Lizzie Buckmaster Dove is a multimedia artist from Coledale, a coastal village in the Illawarra about 18 kilometres north of Wollongong.
She was also a good friend of Hazel, who sometimes came back from shoreline walks with Lizzie tingling with a mixture of excitement and contentment.
From those walks, and many others, Lizzie drew inspiration for some glorious art installations that highlighted her affinity for the south coast landscape: the rocks, the pools, the headlands, the trees, the animals, the sky, and the sea (click to enlarge).
She came to want to understand the Country that informed and inspired her art from more than an Anglo perspective, through an Indigenous lens.
In 2021, Lizzie enrolled in a Masters of Philosophy course at the University of Wollogong, where she formalised her walks and her art into a research project on Walking in Country. Along with her academic supervisors, Dr Lucas Ihlein and Dr Chantel Carr, her research was informed by Wadi Wadi elder Dr Aunty Barbara Nicholson and Yuin knowledge holder Dr Anthony McKnight.
By 2023, with their guidance and support, Lizzie’s research resulted in papers and talks on what she was understanding from her walks, deepening her understanding of Country, including First Nations people but also the fauna and flora, the rocks and the water.
In March 2025, a month after Hazel died, Lizzie published her thesis, walking back: towards geographies of belonging, a “Country-led research project situated between creative arts and human geography”.
Its acknowledgments include:
Many years ago, Hazel Flynn generously provided feedback on early writing, in turn boosting my confidence to continue. My deepest love and thanks. I wish I could share this writing with you too.
Later that year, Lizzie sent me a PDF of Walking with Moon, Lizzie Buckmaster Dove’s Story with Country (yes, the spacing is deliberate), which “constitutes the creative component” of walking back:
stories, accounts, sketches, diagrams, photos and poems. These are artefacts of a primary walk that took place over a one-month Moon cycle in May/June 2024.
Today, I attended the launch of Walking with Moon in book form at the Wollongong Art Gallery.
Lizzie was there, of course, along with Aunty Barb, Dr Ihlein, and Dr Carr. Between them they talked through how the project came to be, the relationships Lizzie built, and the significance of a research project that became a stunningly beautiful, insightful, inspiring, and poetic book.
There were other friends at the launch who knew Hazel, so it was all quite emotional, even more so because our daughter Augusta works at the Gallery. Lizzie wasn’t even aware that the tall young woman on the front desk was her friend’s daughter.
I’d read the book in PDF but this is one instance where the digital version simply cannot match the print copy. The photos, the illustrations, the poems, the maps, the observations, the understandings – all are beautifully laid out in a book that is itself a work of art.
The copy of Walking with Moon signed by Lizzie will go into our bookcase of autographed literary treasures. Hazel would have been delighted to see it there and so proud of her friend.
Copies are available for sale at Wollongong Art Gallery or direct from the author.