When Na Lan moved from Beijing to a small Australian town with a population of just 1,200, she cried a river of tears.
'My husband thought he should tie a canoe to our house just in case I got washed away,' she says.
The three-hour journey from Sydney to the home of her husband, artist Reg Buckland, near Rylstone, on the western edge of the Blue Mountains, 'felt like 10 hours'.
'It was so slow, I kept telling myself, don't worry we'll be there soon ... Then, when we finally arrived in the town, we kept going, onto a dirt road and to the mountain. I started to cry, I cried for almost three months.'
But curiosity for the spectacular landscape - on the edge of World Heritage-listed Wollemi National Park - soon began to take hold. She started disappearing into the Bush, 'sometimes for whole days at a time without telling anybody'.
'Reg tried to tell me, 'In the Australian Bush you don't just go off without telling anybody.' But while I stayed in the Bush, I started to read books and I stopped crying.
'I started looking around at the different birds and the trees, and I thought, 'I've never seen this before; it's beautiful.' That's when I decided that if I were to stay here, I could be an artist and start painting about the Bush, about nature, about Australia.'
