be slower and harder to track. During the week we spent on the HMNZS Otago, there was much note-taking, photographing and a lot of staring at the horizon. Without any co-ordinates, landmarks or familiar objects, the artists found themselves cast adrift in a new kind of space -- one that was at once overwhelming and full of imaginative potentialities. My own investigations amounted to a great many notes for poems and drawings, inspired variously by the omnipresent sea, the charts and electronic gadgetry on the ship's bridge, and such daily occurences as a pod of dolphins sighted off Little Barrier Island, a flying fish landing on deck, a succession of extraordinary dawns and sunsets and, on our last afternoon at sea, a mid-ocean swim for ratings, officers and seariders alike when we reached the Tropic of Capricorn. Having returned from the Kermadecs, the members of the artistic crew are now getting down to the next phase of the project. Adelaide-based Fiona Hall returned home via Wellington, where she continued working on the massive tapa cloth she had begun in Tonga. This work-in-progress brings together visual elements from the voyage, scientific subjects from the Kermadecs and some apposite political slogans. With Elizabeth Thomson, Fiona visited the NIWA base, at Greta Point, Wellington, where she studied and photographed numerous Kermadec life-forms. John Pule's time spent on the Raoul island headland has inspired a 12 part poem (complete with prologue and epilogue) titled 'Polynesian Station Pointer', which begins on a suitably operatic note: