing

What makes a king?

The Eastern Curlew has an understanding of land and sky, features the longest bill of all shorebirds and is heavier and taller than its closest relations. They are often described as timid, but this characteristic works to protect them and ensures they reach their destination.

Before dawn, I sometimes see them as a go outrigging on Botany Bay. Their distinctive bill sets them apart from the other shorebirds. They are always gone by the time our crew comes back in. An elusive king.

Title: The True King of the Skies
Medium: Solar Plate ink colouring
Site: Botany Bay, NSW

Mike Nicholls

Cormorants are resident seabirds that often share habitat with migratory shorebirds. This is the case at Kororoit Creek, which flows out into Port Phillip Bay through the Altona coastal park.

Title: Cormorants at the mouth of Kororoit Creek
Medium: Linocut
Site: Kororoit Creek, Altona VIC

Bridget Nicholson

I was overcome by the size of the Red-necked stint and it's annual flight. My first encounter was at Flinders as part of a 'chaperoned' group. I returned to spend some time on my own with the birds. At first I couldn't see them, they are so well camouflaged, but as I waited they revealed themselves through movement, I am enamoured. The Flinders ocean beach is a very special place for me having spent many summers here with my grandmother, and whilst not a pretty beach of golden sands it entraps you with its craggy rock-pools, seaweed, and promises of another world.

Title: The Flight
Medium: Unique state, collograph and photopolymer plates
Site: Mushroom Reef Marine Sanctuary, Flinders VIC

Lyn Nixon solo & collaborative works

‘Flight path south’ illustrates the incredible journey that the tiny Plovers make to travel to our unique Peel wetlands. The flight path and the Plover have been pierced into the solvent transfer and drypoint etching print, it illustrates how they may disappear if when making the journey they have nowhere to feed, if the wetlands are not protected.

Artist: Lyn Nixon
Title: Flight Path South
Medium: Solvent transfer, monoprint and drypoint etching with pinpricking
Site: Peel wetlands, Mandurah WA

Artists: Lyn Nixon, Melinda Hughes and Annette Nykiel
Title: Fragile Wayfarers
Medium: Solvent transfer, screenprint, collage
Site: Peel wetlands, Mandurah WA

Artists: Lyn Nixon, K. Sullivan-Rhodes and Annette Nykiel
Title: Evolution
Medium: Solvent transfer, collage
Site: Peel wetlands, Mandurah WA

Sally North

These migratory birds are incredibly hardy, spending days and nights, sometimes flying nonstop in response to their natural instincts. In this work I wanted to highlight this fact, and also the dark days ahead for them if we humans persist on our continued path of destruction of migratory bird habitats.

Title: Whimbrel Night Flight
Medium: Reduction linocut
Site: Kinka Beach site coordinates: 23,13,30S- 150,47,59E which is located at the southern end of Kinka Beach on a sand spit at the entrance to Kinka Creek, Capricorn Coast, Central Queensland Australia.

Maria Nova

As a mechanical engineer by trade, I love a challenge. But needing a more creative challenge, I began designing and building soft furniture. On the hunt for unique fabrics, I began experimenting lino printing as a method to custom design my own upholstery fabric. Lino printing is a type of art that set at the back of my mind since young age and resurfaced only recently. After completing a short course recommended by a friend, and keeping to the basics, I have been experimenting with lino, a variety of inks, papers and fabrics, and continue to search for that elusive masterpiece.
For this exhibition I have chosen Little Egret from Kimberley region WA in combination with Western Australian flora.

Title: Little Egret of the Kimberley
Medium: Linocut
Site: The Kimberley WA

Annette Nykiel & Bede Jacobsen

Shorebirds have different length bills so that even when they feed at the same habitat they are reaching prey at different depths in the mud substrate - thus avoiding competing with one another. Even males and females of the same species can have different bill-lengths to thus avoid competition for prey.

Title: Feeding at Lake Pollard
Medium: Hand-coloured drypoint
Site: Lake Pollard, Yalgorup wetlands WA

Paul O'Brien

The Godwit is from the family Scolopacidae the same family as Curlews , sandpipers ,& Snipes. Their scientific name is Limosa limosa .They were fairly numerous on the sandy wet land under the Stockton Bridge over the Hunter River here in Newcastle, NSW. They can be found all around the coast & throughout the inland wetlands.

Title: Godwit
Medium: Etching on copper
Site: Stockton Bridge wetlands, Hunter River, Newcastle NSW

Sally O'Connor

Frequent visits to my Mum in Meningie have taken me directly past the overwintering birds in the Coorong. I photographed a site near Jack’s Point and developed several pictures from this. Initially my woodcut depicts only the topography with the sand dunes in the distance and waters of the lagoon, behind a foreground of sedge.

Title: The Coorong
Medium: Woodcut on Huon pine
Site: The Coorong SA

Monica Oppen

Kurnell on the southern headland of Botany Bay is under the north-south flight paths in and out of Sydney Airport. Kurnell is also the site of the former oil refinery and not far away the sand dunes are still being mined. Yet Bonna Point and nearby Towra Point, which is a nature reserve, are still an overwintering spot for the long travelling waders. As I sat and watched a single Curlew in amongst a small flock of Oyster Catchers the aeroplanes landed overhead. I wanted to portray these birds as tiny shapes in an environment in which the natural world is a tiny remnant and the human impact is always close by. The computer coding text is to remind the reader/viewer that the digital interface through which we process the world is omnipresent.

Title: First Arrival at Bonna Point, Kurnell, Sept. 2017
Medium: drypoint on steel, fax machine printed text on chine collé, relief print off acetate.
Site: Bonna Point, Kurnell, on the southern headland of Botany Bay, NSW

Glenda Orr

My etching features a Ramsar wetland that I frequent with our informal birdwatching group but the scene is the swampy, marshy areas behind the shoreline. I have been intreagued by the surreal landscape as this area abuts right up on a sterile, concrete storage area for the port, and planes regularly fly low over the area to the nearby airport but yet we saw over 75 bird species this particular day including Godwits on the shoreline.

This image, however, reflects a particular interaction that day. There was huge excitement from my birdo friends and many other visitors, some even from Japan and Korea, that we saw 3 crakes – the Spotted Crake, Spotless Crake and Baillon’s Crake all near each other in the reeds on the edge of this large water-lily laden pond but I was more delighted by the common old Willy Wagtail and Sacred Kingfisher that were perched nearby. The Willy Wagtail had cleverly hidden her nest in the crook of a tree and was flitting from a stump in the middle of the pond, hunting to feed her young, while the Kingfisher sat quietly waiting for ages.

Title: Crakes, Kingfisher and Willy Wag Tail – Wynnum Wetlands.
Medium: Etching
Site: Wynnum Wetlands, Moreton Bay QLD

Paula O'Shea

Title: Bar-tailed Godwit
Medium: Hand-coloured linocut
Site: Altona beach, Melbourne VIC

Title: Red Knot
Medium: Hand-coloured linocut
Site: Altona beach, Melbourne VIC

Ian Pascoe

I am an artist who specialises in drawing the natural world in ink and nib pens, particularly reed pens. After a bit of dabbling in linocuts, I recently started working with collagraphs, and have found it a steep learning curve. My shearwater prints were inspired by a sunset cruise along the rugged south coast of Phillip Island, where I was able to get photos of shearwaters returning to their burrows after a day of fishing Bass Strait. I hope I have been able to portray the spectacle of a mass of these birds against a backdrop of Cape Woolamai.

Title: Shearwaters
Medium: Collagraph
Site: Phillip Island lies at the mouth of Westernport, Victoria. Its north coast is within Westernport, and hence wader habitat, while its rugged south coast fronts Bass Strait. Here the migratory Shearwaters, Ardenna teniurostris, arrive in spring to mate and lay a single egg in a burrow. The pair fish the waters of Bass Strait and the Southern Ocean, returning in large flocks at sunset each evening to feed their chick. The adults leave the chick before it fledges and the fledglings must fly North to the arctic alone. The print depicts shearwaters fishing the ocean near Cape Woolamai.

Debra Petit

Debra Petit is an Australian mixed media artist who has exhibited widely. Debra has been saving birds since childhood. The Overwintering Project has been a wonderful vehicle for Debra to use her printmaking skills to create a sepia monotone drypoint work of Sharp-tailed Sandpipers (Calidris acuminata), one of Mandurah’s migratory shorebirds. Debra was inspired by the Sandpiper’s subtle colouring, bold markings, and cheeky kinetic pose. Debra has known the Creery Wetlands in Mandurah, WA for over 30 years, seeing many changes in that time.

Title: Whoops! There's Dinner
Medium: Drypoint etching
Site: Creery Wetlands, Mandurah WA

Perdita Phillips

I visited Alfred Cove (Marradungup) at different times when the tide was in or out. The water was full of phytoplankton, the mud banks were full of algae, snails, worms and smaller life underneath that waders feed on. The same sun that powers the life of the muddy bottoms also drives the birds to travel across the world: light, mud, time and depth. Anthotypes are images created using materials from plants. Unlike conventional photography, exposure to light is used to fade treated surfaces to create images. In this case, the spice turmeric was used to create an image when bleached by the sun over a couple of hours. Anthotypes are fugitive and will eventually fade. A digital print from scan has been supplied for the portfolio.

Title: Light, mud, time, depth (number 6)
Medium: digital print of scanned turmeric anthotype
Site: Alfred Cove

Fay Pilon

The Red-necked Stint weighs about the same as a chook egg, about 50g. These birds are migratory and leave King Island at the end of March, going to the Northern Hemisphere to breed. Birds return to King Island mid-September. Red-necked Stints are seen on sandy beaches.

A cinquain, a 5 line poem:

Bird
fly high
soar and dip
resilient
country to country.

Title: Untitled
Medium: Stencilled monoprint
Site: King Island TAS

Sue Poggioli

It was Monday morning, the 20th of November 2017, Torbul on Moreton Bay. Birds gathered awaiting low tide, ready to feed on the mud flats. On the grass and sand were Bar-tailed Godwits, Black-winged stilts, Eastern Curlews, Great Knots, and Ruddy Turnstones. Having taken positions many stood on one leg, head resting to the side and were moved gently by the breeze, like a wind vane. Others moved about as if in discussion. In the mangroves sat Whimbrels. We were told there were probably a thousand birds present. Any disturbance would cause the resting birds to fly across Pumicestone Passage to Bribie Island to search for other feeding grounds. They are in Australia for Summer to feed in preparation for their return to the Northern Hemisphere and breeding.
We waited at a respectful distance quietly watching and recording.

Title: Conversation with Birds
Medium: Etching, sugarlift aquatint, colour a la poupee, watercolour
Site: Torbul, Moreton Bay, Qld.

Wynnum Mangrove Boardwalk. I enter the mangroves, suburban sounds diminish, other sounds grow. Today, the tide is low, soon to turn, sandbanks exposed, birds feeding, long beaks go in and out of the sand, working, finding what they need, I have my supplies, to eat and work. I sit to draw. I am inside the mangrove forest.

Always I am amazed at the vast size of the larger trees. At the beauty and seeming fragility of mangrove shoots emerging from the stinking, oozing black mud. I am cocooned in sound, birds mostly unseen, occasionally ravens come in closer to look at me and call to each other, there is someone here. I draw, I am aware of other sounds, water lapping, moving in now, snapping shrimp, the male parading his large red claw to attract a female, wind stirring the trees, Moreton Bay moving beyond the line of mangroves.

I give my attention to the mangroves and am in awe of the protective cloak they draw around the creatures who live here, who visit, including migratory shorebirds feeding and fattening before their long journeys to the northern hemisphere. I too am enveloped in the protective cloak of the mangroves and emerge from the forest nourished.

Whimbrel.

Title: In the Mangroves (I)
Medium: Linocut and collage
Site: Wynnum Mangrove Boardwalk, Moreton Bay QLD

Irene Proebsting

Harmers Haven is a small town along the Bunurong Marine and Coastal Parks in Gippsland. The Bunurong people are the traditional owners of the land and water in the region. It was during a break between coronavirus restrictions on the eve of the 2020 winter solstice that I visited the area.
This beautiful marine coastline which features reefs of sculptured rock formations and brightly jewelled pools, support sea animals and provide food for local and migratory shorebirds. I decided to use photographs of one of the sooty oystercatchers feeding there and a rock pool for my print. I merged the images and the body of the bird is slightly transparent to infer the fragility of the ecosystem and the life-forms that depend on it.

Title: Bunurong Coast
Medium: Digital print on Hannemühle
Site: Harmers Haven, Gippsland, Victoria

Julie Puchalski

The site I visited is Swan Bay on the Bellarine Peninsular. It is a place I visit quite regularly as the bird life is diverse and plentiful. It was during one of these visits that I was fortunate enough to see two Sooty Oystercatchers chicks which were so small, vulnerable and totally reliant on their parents for protection and their survival.
I have chosen a bird from the list of migratory birds to Australia and New Zealand provided by The Overwintering Project to use as the image for my print.

The Bar-tailed Godwit.
This bird is on the vulnerable species list. It is an amazing bird which undertakes the longest non-stop migration of any bird so far studied and must build up its body fat to fuel this long trip. I read about a bird in a study of this migration, one female (E7) who in 2007 departed Alaska on an eight-day non-stop flight to New Zealand setting a flight record of 11,680 km. This female then made a 174-day round trip, a journey of 29,280 km with a total of 20 days of flying.

I decided to use the image of a Bar-tailed Godwit chick to emphasis the vulnerability of the species and all migratory birds who depend on so many factors to survive these gruelling annual migrations. Just as the little oystercatcher chicks were reliant on their parents, the Godwits and many other migratory species need our assistance and support for their survival.

Title: Bar-tailed Godwit Chick
Medium: Multi-media print including Linocut, mono-print, and chine-colle on Fabriano paper

Mary Pulford

I have enjoyed going out into estuarine and wetland environments to search for migratory shorebirds. Very often these are dull brown mudflats, and it takes some patience to spot these discreet birds. The next difficulty is identifying them – how big are they? What colour are they? And does the beak turn up or down? This work reflects my time searching for migratory shorebirds, and I do think it’s a Greenshank.

Title: I think its a Greenshank
Medium: Drypoint, carborundum, a la poupée with hand colouring, 3 plates
Site: Coastal wetlands of SA

Jill Quirk

The critically endangered Eastern Curlew appealed to me with its elegant long bill and tall, regal silhouette. The world's largest shorebird. I highlight it as representative of all migratory shorebirds which use Australia's coastal wetlands. Many habitats are in densely populated areas where development is an ever present threat.

Title: Eastern Curlew
Medium: Linocut
Site: SW coast of Victoria

Katie Ravich

The presence and absence of birds in a place indicates the overall health of that place - of the world. The more species in healthy populations that are present, the healthy the environment. Birds are also beautiful, joyous and extraordinary and they do many things for us assisting in pollination, insect control, soil and sand aeration etc, and they do it all - free! They are interwoven into our lives in many ways, some of which we are totally unaware of - and yet we are destroying their habitat and ignoring their right to life. The loss of birds that we are now witnessing worldwide, is not only terribly sad, it is shocking and is as much a loss to mankind as it is to the birds themselves. I hope my small contribution to this wonderful project, can in some way help others to stand up for birds in all their forms - not just become aware of their loss, but fight for them.

Title: Ruddy Turnstone
Medium: Stencilled Monoprint
Site: King Island, Tasmania

Gaby Reade

The Godwits/Kuaka arrive and depart every year in Heathcote Valley, where I have lived for the past 26 years. Residents of Christchurch welcome and farewell the Godwits/Kuaka every year with a ceremony (September and March). Declining numbers of birds in the past 2 years to this site from around 2000 birds to 1500 birds. One reason: habitat loss to their resting places on their journey to Alaska. (Yellow China Sea and Korea). Estimated total number of population in Aotearoa: 80,000.

