The first night the Australian painter Jo Bertini spent in the Central Desert she was sleepless, kept awake by a repetitive drum beat.
"I just kept thinking, 'I can't sleep, will they stop that? What is that noise? Is that a generator?' " Come morning, she approached expedition leader Andrew Harper.
He glanced at Robyn Davidson, the adventurer and author of Tracks whom Bertini had come to meet before painting her portrait, and they laughed. So deep was the silence and stillness of the desert, Bertini had been jumping at the sound of her own blood pumping. The next night Bertini folded down her swag and slept facing the night sky.
"I remember when I was little my mum used to say to me all the time when she put me to bed, "All I want for you is peace," Bertini says.
"And I never understood it, but she used to say it all the time, 'I just want you to be peaceful', because she could see the restlessness in me, the creative drive and the creative instinct. Every mother wants that for a child, don't we? And that's where I find peace. The desert is where I want to die."
Bertini is sitting, loose-limbed and tanned, on a stool in her parents' spare bedroom converted to her city studio. Towering gums crowd a sweeping ridge-top view to Balmoral Beach. Magpies call. There is peace aplenty here but it is not the deep solitude she craves.
She has just taken delivery of Fieldwork, a beautifully produced collection of 100 of her sketches, gouaches and oils from the arid centre, the result of a collaboration with Zabriskie Books, the Bondi independent bookstore that closed its doors in 2012 to become a niche publisher.
For 10 years, Bertini has been expedition artist for Australian Desert Expeditions (ADE), accompanying scientists into remote, unnamed corners of the Gibson, Simpson and Central deserts for six to 12 weeks at a time.
Her paintings are exhibited at Olsen Irwin Gallery in Sydney and MARS Gallery in Melbourne. For 25 years her work has toured regional, national and international galleries, but her bags of sketchbooks and notebooks have, until now, lain untouched in her rural studio in Peelwood, destined to be donated to the National Archives.
Bertini handed them over to friend and publisher Niki Zubrzycki last year with no further instruction than that the book should read like a sketchbook. "I didn't want it to look like a coffee table book," Bertini says.
"I didn't want it to look like an artist's monograph. I didn't want it to be about me. I wanted it to be about the expedition and the process; it's about what we do as a team; it's about the science, the camels; it's about the explorers. It's like giving someone access to the diary of Burke and Wills."
That's not exactly how Zubrzycki sees their project, which began as dinner talk between friends and was made possible by a crowd funding campaign raising $32,000. For Zubrzycki it is about putting on paper Bertini's boundless passion and deep love of the desert landscape. "I think that someone with her drive and talent should be better known."
In the desert, Bertini works oblivious to sunburn and exhaustion. Walking beside the camels, she is rarely without sketchbook and pencils. When a scene strikes her, she flops down on a sandhill to make rapid pencil marks on the page; ragged horizon, undulations, a spindly tree here, spinifex there, before shading to capture the contrast between light and dark.
With an economy of strokes, Bertini catches a group of women bathing in a muddy waterhole, watched by haughty camels. She values those sketches she made of a sacred Aboriginal site in an isolated area of the north-west Simpson desert, where she helped map the discovery of gypsum mourning caps, many hundreds of years old.
The following year, a team from ADE travelled to a waterhole suspended high in the rocky escarpment of Mt Knuckey, accompanied by traditional owners. As a woman, she expected to be refused permission to enter the sacred site but an indigenous elder told her: "You're the next fella making art here and this country, the desert, needs to be painted."
"For an artist [the desert] is like the pot of gold," Bertini says. "There is a sense of time, there is this sense of the enormity of space, you have a real understanding of Australia's vastness as a continent, which you can't comprehend when you are on the periphery, on the coast."
Bertini's slight frame belies a physical toughness. She can wield an axe, load hessian and mulga wood packs, and work down the side of a camel string. Her friends tease she has a six-pack.
When she comes out of the desert, Bertini is subdued. "I don't talk much, I can't go into supermarkets ... I can't handle noise at all. I can't sleep because there is too much light, and I don't have the stars and I don't have that dark, still silence, dead silence."
There is a wildness of spirit in Bertini, says art writer and friend, Prue Gibson. "It's not so much perfectionism [that drives her] as a compulsive need to work," Gibson says. "As with writers, nothing is ever really finished. She's very demanding of herself and others, she's her hardest taskmaster, and then the environment demands it of her."
Bertini's love affair with the desert is, she half jokes, the fault of Davidson, who famously walked Australia's centre in 1977. In 2004, the director of the National Portrait Gallery Andrew Sayers heard Davidson was returning to Australia and wanted Bertini to paint her portrait. Sayers offered Bertini his striped thermals if she would accompany Davidson on an expedition into the desert.
After a decade of trekking, often venturing with no one but Harper into dune country, Bertini knows to pack items of real value: her sketchbooks and art materials, knickers and socks, a down-lined jacket and her sub-arctic weather swag.
Along the way, she has rid herself of mental baggage and found love with Harper. She regards him as the last of the great inland Australian explorers. "I'm not that," she says. "I'm interested in observing what I see and recording it artistically. All artists are explorers but metaphorically."
Bertini's family is originally from Broken Hill. Her grandparents ran a cattle and sheep property in Oberon until seven years of drought force them to sell. Art, too, is her heritage. Her mother is the sculptor, Anne Ferguson, her aunt the New York-based painter, Judy Cotton. Her grandfather, John Cotton, and his cousin, Olive, were both internationally renowned photographers.
"I had my mother corrupting me artistically on one side and on the other I had my father saying I had a fine brain and I should use it for something 'worthwhile'. I fought with him the whole time but, as a kid, how do you argue with a lawyer?"
She dropped out of undergraduate law and joined an avant-garde art performance group, painting all the while. After 10 years studying and working overseas she enrolled at the National Art School, married and had two children, later divorcing.
"I think artists can be very destructive people because of the need to be fuelled all the time, inspired all the time. My kids don't understand that I don't have weekends, my kids don't understand I work at night. They say, 'You live in that studio, you smell of the studio'.
"How many canvasses do you have to wreck before you translate that sketch and that moment and instinct you had in the landscape into an oil painting? You are always wrestling with the angel, looking for a muse, looking for an artistic opportunity which you can jump on like a bird of prey."
Fieldwork is published by Zabriskie Books.
