An experimental three-channel work instigated by two factors.

The first is the rediscovery of audio cassette tapes produced by my father to play 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 I had featuring a sinister Germanic building across the road from my primary school playground in Toowoomba QLD—a school I attended during the same period in which the afore-mentioned 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 an area I had not been to for decades. The site’s location at 661 Ruthven Street 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 living in an apartment opposite a freeway entrance in inner-city Melbourne and sleeping on a thin, roll-up Japanese futon. When I returned to the site to make this work, I was a mature-age PhD student.