Title: Karangatia mo te Kuaka/Call for the Godwit: (1) Kuaka are preparing for their long flight, spreading wings; lines & circles symbolise longitudes / latitudes; shapes and forms symbolise habitat and landscapes (2) Karangatia – Call for: a call to us to preserve habitat, embossed Kuaka symbolise the threat of disappearance due to habitat loss.

Title: Call for the Godwit – Karangatia mo te Kuaka
Medium: solar etching, embossing, drawing, chin colle (handcoloured rice paper) on somerset paper 300gms
Site: Southshore and Heathcote/Avon Estuary, Christchurch/Otahutahi, New Zealand/Aotearoa; 850 ha of mudflats, 250 ha of oxidation pond, 100 ha of lowland paddock.
Developed in the past few years: Charlesworth Wetland Reserve: 20 ha of marshy area for Godwit/Kuaka and Oystercatchers.

Bronwyn Rees

Title: Cape Bridgewateer
Medium: Drypoint etching
Site: Cape Bridgewater, Portland VIC

I visited Cape Bridgewater while staying at the art space above Portland Print Studio, in 2016. I knew a little bit about Hooded Plovers, but not enough – as evidenced by the following story. I walked out from the carpark, and there in the middle of the beach was a nest with some spotty eggs in it. Wow! I thought – I can’t see any adult birds around. Maybe the nest has been abandoned? I took photos and proceeded to lay my plastic plate over the top so I could trace the shapes.

Later I saw some adults flying around – I wondered if they were the parents? The more I thought about it, the more I became worried. Heaps of people went down on the beach there with their children, their stuff and their big dogs. It was right in the path of all the traffic. What possible chance did they have? When I got back to Melbourne I contacted the local bird people and asked what could I do to help? They said, you could donate $40 to build a shelter for the nest. So I did. I wished I hadn’t been so ignorant, and greedy to absorb the amazing novelty of observation at such close quarters.

The image I have submitted is of the seaweed on the beach and the rock exposed by the tide. I chose it because it looks a bit sad and in turmoil as maybe the parents would feel when they can’t safely access their nests.

Geoffrey Ricardo

Title: Godwit
Medium: Etching
Site: Altona foreshore VIC

Trudy Rice

The Pacific Golden Plover's survival depends on undisturbed beaches, which are needed for successful breeding. These two adult Plovers are meeting on a pristine sandy beach, just how it should be.

Title: The meeting
Medium: Monoprint & Solarplate Etching

Angelina Riley

My inspiration for taking part in the Overwintering Project is my love of nature and my concern for the declining natural environment. Humans are gradually taking over areas of the environment that would naturally be inhabited by wildlife. The
Overwintering Project is about endangered and at risk migratory birds coming from all parts of the world and passing through my part of the world – Australia. I have created a print about Curlews in flight. With their mudflat feeding areas declining because of urban sprawl, I imagine the birds just circling around looking for a safe and food rich place to settle.

Title: The Flying Migrant
Medium: Copper plate etching with aquatint

Ellise Roberts

Title: Untitled
Medium: Screenprint on block print
Site: Altona foreshore VIC

Title: Balance
Medium: Hand-coloured screenprint
Site: Altona foreshore VIC

Title: Nest
Medium: Collagraph
Site: Altona foreshore VIC

John Robinson

Was that a Bar-tailed Godwit that I saw as I drove over the causeway? It seemed to have a longer beak with more of a curve. There is nowhere to stop, so I could not be really sure. I checked in the bird identification book and the bird that seemed most likely is a Whimbrel. They have been known to overwinter in the Orielton Lagoon. It was in a shallow rocky area at low tide, surrounded by Silver Gulls. I’m sure it was a lone Whimbrel.

Title: A lone Whimbrel by the Causeway
Medium: Drypoint
Site: South Eastern Corner of Orielton Lagoon on the southern side of the causeway TAS

Sandy Robinson

These small birds migrate to Australia from Siberia each year.
We see small groups of them at the waters edge. Some are hunched over, poking busily into the sand, searching g for food.
Others seem to be engaging in a playful game of tag as they scurry in and out with the sea water.

Title: Untitled
Medium: Woodcut stencil with chine colle
Site: Red-necked Stint at British Admiral Beach on the west coast of King Island TAS

Catherine Rogers

I’ve travelled by Pitt Water - Orielton Lagoon in Tasmania many times and taken for granted its international significance for migratory shorebirds and rare species. One summer’s day, I was struck by the sight of shorebirds flying over the steel grey waters. It was overcast and a storm was about to hit. There was a sense of tranquility and majesty of them caught in flight; their forms against the darkening sky and the choppy waters below.

Title: Flight over Pitt Water
Medium: Embossing
Site: Pitt Water - Orielton Lagoon TAS

Jennifer Rogers

Amongst the great number of migratory shorebirds overwintering throughout the Boondall Wetlands in Brisbane, is the Red Knot. Due to the Arctic Russian snow melt happening progressively earlier each year, because of global warming, the Red Knots are finding it more difficult to hatch in time for feeding during the annual two month peak insect time, when the birds build up fat for the long journey south.

Smaller chicks with smaller beaks mean the bird’s viability is threatened ahead of the big migratory flight to southern countries. According to researchers publishing in the journal ‘Science’, both Arctic and Southern feeding sites are compromised with smaller beaked birds unable to obtain suitable foodstuffs.

My selection of the Red Knot as a subject for the Overwintering Project seeks to emphasise the existing environmental threats these birds are experiencing at the moment. The image uses a linear style lino cut printed in charcoal/blue, with a ghost bird representing a disappearing species.

Title: Red Knots, Nudgee Beach, Queensland
Medium: Linocut
Site: Nudgee Beach, Queensland

As my work as a printmaker involves the observation and recording of the littoral margins of the Australian landscape using relief and etching techniques, being involved with the Overwintering Project offered a great opportunity to participate in helping draw attention to the plight of our unique migratory birds. With the loss of habitat due to housing development along the coastlines of Australia, I was particularly pleased to be a part of the Overwintering Project exhibitions that set out to inform people about the wonderful shorebirds which make such astonishing flights to and from the northern hemisphere each year.

Title: Eastern Curlews, Great Sandy Straits, Qld
Medium: Etching and linocut with chine collé
Site: Great Sandy Straits, Qld

Susan Rushforth

Seasonal Journey reflects the migratory pattern of the Bar-tailed Godwit between the Arctic and Australia. This migratory wader makes the longest flight of any migratory bird and a distance of 11,000 km has been recorded. Bar-tailed Godwits are predicted to inhabit the tidal mudflats and intertidal sand flats of my local estuarine environment of Pittwater in Sydney. Pittwater still contains natural intertidal areas and mudflats sought by the Bar-tailed Godwits. There has been a decline in the numbers of these birds particularly in parts of the Northern Hemisphere where the estuarine environment has been altered.

In this print, Seasonal Journey, I have focused on the sense of camouflage utilised by the Bar-tailed Godwit with it’s environment for survival. I am very appreciative of the talk that Robert Griffin from BirdLife Australia gave to a group of printmakers from the Warringah Printmakers Studio. By looking through his telescope I was opened up to a new world of migratory shorebirds in my local area at Long Reef at Collaroy Beach.

Title: Seasonal Journey
Medium: Woodblock Print using water based pigments on handmade Japanese Kozo paper
Site: Long Reef Aquatic Reserve, between Collaroy and Dee Why, Sydney's Northern Beaches NSW

Margot Rushton

Above left: Kiama Wetlands III; Medium: Zinc Etching, spitbite, aquatint and drypoint a la poupee and stencil.
Above right: Title: Kiama Wetlands IV; Medium: Zinc Etching, spitbite, aquatint and drypoint a la poupee and stencil.
Site: Kiama Wetlands, NSW. Next to Kiama Cemetery and opposite Bombo beach.

In 1983 I attended the Wollongong TAFE 2 days a week focusing on painting. I was introduced to printmaking by Patricia Holleley during this time and dropped painting almost immediately. I moved back to Canberra in 1984 and was accepted at the Canberra School of Arts for a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1985. At the same time I participated in the occasional workshop at Megalo Prints. However, in 1986 I decided to focus on my career as a public servant and put printmaking on the back-burner. In 2008 I moved to Shellharbour permanently and established my printmaking workshop. I have held several solo exhibitions and have also participated in group exhibitions in Greece, Sydney, Kiama and Wollongong. My work hangs in private collections in the USA, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.

Stephne Sands

Above Left: Title: untitled- Peel wetlands; Medium: Solvent transfer, drypoint; Site: Peel-Harvey Estuary WA
Above Right: Title: untitled- Peel; Medium: Solvent transfer, drypoint; Site: Peel-Harvey Estuary WA

Jenny Sanzaro-Nishimura

The print Red Knot to be Forgot? was inspired after researching the birds that migrate to or ‘overwinter’ to the islands and tidal areas of Moreton Bay, Queensland. The Red Knot travels here each year from its breeding grounds in Chukotskiy Peninsula Siberia and Seward Peninsula Alaska often in a non-stop flight, losing almost half its bodyweight along the way. In its breeding colours it is a beautiful rufous colour, fading to a speckled grey by the time it reaches our shores. It spends less than three months in its Artic breeding grounds to fly up to 14,000 klm south on a 50cm wingspan. The Red Knot is a regular visitor to the tidal flats near Wynnum Bird Hide and other tidal areas around Moreton Bay. There are grave concerns that Global warming is destroying its overwintering sites and breeding grounds and it has already been declared endangered in the USA.

One Red Knot nicknamed Moonbird (tag B95), has been recorded migrating between Canada and Terra Del Fuego for 20 years, flying further than the distance to the moon, hence the name.

Title: Red Knot to be Forgot?
Medium: Screen Print, Mokulito, Watercolour, colour pencil
Site: Wynnum bird hide, southern Moreton Bay, Queensland

Sambuddhananda Saraswati

The Japanese (Latham’s) Snipe (Gallinago hardwickii) is known to range the eastern and is a common migrant from Japan and Kuril Island to Australia's eastern coast and Tasmanian swamps and wet grasslands and coastal areas. It's range includes Kinka Beach (coordinates: 23,13,30S- 150,47,59E). The Latham’s Snipe gives a loud ’keow’ like a green tree frog.

We noted various overwintering birds on the sand spit at the entrance to Kinka Creek, Capricorn Coast, Central Queensland, Australia.

Title: Latham's Snipe
Medium: Drypoint etching with watercolour and collage
Site: Kinka Beach (coordinates: 23,13,30S- 150,47,59E), Qld

Petra Saravanamuthu

Visiting locations both in summer and winter captured the contrasting character of the birds’ habitat. In summer, the water had receded and left cracked mud across a wide barren expanse fringed with tall reeds, and there were no traces of the birds except for a fallen feather. This print is inspired by the winter visit when white herons roosting in a nearby tree were admiring the shores fecund with edible red samphire. Passing binoculars to one another, we spotted black and white birds in the distance dipping their bills to find food, wading on clumps of growth and small islets.

Title: Avocet Wading in Shallow Water
Medium: Drypoint and Collagraph
Site: Troy Park, Burke Dr, Alfred Cove A-Class Nature Reserve bordering the Swan Estuary Marine Park WA
Group visit on Saturday June 15th 2019, 9:00am

Nyrel Saunders

Title: Eastern Curlew
Medium: Drypoint, hand coloured a la poupée
Site: Darwin, NT

Maija-Liisa Schreider

Combining Realism and abstraction.
I start by visiting Herdsman Lake with my sketchbook and camera. After several sketches and photos, I made watercolour impressions of the feeling of the place. My chosen subject was the Pacific Black Duck, due to the fact that it was the bird I sighted most often during my sketching trips. I combined the linocut with my watercolours to choose the best background. My influence for this work must be Vera Miller; I like her abstract water/scenery. Trying to encompass the microscopic as well as the macroscopic. The colours represent the scent and the feel of the Herdsman Lake as I interpret them.

Title: Pacific Black Duck, Lake Herdsman
Medium: Hand-coloured linocut
Site: Herdsman Lake WA

Ruth Schubert

Ruth Schubert is an active member of Thumbprint Inc and is based in Mount Gambier of South Australia. Her recent focus has been on experimenting with a range of printing techniques including, waterless lithography, linocut and drypoint printing techniques. Her print is of the Red-Necked Avocet from the Coorong of South Australia.

Title: Red-necked Avocet
Medium: Linocut
Site: The Coorong, SA

Gwen Scott

In late February 2020, Kate Gorringe-Smith had organised a visit to Stockyard Point for numerous artists interested in learning more about the shorebirds of Westernport Bay. It was a beautiful day and we spent many hours soaking up the sun and listening to Roger Standen's (then Chair of the Victorian Wader Studies Group) informative talk about the birds on this shoreline. Having done no sketches on-site and only taken a few photographs of birds at a distance that day, I decided to produce a print that reflected the beautiful day and environment with a fellow artist/birdwatcher thrown in!

Title: Birdwatcher
Medium: Reduction linocut
Site: Stockyard Point, Jam Jerrup, Westernport Bay, VIC

Pamela See

Mud Sticks is a woodblock print editioned with a baren using xuan paper. It depicts a Curlew Sandpiper in flight, with a wavy marshwort flower (Yellow Fringe Nymphoides Crenata) attached to its foot. The seed of this floral species is dispersed into the mud of saltmarshes, and then adheres to visiting migratory fauna. Subsequently, the distribution of both species is related. Both are endemic to the Boondall Wetlands, which the artist frequents. In title, the composition makes reference to the metaphor “mud sticks” which implies ill-repute. However, the composition is intended to demonstrate the consequences of some circumstances are imperceivable at the time.

Title: Mud Sticks
Medium: Woodblock print
Site: Boondall Wetlands, Brisbane QLD

Carol Seeger

Overwintering shorebirds seek locations that provide food and safe habitat to build up their resources for the long flight back to the northern hemisphere. Many Overwintering locations are being lost to development and the expanding urban sprawl. Six of these species are either vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered and they overwinter in this area. It is imperative that local authorities acknowledge and allow for limited development in these areas, which in turn provides safety from domestic and feral animals. Educational signage about these amazing little birds would give an insight into the enormous annual migration they endure.

Safe Haven

A strip of pockmarked Pacific sand
Invertebrates and crustaceans
An approaching avian wave
The elegant symphony of dipping, banking and swirling
Crash landing
Waiting for legs to function
Early morning
High tide
The cacophony waits
To feed
Lenses and shutters
Busy
Counting and recording
Disappointment
Fewer this year
Summer over
Time to leave
Head north
Thousands of kilometres
Raise the next generation

Title: Mangrove Habitat
Medium: Etching with chine collé
Site: Wathumba Creek, western side of Fraser Island, Queensland

Lisa Sewards

Shoreham beach has been the playground for my family for the past decade. The Overwintering Print Project has heightened my awareness for local birds and especially the various Plovers that nest in the area. Volunteers lovingly rope off nesting areas of Hooded Plovers and pop up little signs to educate locals and tourists. At the end of summer and at the site of one nesting habitat I found pieces of tangle or flowers of the sea as I call them, along with a feather. These have been etched using solar plates creating an artwork reflecting my local migratory and resident shorebird habitat.

Title: Found, Shorebirds nesting habitat Shoreham
Medium: Solar Plate Etching
Site: Shoreham Beach Victoria (Honeysuckle beach area)

Luke Shelley

I was lucky enough to grow up on the waterfront of Davistown. A small estuary called Lintern Street channel. As a child I grew very fond of the Eastern Curlew for its large beak and its distinctive startling call. I recall large flocks of 20-30 birds that would visit our waterfront throughout the summer months. Joined by pied oyster-catchers, sacred ibis, and royal spoonbill, the curlew would forage on the mudflat at low tide. The warm nor-east breeze would ruffle the shallow surface of the water. As kids we would swim across the channel to the mudflat, the Curlew always keeping a safe distance.

