"How dare you question what the boss says!" he screamed.

She tore herself away as his fingers bent into clawing movements, catching pieces of her clothing, ripping bits off. Pieces of cheesecloth came away in his hands, stuck to his fingers. She was able to get away and run into the grassed playing field. But it was no longer grassed, it was hot and empty like a desert. The sand and the heat were suffocating her. She heard herself make a choked kind of howl as she woke up, was woken up. She lay in the darkness listening and identifying all the dark objects in the room. She put her hand across the bed. It was empty. The door was closed but a glow came from under the door. Relief spread through her body again. She started to hear the surf again, heaving and subsiding as always. Then the door opened and she saw a curly silhouette.

"Did you call out, Rini?" whispered her partner.

Rain pounded on the roof of the car, then turned to hail, then rained again on piles of hailstones in drifts in the gutter and next to the fences. Leon made no move to get out. He chewed gum, turned up the stereo and settled back.

"I check about thirty places in one shift. It's pretty frantic. But we're on the way home now."

When the rain stopped he bounced out of the car. His brother continued to sit hunched over in the passenger seat for another few seconds. Leon produced a large key ring and opened the front door which glistened with the reflections from its black enamel paint and small panes of bevelled glass. A brass plate next to the door read Karakul Artefacts trading as Brolga Antiques. A wisteria vine in full bloom grew up a flat cast iron column and along the underside of the balcony above. The night air was filled with the smell of wet foliage and the perfume of the wisteria.

Inside they walked across soft pale grey carpet through connecting rooms. Artefacts from all over the world hung on the walls and sat on shelves but there was nothing very valuable on view.

"The good stuff's in the strong room up here," Leon said as he went upstairs to the second level.

"Where can we get the rug valued? Could these people do it?" Alex asked.

"We'll have to look around. The question is, would you trust them to know you had it."

Rini pulled her fingers through her hair and lifted her head up, addressing the student who had asked the question.

"How much is to do with the real issues of multiculturalism and how much is to do with survival in the shark pit of academia, I don't know. People who've been lampooning the local proponents in the past are now appropriating our overseas contacts. Treating them like heroes. And the arts programs, applauding all the officially sanctioned third world writers. Anyone published by the big presses basically is okay. The important aspect of the question though, is to what extent is work by migrants commodified because of its 'migrant content'. Can a minority culture person in Australia (or England or America, for that matter) speak as anything other than a stereotypical ethnic with the subject position that implies?"

She felt the smile on her mouth, smiling that smile with lots of gum and a wrinkled nose just like her embarrassing relatives. She lowered her lip and unwrinkled her nose.

On the paper was a central Indian yellow shape. Billie picked up the stencil and placed it over the paper. Then she took the screen and laid down a line of alizarin crimson and blended it towards vermilion. She laid the screen over the stencil and pulled the squeegee across it.

From cinnabar to sandarak, she whispered.

The dog looked up at her from the sunny patch next to the window. Billie finished the ten prints she had and laid them in the drying rack. Then she sat down at the light table to cut the next stencil. A wave of perfume wafted in from the flowering tree outside. The dog got up from the sunny patch and went out onto the deck into the shade next to the big pot of browallia with its orange flowers spilling down onto the boards. That edible type of orange. Browallia - reminding some people of English country gardens, some people of the English country gardens in Australia, some people of the Australian gardens of their childhoods, some people of poor people's gardens, and some people of gardens in China.

The dog positioned himself so that he could watch the wattle birds in the tree and the artist at work at the same time. The telephone rang and she left it ringing until the answering machine picked up.

"Billie, darling, it's me."

She answered the phone. Her cousin said she wanted to cook dinner to repay her for accommodating her until Billie's mother returned. Billie hung up with a sense of foreboding. Saturday almost over. Sunday to be occupied again. Monday back to work. And only three more months in the studio before her friend came back to reclaim it.

"'Traces of the Byzantine in Contemporary Balkan Art'." Sounds interesting. But you won't find anything much to do with the Byzantine in Australia. It's just not one of the strong concerns, not a concern at all. It doesn't touch us, we have no contact with it. But there is someone who was in a group show here recently. Billie something. Her work had some Byzantine elements. It looked iconic because it had a shallow pictorial depth. Silk screen on fresco. She uses gold leaf as well. And she's a mixed media kind of artist. She's interested in antiquated techniques. I'll give you her phone number and maybe she can put you on the right track."

The gallery attendant took out a gallery card which read Gallery-Studio-Praxis and copied down some details on the back of it from an invitiation for the group show and handed it to Alex.

The phone rang again and Billie answered it immediately. It was some Russian guy interested in icons in modern art, meaning the original eikon. She invited him to look at her material, some photos she had and some of her research in the area. And Sunday night was a dead zone. Any work she wanted to do was spoiled by the idea of work the next day.

"It's interesting what those images do. Once they are on a single pictorial plane together, their boundaries become shared, their borders adjunct to each other, flowing next to and around each other."

"The breakdown of the figure/ground distinction."

