He talks of lessons learnt from mangroves and their ability to thrive in difficult conditions; of owls as fertility totems; of crows that shriek to warn him about brown snakes when he paints in the bush near his home.

But for all his New Age vocabulary, Yeldham is a practical man. He knows how to make and fix things; how to steer his tinny along creeks to hidden bays. He knows how to commune with nature without getting killed by it.

"That's what the Australian bush is like," he says. "At one moment, you're in splendour, the next you're being attacked by ants."

The more you surrender to Yeldham's intense, meandering, metaphor-strewn conversation, the more it seems to have a logical current. Of course creativity is like the growth of an ancient tree. Of course listening to nature will teach you things you didn't know.

For Yeldham, there's not much separating art from life. Living by the Hawkesbury just north of Sydney, the work he does, the way he raises his son and daughter with his wife, Jo, is all part of a quest to live in a way he finds meaningful.

Nature became part of that quest early on, when he was a privileged but unhappy kid in Sydney, bullied at school and failing in class because of dyslexia. 

He remembers playing spotlight on his mother's hobby farm, hiding in the trees and staying out in the dark longer than the other kids. It's a story he often tells when talking about his work – a kind of fable about nature's redemptive power. Then there was his move as a teenager to a Swiss boarding school, where he learnt to climb mountains at night.

"I never knew what pushing through was as a boy; I just had tantrums and it always ended in giving up. Being in the mountains taught me that, wow, I can do things that I didn't think I could do. And that's what art is, really."

As an adult, Yeldham continued to seek out difficult landscapes.