Davistown is a small community located on the southern central coast of NSW. The suburb is best described as a peninsula within the Brisbane Waters estuary system. This monotype was created on site at Lintern Street reserve (where the artist grew up). The Brisbane Waters system is a very healthy ecosystem, and is relatively shallow compared to other systems. The many sandbars, seagrass beds and mudflats create the ideal habitat for many species of resident and migratory birds.

Title: Eastern Curlew
Medium: Monotype on Japanese rice paper
Site: Lintern Street reserve, Davistown, Central Coast NSW

Emily Simson

Responding to the Red-necked Stint and Little Llangothlin Lagoon NSW

Little Llangothlin Lagoon is one of 40 high altitude lagoons in the New England region of Northern NSW. The usually reliable rainfall makes this wetland with it’s range of habitats, a refuge in dry times to 100 bird species and waterfowls, including 8 migratory species. The lagoon is now completely dry due to extended drought conditions in Eastern Australia.

The Red-necked Stint is one of the migratory birds previously found overwintering here. This year it would find the dark green spikerush-sedgeland has collapsed into rusty red angles, the deeper water has evaporated, exposing the rich chocolate brown of ancient peat and basalt soil for Kangaroos and Wallabies to make their tracks.

Title: “please come back when the drought breaks”
Medium: 2 plate collagraph
Site: Situated East of the New England Hwy 20km NE Guyra, New England region Northern NSW

Melissa Smith

Migrating south from its breeding area in the tundra of the High Arctic, the Sharp-tailed Sandpiper arrives in the Tamar Wetlands (Tasmania) in September and begins its northward journey in March. In February 2019 over 150 birds were counted in the area, reinforcing the national importance of this inland habitat for migratory shorebirds.

We know these birds are so like us. Flung out into the world, capable of great feats, destined to make the best of our fates. The earth is always faster for shorebirds. They fly ahead of us.
Darby, A. 2020, Flight Lines, Allen & Unwin, Sydney p.267

Title: Tundra to Tamar
Medium: intaglio collagraph
Site: the Tamar Wetlands, Tasmania

Trevor Spohr

We are fortunate that the Brisbane City Council has set aside the Boondall Wetlands as a Reserve and apart from walking platforms and viewing stations the area is much the same as it always has been, a great legacy for current and future generations.
My work for the Overwintering Project is titled Urban Rambler a comment on the pollutants that have detrimental effects on these fragile ecosystems.

The figure is protected by a helmet, mask and goggles, the bird, an Eastern Curlew, is exposed to the same toxic elements without protection, the eye of the figure and bird intersect, they view the same situation.

Title: Urban Rambler
Medium: Screen print with gold leaf
Site: Boondall Wetlands Reserve

Michelle Strazzari

The Oriental Plover also known as the Oriental Dotterel & closely related to the Caspian Plover is medium sized elegant bird with long legs and a wingspan of 46-53cm and height of 21-25cm.
It breeds in parts of Mongolia, eastern Russia & China from April to July & migrates through its non-breeding season to southeast Asia, Indonesia, New Guinea and arrives in northern Australia in early September through to October.
During their time in Australia plovers spend time in coastal habitats such as mudflats, sandbanks, sandy or rocky ocean beaches, nearby reefs or coastal grasslands. Their diet consist mainly of insects, including termites, beetles, grasshoppers, crickets and bugs.

Title: Oriental Plover
Medium: Collograph

The Pectoral Sandpiper a medium sized shorebird has a length of 19–24 cm and wingspan of 37–45cm. It breeds in North America and Asia, wintering in South America and migrates to Australia in Queensland mostly around Cairns during September to June. There are scattered records elsewhere, mainly from east of the Great Divide between Townsville and Yeppoon.
In Australasia, the Pectoral Sandpiper prefers shallow fresh to saline wetlands. The species is found at coastal lagoons, estuaries, bays, swamps, lakes, inundated grasslands, saltmarshes, river pools, creeks, floodplains and artificial wetlands.

The sandpiper is omnivorous and consumes algae, seeds, crustaceans, arachnids and insects.

Title: Pectoral Sandpiper
Medium: Collograph

Jennifer Stuerzl

Migratory shorebirds
flight
shore, sand, mud, stones, feathers
beaks, legs, claws, eggs, eyes
blood
flesh
life, death
interconnections
ecology
habitat destruction, pollution
landfill, mudflow, chemical spills
human manipulation
intervention
conservation, habitat restoration
spaces
interconnected places
nature
revered, loved, embraced and sustained
birdsong … light
the whole interconnected world
flight.

Title: Interconnected
Medium: Etching, linen thread stitching on washi paper

Phillipa Sturgess

Twice a year these small birds navigate across continents and oceans to find the sites suitable for breeding in the north and overwintering in the south. This amazing feat reminds me of journeys of early seafarers. Where human explorers were assisted by the invention of tools such as maps and compasses, migratory birds relied on their instincts and their connection with the earth to guide their travel.

Title: Navigator: The Greater Sand Plover
Medium: Lino print and cyanotype
Site: Kinka Beach site coordinates: 23,13,30S- 150,47,59E which is located at the southern end of Kinka Beach on a sand spit at the entrance to Kinka Creek, Capricorn Coast, Central QLD

Linda Swinfield

Air = flight + water 1 (square) is part of a series of prints started in March 2020. Initiated as a commission from Captivate, Parramatta whilst I was Artist in Residence to represent the elements within the landscape.

As a hybrid printmaker I chose my media based during the creative process and for this group of works I chose traditional analog film to unpredictably layer the symbols of air (feathers) paired with water during walks around Wentworth Falls Lake. The multiple exposure of film as a layering process is similar to printmaking and utilises an accidental layering when the film doesn't line up or its exposure presents inconsistencies.

This individual image represents air and water, incorporating feathers as a symbol of flight and bird life which all coexist within the filigree of our landscapes and waterways.

Title: Air = flight + water 1 (square)
Medium: Archival print
Site: Wentworth Falls Lake

Trudy Tandberg

This work contains a poem translated into shorthand:

The Drowning
For now the dialog continues,
the pain to surely diminish,
repeat the scene,
clarify a line,
the discourse,
the disclosure
fails to satisfy,
loss is loss,
and there is no reply

The Drowning is a study of the Hooded Plover habitat at Lighthouse Bay, Carpenters Rocks, South Australia -37.912059,140.391547. In the Border Watch in January 2018 the drowning of a young Hooded Plover was reported under the title of Tragic Act of Vandalism. The accompanying photograph struck me as poignant. The positioning of the bird on the sand suggests a uplifting grace, but this bird had drowned a short sprint from it’s pebbled nesting site. A westward evening beach front affords great symbolism of loss in the blasting light, open expanses of blue and fading horizon line. In this image the loss is of such a little endangered bird. The Hooded Plover is a species generally just seen with the naked eye as a blurred silhouette, running along the shore line. A species easily disregarded by the human users of the beach.

Title: The Drowning - Hooded Plover
Medium: Drypoint/monoprint
Site: -37.912059,140.391547 Lighthouse Bay, Carpenters Rocks SA

Gwenn Tasker

Title: 5 inches 30 grammes 25,000 km
Medium: collagraph and etching

Fiona Taylor

Title: Summer Holidays
Medium: Linocut
Site: Altona foreshore, Melbourne VIC

Title: Sun Birds
Medium: Drypoint etching

Title: Untitled
Medium: Collagraph

Kerrie Taylor

The secrets of mangroves and the cultural and spiritual teachings of an Indigenous Tiwi elder are the inspirations behind the print, Wading, whimbrel, wandering.

Kerrie lived and worked on Bathurst Island, 90 kilometres north of Darwin for more than two years. She became fascinated by mangroves after an outing with a Tiwi elder who was teaching his grandson how to find mud mussels.Kerrie was intrigued with the hidden elements living in the mangrove system symbolising the strength and resilience of Aboriginal cultureand inner knowledge.

The whimbel is one of 4 migratory shorebirds which roost in Darwin mangroves. Wading, whimbrel, wanderingrepresents the amazing spirit, tenacity and knowledge of the spectacular migratory journey undertaken.

