My fascination with Australia goes back as long as I can remember, probably as long as I have been drawing letters with flowers. As a kid, it seemed magical to me that there was a whole other continent on the other side of the earth.
When I was about ten years old, I came across an article in the magazine GEOLINO about a girl staying in Sunshine Beach, Noosa, as part of a student exchange. I told my mum that I wanted to do the same. She told me we could talk about it in a few years, probably hoping I would forget about it.
A few years passed, and one day she came back from work, visibly excited. She told me she had met someone who knew someone who hosted exchange students. He lived exactly where I had been wanting to go all those years: Sunshine Beach, Noosa. It turned out to be one of the strangest and luckiest coincidences of my life, and I was able to stay six months in Australia when I was around 14.
When I had to leave, it felt like being expelled from paradise. I was devastated. I missed my friends, the weather, the school, and the beaches. For many years, I kept having recurring dreams about Noosa National Park. At some point I lost all hope that I would return.
16 years later
From the entrance to the park, a steep stairway leads up to the hills that tower over the sea and beaches. The sun is bright and hot. Sweat runs down our foreheads. He hums a song and is quieter than usual. Some days are too beautiful for their description to do them justice. This day is one of them.
We pass fragrant banksias and eucalyptus trees, and many other plants I don't know the names of. The winding path is mostly empty and passes some of the most beautiful white beaches, maroon-coloured rocks and green hills. We pass the cliffs of Hell's Gates and dolphins jump out of the dark blue waves. He leads the way to the fairy pools, little fish and tiny crustaceans fill the warm waters. This is the first time on our hike that we encounter a lot of people trying to get their perfect shot. To be fair, the rock pools have an Instagram page with 9,000 followers. We climb further and further and finally it’s just us.
He asks if I want to do this for the rest of my life. We both know there has always only ever been one answer.
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Hell’s Gate encapsulates all my memories from my favourite place on earth and is my first collaborative typeface with Tom. He drew the letters behind the plants and we will release them separately sometime in the future.
For this typeface, I also want to thank Jordi Ng, who commissioned a masthead for the New Meridian Field Observer Newspaper of the Crown Heights Gardens NY, around the time I started working on this typeface. Jordi proposed a mono-linear style for the illustration to accompany the typeface REPOST by HAL Typefaces. With the kind approval by HAL I added little bugs and plants to some of the letters. The style inspired me to expand the idea to Hell’s Gate.
Over the past months, my work has been generously supported by the Rijksmuseum Meermanno (formerly Huis van het Boek) in The Hague. As part of my residency, “A New Nature”, I was given the space to work on my ornamented typefaces, inspired by their fantastic collection. This typeface was drawn in the beginning of this year during the planning of the residency, while we were preparing the exhibition, which will be on show until October 25.
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FLOWERS BY
CÉLINE HURKA
LETTERS BY
TOM CONROY
YEAR
2026
CHARACTER SET
26 INITIALS26 ORNAMENTS (ON THE LC CHARACTERS)
10 FIGURES
PUNCTUATION
STYLE
FAIRYPOOLS
VISUALS
CÉLINE HURKA
FOR TOM <3
