A woman in a long dress covered in stars and moons is hurling rocks and insults at a huge black bear that is tearing up her vegetable garden.

She runs towards it, flinging her arms around and growling until the bear lumbers into the forest.

Then she comes over to us cowering in the car, with all windows locked. After spending a sleepless night in what the Sunshine Coasters call the 'Bates Motel', we have driven halfway up a steep cliff, out of civilization, and into Theresa Kishkan's driveway above Madeira Park.

"You must be the photographers,"; she says.

Theresa coaxes us out and into the home that she and her husband John Pass designed and built themselves-all wood, with cooking smells and a pot-bellied stove-for much-appreciated glasses of wine. Inside there are oil paintings of her as an artist's model. In those days she was living on a remote island off the west coast of Ireland with a local fisherman. She has also lived in Greece and England.

We start looking for a place to photograph Theresa and John, also a poet. We find their son Forrest in his room drinking Revolutionary Soda and writing a manifesto for a new world, pictures of Che Guevara all over the walls.

Throughout our stay, Theresa is as welcoming and sweet to us as she was aggressive and mean to the bear.

[by Blaise Enright-Peterson & Barry Peterson / BCBW 2000]