Kerrie’s work has been exhibited in Darwin and interstate, receiving a number of awards.

Title: Wading, whimbrel, wandering
Medium: Screenprint
Site: Mangroves, Darwin NT

Title: Journey to the next habitat
Medium: Monoprint with linocut chine collé
Site: Casuarina Beach, Darwin NT

Sandra Taylor

My print-making is inspired by nature and the landscape - and I often respond to current environmental issues. In this print for the Overwintering Project I have focussed on the Bar-tailed Godwit - one of our vulnerable shorebird species. In Autumn, these shorebirds migrate north to Siberia and Alaska to breed, and each Spring they return to coastal mudflats in several locations around Moreton Bay. These locations have been recognised internationally as Ramsar wetland sites because of their importance for bird diversity and conservation. However, these sites are currently threatened by a proposed development project (the Toondah Harbour project) which lies within the Moreton Bay Ramsar sites.

Title: Foraging
Medium: Etching
Site: Moreton Bay, Queensland

Kati Thamo

Our house overlooks a harbour on the south coast of Western Australia. For thirty two years we’ve observed the tidal flows and birdlife of this watery refuge through our front windows. Over recent months I’ve been cycling around the harbour to the spit of land where waders congregate, and I’ve been observing a small group of plovers as they forage for food on the tidal flats. Their name arises from the Latin pluvial, meaning ‘rain’, and so seems an appropriate overwintering bird for our southern coastline which is so frequently drenched by the incoming winter weather.

Title: Winter Light
Medium: Etching
Site: Rushy Point, Little Grove, Princess Royal Harbour, Albany, WA

Bridgit Thomas

Oystercatchers are up there with my favourite birds. Striking looking, they are sturdily built with long powerful bright orange bills, designed to feed on shellfish that no other bird can open or dislodge. They are visitors to coastal areas of Mornington Peninsula occasionally.

Title: Pied Oystercatcher over Flinders
Medium: Drypoint over printed chart and embossed linocut
Site: Mornington Peninsula VIC

Title: Pied Oystercatcher with seaweed & pipis
Medium: Drypoint, solar plate etching and linocut
Site: Mornington Peninsula VIC

Ruth Thompson

In 2016 the Bar-tailed Godwit was listed in Australia as Critically Endangered.

Members of the Sandpiper family, Bar-tailed Godwits are world record holders for non-stop flight. To migrate from Alaska/Scandinavia to Australia/New Zealand they put on 60%–70% in weight. They’ve been recorded travelling non-stop for over 11,000km in just 9 days, flying an average 50km/h. Their round-trip is the longest known of any shorebird species.

Their Australian non-breeding plumage is mottled brown above and light buff below. Breeding plumage is a darker rusty brown, and begins to appear towards the end of their Australian sojourn. I’ve highlighted the rufous colour, which signals their annual departure from our shores.

Title: Nine Days to Botany Bay – Bar-tailed Godwit I
Medium: Linocut and drypoint
Site: Botany Bay NSW

Sabine Thompson

Title: Sandpiper
Medium: Linocut and relief print
Site: Altona foreshore, Melbourne VIC

Sylvie Thompson

Title: Birdy of the Sun
Medium: Linocut and relief monoprint
Site: Altona foreshore, Melbourne VIC

Helen Timbury

I saw my first Ruddy Turnstone ever on a site visit to Mushroom Reef at Flinders in Victoria. When we rounded a rocky coastal outcrop, the beach appeared deserted, the only movement some small breaking waves. Then a few started pointing towards clumps of kelp edging the shoreline. It wasn’t until I looked through the spotting scope that I saw many small brown birds. One species, I was told, was called a Ruddy Turnstone. I was immediately delighted that aside from anything else, it just seemed to have one of the greatest of names for any bird I know of!

Title: Ruddy Turnstone
Medium: Reduction Linocut
Location: Mushroom Reef Marine Sanctuary, Flinders, Victoria

On a site visit to Mushroom Reef Marine Park, at Flinders,Victoria I photographed the rocky headland, some dried kelp and the coastal grasses. There were some Hooded Plovers on the sandy beach that day in October but they were well camouflaged only able to be seen with binoculars. This was the first time I'd seen them although I must have been in their presence many times before.

Title: Hooded Plovers
Medium: Reduction Linocut
Location: Mushroom Reef Marine Sanctuary, Flinders, Victoria

Sue Top

My work is a general statement about migration, overwintering and habitat needs from the birds’ perspective…..

Flying, flying, flying
We cross continents
Wind howls, rain pours
Doggedly we flap our wings
Up and down, up and down
Hour upon hour
Until we reach the end of our strength
Following our inbuilt navigation systems

Surely somewhere closer to home could satisfy our needs
But no, year after year we come, young and old
Making this epic and hazardous journey
We simply must reach our winter paradise
A place in the sun
A place where our parents and grandparents and great grandparents came before us
A place that speaks to us, that holds our roots
All we ask is the constancy of food, shelter and safety in that place
Surely that isn’t too much

Title: Finding Shelter
Medium: Collagraph and mixed media

Emilie Tseronis

Title: Top of the Heap
Medium: Etched lino, drypoint, hand coloured
Site: Karuah 2324 NSW

Vicki Tyrell

Title: Untitled
Medium: Collograph
Site: Altona foreshore, Melbourne VIC

Evelyn Upton

(Dream of Birds)
The march of Homo Sapiens is relentless. We have and still are destroying birds' living spaces. Will they come to remind us of our affinity with them, to keep their presence before us? To guard against extinction, both theirs and ours?

We know the record of extermination, as highlighted though deliberate sparseness of the picture plane.

We long for ecological restoration, these longings contradict our response, where development and economics place insecticides on plant life, pollute the oceans with garbage and destroy habitats.

Title: No place to go
Medium: Drypoint and hand-colouring

Cate Valpiani

The Glossy Ibis is a nomadic migratory species found in Asia, Africa, Australia and on the Atlantic coast of the Americas. It is described as a 'vagrant' bird in New Zealand. Though its feathers have a distinctive colourful gloss, when seen from a distance the Glossy Ibis looks dull, dark and well-disguised in the wetlands where it feeds, shelters and breeds.

Though it migrates widely, during good rainfall it can be found in the waterways and marshes of western NSW. The related White Ibis (colloquially known as the 'Sydney Bin Chicken') also does this, however, as marshes have dried up that species has turned urban scavenger to survive.

It is a warning of habitat loss and climate change on birdlife. Conservation efforts may help birds such as the Glossy Ibis survive in their original habitats.

Title: Glossy
Medium: Multicolour 2-plate reduction linocut
Site: Towra Point Ramsar Conservation Area, Sydney NSW

Cathryn Vasseleu

Great Knots are the predominant migratory shorebirds that reside in Darwin from September to April, before heading to their Arctic breeding grounds. Flocks of thousands, loafing on the shore or airborne, belie their critically endangered status. Hanging out with them at the beach is one of the best things about the wet season. I have spent many blissful hours at Lee Point in the cool of the morning or evening, escaping the humidity elsewhere, to experiment with photographing them in flight. Transforming the digital image into pigments on paper, the printing process adds to the watercolour quality I’m after.

Title: Lines of Flight 1. Great Knots
Medium: Digital print on photographic rag
Site: Lee Point, Darwin NT

Teona Villar

Title: Feeding
Medium: Linocut
Site: Lee Point, Darwin NT

Peter Ward

A direct response to my visit to the Lake Connewarre State Wildlife Reserve, near Barwon Heads, on a cold & blustery day.

Title: Storm over the Connewarre Wetlands
Medium: Multiplate linocut
Site: Lake Connewarre State Wildlife Reserve, near Barwon Heads, Vic.

Tammy Warner

Growing up on the coast of the Mornington Peninsula, exploring nature was an essential part of life.

This print depicts the Bar-tailed Godwit flying continuously day and night, above natural and man-made environments. It is one of many migrating birds that fly from the Arctic , Scandinavia and Northern Asia to the shores of Australia and New Zealand.
In areas such as Westernport Bay, birds overwinter, getting nourishment from shallow waters.

