An experimental three-channel work instigated by two factors.

The first is the rediscovery of audio cassette tapes produced by my father during long work-related driving trips through rural Queensland in the 1970s. Intended to make use of otherwise lost time, the recordings consist of material from his mature-age undergraduate studies, each one preceded invariably by a vocal test in which he repeatedly counts from one to ten.

The second is a dream featuring a sinister Germanic building across the road from my primary school playground—a school I attended during the same period in which these tapes were made. While fully aware that the building had no basis in reality, past or present, the lasting impression of the dream led me to revisit the site I had not looked at for decades. Its location at 661 Ruthven Street, Toowoomba was a vacant warehouse; only later did it become what it is now: a Red Cross Blood Donor Centre. To its right stood two concrete, slab-built commercial premises: a Forty Winks mattress showroom bearing the prominent slogan Get a better bed, and an Autobarn.

At the time of this visit, I was sleeping on a thin, roll-up Japanese futon in an apartment opposite the entrance to a freeway in inner-city Melbourne. By the time I returned to the site to make this work, I was a mature-age PhD student.