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Lyttelton based painter Bill Hammond has developed his own unique quirky mode of visual expression. His helter-skelter landscape paintings of the 1980s, to which this work belongs, are his comment on the state of contemporary society overwhelmed by technology and
defeated by anxiety.

The title refers to the body that specializes in fi nding employment for tertiary students and Hammond points to the high rates of unemployment, characteristic of New Zealand society in the late 1980s, in this painting. This painting presents an array of quirky characters. The crouching figure in profile on the left, possibly a self-portrait of the artist, is repeated on the right hand side. On the left he runs his hand down the page of a newspaper's classified section, presumably he is looking for a job, while on the
right he looks down a cavern into a landscape.
The central protagonist, a darkened figure presented in the centre foreground, looks toward the viewer with his hands clenched around a weapon. To the rear of him, two blockheaded characters with arms raised above their heads, appear to have been threatened by him. Representing corporate New Zealand, their heads are shaped like high rise buildings, which can be seen behind them.

Despite squared speech bubbles appearing at the mouthsof all the main characters there is no obvious connectionor communication between the disparate figures. The composition's discordant spatial elements serve to further isolate the characters while the painting's limited, almost monochromatic palette, suggests the bleak economic times brought on by the stock market crash in 1987.