The Landscape Within: The Remote Landscape in Australian Painting

Karen Stephens

For a place to be considered ‘outback’ or ‘remote’, it is usually thought of as being located inland, isolated, uninhabitable and out of sight. These terms can also suggest a type of nothingness or not much going on—a deserted, dilapidated wasteland. This essay demonstrates the significance of remote landscape for Australian landscape painting’s capacity to withstand argument and to revolutionise through highlighting key works in the Rockhampton Museum of Art Collection across a timeline of 1930 to 2011. The remote landscape is the arena for some of the most powerful social, political and cultural events throughout our history, with the ancient and wily medium of painting at the leading edge. This essay recognises that Australian landscape painting is complex, with the potential to produce new arguments given that we are at once both a young country in terms of Western colonisation and also one of the oldest civilisations in the world.

The outside political influences of the late 1930s and 1940s affected Australian painting with a lack of resources and the exodus of men returning to the ‘Mother Country’ to fight. Three notable Australian painters did not commit to military service. Russell Drysdale, after being excused because of limited vision in one eye, was told if he could not fight for his country “to go and paint for his country”.1 Arthur Boyd contemplated “going bush when presented with his call-up papers” and escaped duty in 1944 on grounds of being unfit to serve.2 Sir Sidney Nolan deserted the AIF in 1944 at age 27, a jailable offence, and lived “on the run like an outlaw”3 under the pseudonym of Robin Murray. The threat of prosecution ended in 1948 during a general amnesty.

For these three painters, the remote Australian landscape became “a place of trial”4 and a fertile ground that preoccupied them for their entire careers; Drysdale’s landscapes evoke eeriness, Boyd’s mythological landscapes are full of psychological angst and emotion, and Nolan’s figures show the tension within a person seeking escape and blazing their own path using the subjects of explorers, soldiers and outlaws.

Drysdale’s Outback Post Mistress and Daughter 1976, Boyd’s Woman in a Jinker 1976 and Nolan’s Burke in Central Australia 1964 demonstrate a continual return to the subject of figure in remote landscape and the push against prevailing traditions at this time—including the rejection of pastoralist scenes in landscape painting, the rise of American influences of abstract expressionist painting, and the Vietnam War.

Between the 1950s and 1970s, radical and individualist shifts occurred in Australian painting, and there was a focus on the remote landscape as a subject. Unlike earlier counterparts, regeneration within the remote landscape became a common emerging theme.

John Olsen’s Life Drawn Toward the Void 1976 depicts a bird’s eye view of Kati Thanda - Lake Eyre, the great inland sea. It portrays the enormous scale of this water source as a lush oasis, flourishing with life in the heart of Australia. Clifton Pugh’s Drought and Eagles 1975 also demonstrates a bird’s eye view to portray the cycle of death and regeneration, with red and black pea flowers surviving alongside a perished animal.

In February 1968, Fred Williams was personally traumatised by the experience of bushfire, recalling it as “a war” and “a battlefield”.5 Burning Tree at Upwey, Victoria 1968 captures a devastated landscape and Williams also notes how “the same element that destroyed the bush regenerated and replenished it”.6

John Molvig witnessed the mistreatment of Aboriginal people from extended periods in Central Australia but also “Aboriginal people being sustained by a traditional way of life, at the same time as existing in our modern age”.7 Stockman in Central Australia 1958, from the Centralian series 1958–1960, demonstrates Molvig’s adept rendering of a figure and horizontal bars, which characterises at one time imprisonment and a figure that is embodied as landscape.

Dibirdibi Country 2011 by Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori of Bentick Island, Gulf of Carpentaria, exemplifies the great protest from the First People of Australia which sent ripples around the world. Painting—a mute language “that could transcend cultural boundaries”8—pierced the silence with a protest to the Australian Government by First Nations people for equality using cultural materials as supporting evidence in native title land claim cases which became a catalyst for national change and discussion. The radical jolt of the Indigenous painting movement from remote Australia continues to break new ground and astonish the world, creating potent and complex argument and a greater respect for First Peoples’ culture and knowledge of landscape.

Undisputedly, landscape painting dominates the art history of Australia in a way like no other country, as demonstrated by the artworks highlighted through this essay and in the Rockhampton Museum of Art Collection. This essay’s focus underscores the historical and cultural significance of remote landscape for Australian history painting, a place geographically unseen and often overlooked in favour to look outwards in the search for the avant-garde. This essay demonstrates a diverse cross section of people’s emotions including rebellion, trial, regeneration, convergence and activism that became visible through the medium of Australian landscape painting at periods of time between 1930—2011. In partnership with the ancient medium of painting, the remote Australian landscape proves it’s not lacking in potency for new argument and a capacity to astonish with a refined agility that arrives from nowhere.

February 2022

1 Lou Klepac, Russell Drysdale (Sydney: Murdoch Books, 2009), 7.

2 Darleen Bungey, “Death, Love, War,” in Arthur Boyd: A Life (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2007), 89.

3 Brian Adams, “War in the Wimmera,” in Sidney Nolan: Such Is Life (Milsons Point., NSW: Vintage, Random House Australia, 1987), 76.

4 Patrick McCaughey, “The Exhilaration of Sidney Nolan” in Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters (Carlton, VIC: The Miegunyah Press, 2014), 178.

5 Patrick McCaughey, “Fred Williams: The Secular and the Elemental Landscape,” in Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters (Carlton, VIC: The Miegunyah Press, 2014), 278.

6 McCaughey, “Fred Williams,” 278.

7 Michael Hawker, “Jon Molvig: Maverick,” in Jon Molvig: A Restlessness of Vision, ex. cat. (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, 2019), 19.

8 Rex Butler, “Emily Kngwarreye: The Impossible Painter,” in Double Displacement: Rex Butler on Queensland Art 1992–2016 (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2019), 37.