I’ve long believed that when you’re on the right track, things keep happening that tie into one another. I read about this years ago in the book The Celestine Prophecy – which is based on the idea that there are no coincidences. Author James Redfield believes that those seemingly coincidental tied-together moments prove that everything in the universe is energetically connected.
This story ties together five light installations by light artist Bruce Munro, and some places that leave their mark on you, as though they were always meant to be a part of your journey.
Hills Hoists and cockatoos
In 2019, I met Bruce Munro in Darwin, at the opening of his exhibition called Tropical Light. It featured eight large, immersive illuminated sculptures spread across 2.5 kilometres of Darwin’s CBD and the waterfront. It was the first time I’d experienced Bruce’s art, and being a lover of birds, I was enchanted by a sculpture called Gathering of the Clans. It consisted of eight Hills Hoists with hundreds of colour-coded ultraviolet and fluorescent clothes pegs shimmering on the clothes lines. As I walked into the space, the dark of night having descended, a chorus of cockatoos greeted me. I stood there stunned. It was so quintessentially Australian that it took me back to being a kid in the bush, surrounded by cockatoos making a deafening racket.
This year I met Bruce again in Mildura for the opening of his Fibre Optic Symphonic Orchestra (FOSO). What started out as a quick coffee and chat turned into hours of talking about art, inspiration, light, sound and travel. And during our conversation, I recalled the cockatoos.
“I saw this Hills Hoist and what I thought were little birds on the lines,” Bruce told me. “I got closer and realised they were clothes pegs. At the time, living on the Northern Beaches, birds were everywhere, and I loved the sound of magpies and cockatoos.”
Bruce and his wife Serena also spent months travelling Australia and they marvelled at the wild gatherings of squawking cockatoos in gum trees. This led to researching how many types of cockatoos there are (22, in fact) and the creation of the cacophonous soundtrack of wild cockatoos playing in tandem with the stunning visual display.
The Hills Hoist has now returned in the form of FOSO – an installation that lights up a part of the red-dirt Perry Sandhills near Wentworth.
An orchestra in the desert
The idea of FOSO came from a fantasy Bruce had as a child, and like many of his wild ideas, it gradually developed as the years went by.
“I’d often think – why can’t I walk through an orchestra? Wouldn’t that be amazing?” he recalls. “There are practicalities as to why you can’t – such as bumping into musicians and disturbing things – but I wanted to bring that childhood dream to life.”
Bruce is from England, but he travelled to Australia in his early 20s and met his wife Serena in Sydney. Together they spent many years exploring, including driving across some of the most remote parts of Australia in a Corolla that they’d bought for a couple of hundred bucks. They both formed an affinity with this country and after returning to the UK, they vowed to come back one day. With this affinity came a love of iconic Australian things, including the Hills Hoist.
“Every Australian who grew up with a Hills Hoist has memories from time spent around it in the backyard,” says Bruce. “Summer barbecues around it, swinging on its arms with your mates. It’s such an iconic Australian invention that means so much to so many people.”
When the sky is clear in the outback at night, the stars shine so brightly it feels as though you can reach out and brush your fingers against them. As I walked through the orchestra of Hills Hoists that create the spectacle that is FOSO, the vibrations from string instruments gave me goosebumps. Moving to the wind and brass section, my heart started beating a little faster and the percussion melodies almost had me dancing. And the sight of those 80 towering Hills Hoists is mesmerising.
The score for FOSO was created by British composer Nainita Desai, and it emanates from 240 speakers cleverly hidden in the bases of the sculptures. Thousands of fibre optic strings flit in and out, colours shimmering up and down and across the main columns, travelling out across the hoists’ arms, all perfectly in time with the rising and falling of the hypnotic sonatas.
Like all of Bruce’s works, the landscape that the installation sits upon comes to life in an unexpected way, and the sounds remain with you after you’ve left.
A trail of fireflies on Lock Island
Bruce has an initial idea or a dream, and it gradually morphs into words, sketches, discussions with his team – and then plans begin to emerge about how to create a complex, immersive installation capturing the essence of a destination.
For Trail of Lights on Mildura’s Lock Island, the idea was to use a vast area of quintessentially Australian bushland as a canvas – covering it in a magical carpet of lights through which people could walk silently in the darkness. Add fireflies (as Bruce calls them) and an enchanting, otherworldly vision brings the pathways to life.
For me, walking amongst 12,500 glowing sculptures was meditative. They’re like spirits, fanning off in all directions, and as a breeze passes through, they become a gently swaying dance troupe, each of their fine 24 individual fibre-optic strands gracefully, gently shifting.
Despite being surrounded by the lights and knowing other people are out there, I’m surprised by the quietness and a sense of being alone. I hear some whispers from the darkness – “Are they upturned flowers?” Silence. “Jellyfish floating in a black sea maybe?” Whatever you want them to be, I think.
Along the river’s edge are clusters of long fibre-optic rods of vertical light called ‘Gone Fishing’. This whimsical fibre-optic light sculpture was inspired by Bruce’s childhood memories of fishing with his brother. Consisting of 3,000 illuminated stems, they capture the peaceful, reflective feeling of standing by a stream.
