This artwork begins with a meeting of one boat and one bird, a Far Eastern Curlew, one of the world's most endangered shorebirds can be seen poised on the bow of a wooden pearling lugger, another creature shaped by tide and distance now vanishing from the world it once defined.

The Curlew travels close to 10,000 kilometres each year, from breeding grounds in the marshes of eastern Russia and northern China down through the East Asian-Australasian Flyway to mudflats like Roebuck Bay, where it probes the tidal shallows with that long, impressive down-curved bill searching for crabs and molluscs for a few short months before turning north again. It is a bird built entirely for passage, never quite arriving, never quite staying. They arrive in the Northwest of Australia in late August and leave again late February and March. The species ‘Numenius madagascariensis’ is listed as critically endangered.