As a near threatened species, we need to protect their habitat from commercial development, human disturbance and climate change.

Title:The Journey
Medium: Linocut and watercolour.
Site: Westernport Bay, Mornington Peninsula VIC

Marama Warren

As a child in New Zealand, I was fascinated by stories of godwits. In ancient times the arrival of the godwit or kuaka was looked upon as a great event. Kuaka on the wing are known as waka kuaka. These birds were mysterious to the Maori who followed the course of their flight in canoes and never found their eggs or chicks.

The longest known migration among birds is recorded by Bar-tailed Godwits which are now endangered due to loss of habitat. They travel over 11,500 kilometres from the Arctic Circle to Australia and New Zealand, up to ten days of continuous flight.
Traditionally, when the birds are first seen in the South Island of New Zealand, usually around mid September, church bells ring out to welcome them and farewell them again approximately six months later.

Many Bar-tailed Godwits overwinter near where I now live in south-eastern Australia. There are no church bells at Lake Wollumboola but we are glad to welcome them all the same.

Title: Kuaka at Lake Wollumboola
Medium: Digital print
Site: Lake Wollumboola, Shoalhaven, NSW

Kay Watanabe

Title: Fly North
Medium: Woodblock, vinyl cut, drypoint and chine-collé

Eunie Watson

I use the beauty of texture, as represented by a feather, in my mono-prints.

In ancient times the feather had a symbolic meaning of spiritual evolution and communication. By using print making techniques I hope to convey an awareness, being mindful, of migratory birds and their habitat. I have etched in dry point the Common Sandpiper that visits Western Australia whilst travelling around the world.

I was inspired to make a contribution regarding the endangered habitats of migratory birds to this art project to raise awareness and hopefully say humankind needs to change the way we view our environment, to consider the natural world.

Like the birds soaring through the boundless sky, with a view of all things from high above, aspiring to transcend, see the larger picture and consider how we are all interconnected with other living creatures with whom we share this planet.

Eunie Watson, Printmakers Association of Western Australia
October 2020

Title: Common Sandpiper 1
Medium: Drypoint and Monoprint

Title: Common Sandpiper 2
Medium: Drypoint and Monoprint

Amanda Watts

Amanda Watts has been developing art through printmaking, and is an active member of Newcastle Printmakers Workshop, for the past ten years. Lithography and intaglio print processes are her passion but she also loves working across a variety and combination of techniques. She has completed several summer school and short courses through Newcastle TAFE and Newcastle Printmakers. The expression, light and movement of water and coastal areas, and nature more generally, have been an influence in her art practice.

On Salty Shores uses a layering of printing techniques - Lino print, relief and intaglio drypoint, and chine-collé. The featured Sanderling is a small migratory shorebird that travels the Eastern Asian-Australasian Flyway each year from its breeding grounds in Siberia and Alaska. As young birds they are snowy white chicks of fluff, and later, grey and white with black wing tips. They drop into the coastal shores, including Stockton Beach, Newcastle, darting back and forth on the edge of the wave break to search for food. Nearby is the estuary and mudflats of the Hunter River, as well as coal industry, transport infrastructure and urban environment which can crowd and compromise roosting and feeding areas. Amanda states ‘the layering of techniques, images and colours are to imbue a sense of time, place, resilience and fragility’.

Title: On Salty Shores
Medium: Linocut, relief and intaglio drypoint and chine-collé
Site: Stockton Beach, Newcastle NSW

Peta West

The site at the end of my street is home to local and migratory shorebirds. The Pied Oystercatcher, Little Terns , Red-capped Plover and the Hooded Plover all make Lake Conjola their home. Also our migratory birds like the Eastern Curlew, which can be seen in the Lake's mudflats searching for sand crabs.

Title: Eastern Curlew Foraging
Medium: Linocut
Site: Lake Conjola NSW

Rebecca Westlund

Many migratory shorebirds flock to the Western Treatment Plant south-west of the city of Melbourne, on the edge of Port Phillip Bay. I have only visited once with a friend who had a key but was struck by the beauty of the locations and groups of birds wading in the shallows. I did not identify each species while I was there but instead simply absorbed the serenity of birds in their habitat. Later, I investigated shorebirds sighted here, and chose to create a print of a single majestic Bar-Tailed Godwit - stretching its wings after a long migratory journey.

Title: Bar-tailed Godwit
Medium: Linocut
Site: Little River Bird Hide, Western Treatment Plant, Point Wilson, VIC

Jenny White

Powling Street Wetlands at Port Fairy, on a picturesque part of the Victorian coast, is a short walk from Pea Soup Beach. All but surrounded by houses, it is the resting place of the Latham’s Snipe. In a busy tourist town and in the midst of a residential area, close to a bus route and thoroughfare for local and visiting traffic, the Snipes roost and feed amongst the grasses.

Four years ago, the combined efforts of the local landcare group and the Moyne shire council, succeeded through legal channels to force the downsizing of a housing development, set to impact on the nearby wetlands. The proposed building expansion would have reduced the habitat of the Latham’s Snipe by forty percent – an unacceptable and potentially catastrophic event for these amazing, well-travelled birds. An alternate, far less appealing future of having these birds as a memory was averted. How preferable it is to retain their habitat than see them only as specimens and pictures.

Title: Safe – Development Arrested
Medium: Two-block linocut reduction
Site: Powling Street Wetlands, Port Fairy VIC

Margaret White

The universal experience, across time and place, of gazing up to the moon in all it’s phases reminds us of our shared human existence.

This work forms part of a project exploring the phases and luminosity of the moon and is the first in a series relating to birds in that context. Shearwaters and Hooded Plovers that migrate to southern Australia can be observed at night returning from the North Pacific.

The location is the wide skies seen from the cliff walk at Aireys Inlet in southern Victoria, Australia.

Title: Moonlit return
Medium: Mokuhunga (Japanese Woodblock print) with traditional gilding
Site: Aires's Inlet VIC

Margot Wiburd

Title: Tranquility
Medium: Drypoint etching with chine-collé
Site: Peel-Harvey wetlands, Mandurah WA

Jazmin Wilkins

Jazmin Wilkins is a Brisbane-based interdisciplinary artist whose work explores our connection to the environment. With untouched areas of nature her biggest inspiration, Jazmin invites the viewer to consider the beauty of our environment in an age of rapid land development, and reflect on the unspoken damage we have done to our ecosystem.

Seven shorebirds sit patiently in a tree on the mudflats of Toondah Harbour, Moreton Bay – one of many RAMSAR protected sites that are being threatened by rampant and unnecessary development. The birds watch as their safety net grows ever smaller, and humans encroach on their ecosystem. What hope do they have for the protection of their wetlands, when developer dollars are against them?

Title: A Precarious Position
Medium: Multi-plate linocut
Site: Toondah Harbour, Cleveland, Moreton Bay

Therese Gabriel Wilkins

Newcastle printmakers assigned me the Asian Dowitcher for research and investigation. Koorangang Wetlands in Newcastle has been a place of sightings of these incredible winged warriors albeit rare, as they are dwindling in numbers in Australia and are mostly found in the North Territory where they are under threatened status.

The Asian Dowitcher breeds in Siberia, Mongolia and north-eastern China. The Asian Dowitchers migrate to overwinter in Asia and Australia. They seek out sheltered coasts. It is awe inspiring to think of the incredible journey these wonderful birds undertake.

Title: The Asian Dowitcher in Australia
Medium: Monoprint/Drypoint Etch/ Chine Collé
Site: Koorangang, Newcastle New South Wales

Sandra Williams

After a visit to Long Reef Aquatic reserve with a small group of like-minded printmakers, I was particularly impressed with the story of the Red-necked Stints, especially as they are such a small bird.

We were fortunate to have a volunteer from BirdLife, Australia who told an engrossing tale about this migratory shorebird. His description of the sewing machine action of the Stints feeding and its migration involving a flight of thousands of kilometres made this brave bird the inspiration for my Overwintering project prints.

Title: Stints at Long Reef
Medium: Copper plate etching
Site: Long Reef Aquatic reserve NSW

I enjoyed my research on the Red-necked Stints (Calidris ruficollis).
One has to admire such a small shorebird with a migration involving a flight of thousands of kilometres, to the Siberian tundra and back to Australia.

The nonbreeding adult is an unremarkable grey above and pale below but in the breeding season, the breeding adult has a vivid orange head bordered by dark stippling and in the upper wing, each of the smaller feathers covering the bases of the flight feathers are bright orange and gold tones. A truly pretty bird.

Title: Stints in Flight
Medium: Etching & aquatint on aluminium plate, chine collé
Site: Long Reef Aquatic Reserve,NSW

Penny Wilson

I am representing the ‘vulnerable’ Greater Sand Plover and I watched for it at the Stockton Sandspit, Newcastle NSW October to February 2017/18.

I have depicted the Greater Sand Plover with a blue cross, the international maritime signal for “stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals”. A message to be mindful and protect habitats or they will be lost as we pollute and destroy sanctuaries worldwide. Phases of the moon appear reminding us of the long flight of this bird from breeding grounds in Turkey to Australian shores.

Title: May I See You Soon
Medium: Aluminium etching, collagraph and monoprint
Site: Stockton Sandspit, Newcastle NSW

Diana Wiseman

The wild, white coast in the far southern corner of South Australia is a haven for me and the migratory waders.

I love to watch them, constantly moving, feeding, moving, feeding; driven by some ancient instinct.

They are as one with the landscape, blending in with rock and sand and sea. In flight they turn in perfect unison on wings made silver by the sun’s rays. They climb and bank and dip low over the ocean, then land to feed along the seaweed shore.

Little bodies grow plump before leaving on their great journey north again.

An inspiration for my art and life itself.

Title: Towards Stoney Point
Medium: Drypoint etching on acetate
Site: Stoney Point SA

Jo Wood

Jo Wood is a printmaker who specialises in multi-coloured screenprints. She is a trained textile designer and musician, loves photographing, sketching and drawing in outdoor locations and turning that into screenprints. Her artwork is also inspired by Stoic Philosophy, i.e. seize the day and be as productive as you can in life. The Black-tailed Godwit’s breeding colours and shape inspired her prints, based on a photograph by Mattias Hofstede. The Black-tailed Godwit (Limosa limosa) is one of WA’s Peel Harvey Estuary migrating birds that start to arrive in October.

Title: Almost there
Medium: Screenprint
Site: the Peel Harvey Estuary, Mandurah WA

Wood’s two-plate print was inspired after reading ‘Stepping Off: Rewilding and Belonging in the South-west’ by Thomas M. Wilson. Wood’s work depicts a starfilled sky, the sea, the estuary and the inlet on a bright full moon night, and a migratory Black-tailed Godwit looking for a spot to land. The slightly darker speckled area on the far right represents the extent of Mandurah’s current urban development. The lighter speckled areas that spread over the rest of the image represent the predicted urbanisation around the Estuary and Inlet to 2050. The darkest areas are the currently protected wetlands, rivers and lakes. The white space is other undeveloped land. The collage at the bottom edge represents farmland.

Title: Squeezed
Medium: Drypoint/collograph
Site: the Peel Harvey Estuary, Mandurah WA

Title: Mandurah 2050
Medium: Drypoint/collograph
Site: the Peel Harvey Estuary, Mandurah WA

Title: Here for the Summer
Medium: Monoprint

Lindy Yeates

When I first saw these tiny shorebirds running across the sand at Cape Woolamai, their little legs moving frantically beneath them, the little ‘levitating’ Hooded Plover appeared more like a hovercraft than a bird and made me laugh.

Hooded Plovers are commonly seen in pairs. As Phillip Island’s most endangered bird, there are only 23 pairs on the Island at present. They fossick in the intertidal zone and lay eggs at the high tide mark, camouflaging them in sand and seaweed. Here nests are easily disturbed, damaged and abandoned. From 90 eggs laid in 2020, only 9 chicks survived to fledge.

Title: Hooded Plover
Medium: Reduction linocut, stencil and hand colouring, handmade paper corners
Site: Cape Woolamai, Phillip Island VIC

These prints travelled 30,000kms to Alaska and return with the short-tailed shearwaters that left Cape Woolamai, Phillip Island in April 2020, during the global pandemic.

As COVID19 locked down communities around the world, signs went up all over Phillip Island imploring residents to “stay safe and stay home”. It amused me to think of the 600,000 shearwaters on the Cape, preparing for international travel while the Victorian Government tried to control their departure using COVID19 updates that stressed our Stage 3 travel restrictions.
Stamped, sorted, stuck down and torn, the prints followed the courageous journey of these migratory shorebirds and, like the birds, took more than six weeks to complete each leg. Some didn’t arrive at all. With art imitating life, the prints were delayed leaving Alaska due to insufficient postage while some of the shearwaters lingered longer than usual in their struggle to find sufficient food in warming oceans.

Both arrived back in Victoria during Stage 4 lockdown a bit the worse for wear but at least the prints had masks!

Title: Covid Travel update
Medium: Linocut and stencil, watercolour and ink, post marks and stamps, twine and split pin
Site: Cape Woolamai, Phillip Island VIC

Stephanie Yoannidis

I see these brave little birds on the beach near where I live, and I think of the thousands of miles they travel.

They endure tremendous obstacles to return to their breeding grounds every year. Despite many setbacks, there they are again annually, skittering along the shoreline and flying in perfect unison – so fast along the water.

I just had to be part of this Overwintering Project.

Title: Nelson, Glenelg River Estuary July 2018
Medium: Drypoint Etching
Site: Nelson, Glenelg River Estuary se SA

Rebecca Young

I drew the Lucky Country I map during the Black Summer bushfires of 2019/20. As the smoke and flames advanced across Australia's SE coast, politicians refused to talk about fossil fuels, carbon emissions, and climate change. The colonial notion of Australia as 'the lucky country' with 'wealth for toil' has led to environmental vandalism on an epic scale. Lucky Country I characterises our exploitation of the land and our poisoning of the rivers, lakes and oceans. I researched the damage done to each major waterway and was staggered to find that not one has been left unscathed.

Title: Lucky Country
Medium: Digital print

Valé Zakarauskas

My journey for this project began with a visit to the Stockton Sandspit in Newcastle NSW in October 2017, with the arrival of a number of migratory shorebirds to this large roosting site.
My shorebird has an amazing journey, travelling across the globe from Australia to Russia, Alaska, California's coast, South America and the southwest Pacific, nesting in rocky mountain streams as well as flying to rocky islands, rugged coastlines, sandy beaches and coastal estuaries.
It forages for crustaceans and molluscs by probing amongst rocks, washed by the tides. So here is my shorebird, the Wandering Tattler, foraging amongst the rocks.

Title: Wandering Tattler Foraging
Medium: Multiplate Aluminium Etching Intaglio/Relief
Site: Stockton Sandspit, Newcastle NSW

Patricia Zuber

Flight shapes the humble Bar-tailed Godwit
Delicate but strong
Navigating half the globe for many days and nights
Flying high over many terrains and oceans
Breeding, feeding and resting
These extraordinary birds fill us with wonder

Title: Migration
Medium: Collagraph, linocut
Site: Southern Moreton Bay

Flight shapes the Bar-Tailed Godwit as it navigates thousands of kilometres annually over many terrains and oceans. A protein in their eyes helps them sense the earth’s magnetic field and provides them with an internal compass. Seeing them in numbers at Pumicestone Passage in south east Queensland filled me with admiration.

My original Migration collagraph and lino cut prints were included in the Overwintering Firestation Print Studio and Migaloo Press artists’ books and exhibition. Migration II is a cyanotype of the original image digitally printed onto Awagami Washi. The image has taken on a different quality through the cyanotype process and I felt it deserved another airing in this form.

Title: Migration II
Medium: Cyanotype print 2018
Site: Southern Moreton Bay

The Overwintering Project Print Portfolio