A field of light in the Red Centre
In their 20s and newly in love, Bruce and Serena headed off on an adventure, travelling through Australia with all that they could fit into their trusty Corolla, writing in their diaries every evening and sleeping under the stars.
“Serena was the real traveller, and she was always the planner,” Bruce says. “We’d mark somewhere on the map and just go. Broken Hill, Uluru, Kings Canyon, Port Augusta, Margaret River…. we kept driving and exploring such incredible places.”
It was in Uluru that something changed. “When we saw Uluru, we simply stood and watched how the light changed. It was magical – like Impressionism in real life, and then there’s an inversion of the sky when the stars come out. It made us feel connected to the world. We’d never felt more alive. The land shimmers. The Indigenous people have seen and felt this for thousands of years.”
The burning question for Bruce was: how could he create a piece of art to explain what they saw and felt?
Bruce and Serena returned to the UK, had children, moved into a cottage and took on odd jobs to keep things rolling, but there was always a pull back to Australia, and Uluru and Kings Canyon had firmly lodged themselves in their hearts.
In 2004 Bruce created a version of Field of Light in his home of Wiltshire, and Field of Light, Uluru was born in 2016. It was originally a temporary exhibition: 50,000 glowing spheres of light scattered across an area larger than seven football fields, with tendrils snaking out across the desert beneath them. The bulbs are powered by solar energy and gently change colour, creating the appearance of a field of glowing desert flowers after rain.
“Deserts can be barren places, but there are dormant seeds under the ground and after rain they explode into growth, like the super-fast sped-up films I watched as a kid.”
A decade later, more than 750,000 people have experienced the installation that started as a dream 34 years beforehand. I am now one of those people, and the sheer beauty of the spectacle below Uluru is like nothing else. With a black sky smothered in stars above, I walked through the desert – dazzling bulbs of blue, violet, gold and hot pink spilling out in every direction, the cords joining them like light speeded up.
It’s like a shimmering, pulsing magic carpet from a fairy tale – ready to take you to another place.
A canyon of towers
Light-Towers in Kings Canyon is Bruce’s second major light installation in the Northern Territory, and it’s just as extraordinary – in both appearance and the idea behind it.
“When I was 21 I read a book called Gifts of Unknown Things,” Bruce recalls. “It was about myth, soft science and travel. It covers the sixth sense and tapping into synaesthesia. Sounds – they have a colour, a shape, and it’s about Earth having a natural pulse in the upper atmosphere, resonating at a rate of sixty-nine beats per day.”
This inspiration evolved into 69 towers, each made of 216 recycled glass bottles stacked into sturdy two-metre columns.
“It’s like a stack of lenses,” Bruce explains. “Structurally, they’re strong, and when filled with illuminated fibre-optic cables, they light up.”
The towers are then connected to solar-powered light sources that change colours in sync with a hauntingly beautiful soundscape by British composer Orlando Gough.
Opening in 2023, it’s as peaceful, mysterious and immersive as Field of Light. Everyone sees something different, but wandering between the towers in Kings Canyon, I pictured Stonehenge and thought of spirits passing through from this world to another. That’s the beauty of Bruce’s work: your own life and experiences are a part of what you see, and what you see becomes a part of you.
Bruce’s tribute to Serena Munro: 12/01/1963 – 23/07/2026
When Serena Ludovici met Bruce Munro in Australia, art, ideas, travel and a passion for embracing the world exploded into a path they would follow for 39 years. Like all of us on our journeys through life, neither of them could know what lay ahead. But Serena understood Bruce like no one else, and she documented his projects through her passion – photography.
All of the photos in this story were taken by Serena, and they capture the essence of Bruce’s work.
“We didn’t need to do much more than a fleeting kiss, occasionally accompanied with a sing-song warble – we had our own little language to express our deep love,” Bruce says.
“Serena showed us all – her family and her friends – that life is for living. She was such a doer. Someone who lived life to the full, and it always made me inwardly smile at how much she packed into a day.
“Luckily for all of us, she immersed herself in photography,” Bruce says. “Like every dedicated artist, time did not matter to Serena. Dawn and dusk, being the magic hours of the day for photography, required staying power. But early starts and late finishes didn’t blunt Serena’s passion to capture life through the lens.”
“You were a magician of time, which in your orbit seemed to slow down as you danced through jam-packed days. An effortless dance of disciplines and social interactions. Everything you did was below the radar and modestly executed, and yet we all marvelled. I was, and am, so very proud of you,” says Bruce.
“Your beautiful photographs express everything about nature, which spoke both to and with you. You were a natural spirit – a Dryad of the glade – there was never pretence or gimmicks. You saw the truth and had such a rare talent in a time when made-up reality receives more attention than the real thing.”
“You proved that doing did not need waterfalls of words. You captured life by literally capturing the incredible beauty that was right in front of your eyes. I now have the rest of my life to remember what a unique ray of sunshine you were.”
Rest in peace, Serena Munro.
To read more about Bruce Munro’s Fibre Optic Symphonic Orchestra, click here.
Rex flies to Mildura, which is just a 30-minute drive from the FOSO installation. Book your tickets here and check out the route map below.
