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Like Arthur Rimbaud, who imagined himself a drunken boat sailing the world to escape the tedium of provincial France, the painter Dušan Marek took vast oceans and bubbling surf as subjects for his art before ever setting eyes on the sea. In particular, a painting titled The Voyage, made on the slat of a wooden bunk Marek slept in during five months of internment at a refugee camp in Dillenberg, Germany, is an imaginative study of water and waves. Read from left to right, argues Bernice Murphy, author of one of two monographs on the artist, the painting’s subject emerges as a surrealistic history of the world: beginning with a crustacean, a symbol of life’s oceanic origins, the painting depicts an evolutionary timeline of ‘germinating seeds and … aquatic plants’ before arriving at its right-hand side with the ‘dim outlines of a human’.³⁵Yet equally visible is a less epochal journey: a hot-air balloon floats over undulating waves towards foreign, grassy shores. Stranded in an overcrowded refugee camp, Marek was daydreaming about motion and adventure. (Rimbaud writes: ‘I have seen archipelagos of stars / Feverish skies where I was free to roam’.)³⁶ Marek planned to settle in France or Canada, but when an Australian migration agent offered visas, he took his earliest escape route.