"But that's just the pictorial theory about it. There are so many other conflicting discourses which it taps into."

Alex fingered the heavy upholstery fabric covering the workbench. He gets up to go but does not rise to his full height. He stoops through the doorway on the way out.

She tried to remember if she had invited him or if he asked to come over. Trying to piece together the mundane habits of everyday life and revert back to the 'to do' list of items for the week to come, like coming back down to earth after a sojourn in space.

"Fabrics and the applied arts have been my vocational focus. For example, we have collected extensive samples of black lacquer work. Those craft traditions are still alive to some extent. It is a way of maintaining continuity with the past, the distant past. But it becomes more dilute, the knowledge of each generation is smaller and has been modified to suit modern technology. Our lives are flooded with information but we know less and less. Those original artisans had to manufacture the materials they worked with as well as using the materials to make artefacts."

"Byzantine 3-D rendered figures suspended in an opaque substance like milk, like marble, like gold. Like Roman painting. The figure is decontextualised. I'm interested in mineralogy which I think is a Byzantine kind of concern and chemistry too, like pigments. I also produce other kinds of art. I made a series two years ago which were like giant pieces of jewellery. I used glass and sheet metal. But I don't think anyone here read it as Byzantine-influenced. It doesn't mean anything in Australia. Australians associate that stuff with a cartoon version of the English Middle Ages."

The following weekend, there was a warm northerly wind blowing, bright sunlight and puffy clouds in the sky. Flowers were being blown into the street from everywhere. In the gutter was a mixture of jacaranda, honeysuckle and red bougainvillea, jumbled together and beautiful - light indigo, Naples yellow, alizarin crimson. Unlike red, yellow and blue, so harsh in combination.

Billie, Alex and the dog came to the house, a converted warehouse.

"This is the place Felix is about to move into. My one and only patron is not short of cash."

"An artist buying the work of another artist?"

"He's a collector and his own art is done at arm's length. By other people, that is."

The renovations were expensive, high quality and almost complete. The frosted glass front door opened when she turned the handle. The front of the building was single storeyed with rooms opening off a side hallway. Everything was covered with white dust from the new plaster and paint work. There were newly installed sky lights which greatly enriched the light coming from the windows. Halfway along the hallway, they turned out of the house and went up an external staircase to a wooden deck. On both ends of it were beautiful light-filled studios. The treads near the top of the staircase were cut around an old jacaranda tree which was just coming into flower. Then from the deck they looked into a small valley, blue with jacarandas.

They looked through the slats of the deck at the large slab of sandstone in the dappled courtyard below. Long copper-lined planting boxes ran along the side walls. Next to one, lying on a stone bench, was a man in a red shirt. The dog was standing next to the man who called out when he saw them and beckoned them down to him. They went downstairs through the back studio into an area already fitted out with timber shelving and benches and opening onto another narrow street.

"Huge and labyrinthine," said Alex.

They came into the space under the deck. The man in the blood-stained shirt still lay on the bench and turned to face them. He said he had already called the police and that he had come to install the lighting in the room beyond the courtyard. He explained that when he was at the front door he heard a pounding on the street. Six young men ran up behind him. They started kicking him and punching him. Then they ran off again. He slowly raised one hand and felt his head and the blood in his hair. Billie told him they were meeting the owner there and the wounded man said he was also expecting him.

Felix, the owner, arrived with the police. The police took the electrician for a medical examination and told Felix to meet them later. Then Felix turned back to his visitors.

"I find this very disturbing, he said. And precisely because this innocent man was attacked. I think they might have confused him with me."

But Felix shook it off quickly and led Billie and Alex through to the room beyond the courtyard to sit down. It could become an office. There was wiring everywhere and wires stretched across the room holding lots of tiny halogen bulbs. The room was already secured with heavy doors and locks. Felix walked over to one wall, moved a concrete wall panel and opened a strong room. He brought out a gold chain made of small square plates which had intricate cut-out designs in them. Then he brought out some of Billie's giant jewellery. He demonstrated the obvious similarities between the different works. Alex examined them under the light and asked Billie which technique she had used to make the steel look like gold.

"It's just gold leaf," she said.

The next day, Sunday, Billie visited Rini and they sat on the beach under an umbrella, listening to the quietness of the low surf.

"I feel that there is an increase in violence in the community, said Billie. Is it just me or is it a general thing? Everywhere around the world there seems to be war and misery and violence."

"There's an incipient rage in the community, said Rini. They say there will be another highly significant piece of legislation coming up soon. This is just the softening-up process."

"So what is this legislation?"

"Something to do with immigration and money. Maybe the legality of imports. I'm not sure."

"So when do we find out what it is?"

"I think this time next week it should be tabled. Apparently the controversial part of it is buried in a subsidiary point of the Bill. We'll have to read it carefully."

Rini continued to bury her feet and legs in the sand while Billie got out her diary and wrote in it. She stared at the surf. Twelve more hours left of Sunday. Tomorrow Monday.