JOHN OLSEN Australian, B. 1928

Commissioned by Pancontinental Mining Limited in 1985 to mark the opening of the Paddington gold mine in Western Australia

Corporate collection, Brisbane

John Olsen – Gold!, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, October 1986, cat. 8

John Olsen – Gold!, Pancontinental Mining Limited, Sydney, 1986, illus. full page, unpaginated

Olsen’s Young Miner, together with lot xxx, Landscape & Alluvial Mine, was originally part of a group of paintings commissioned by Pancontinental Mining Limited to mark the opening of its Paddington gold mine in Western Australia. When the collection was first exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the director Edmund Capon commented, ‘Perhaps no single painter in Australia has provided us with such vibrant and diverse imagery of the Australian landscape as John Olsen'.¹  

Olsen brought the young miner in this portrait to life not only in painting, but also in words when he described the hard outback journey to Kalgoorlie and the inhospitable environment encountered there. ‘It is best to let the fearful red dust become part of your nature’, he wrote, ‘Everything will be touched by it… You are no longer deodorized; you become tribalised; you wear the dust like another skin’. ² He would have been familiar with Sidney Nolan’s powerful Mine and Miner series, painted in 1972. Like Nolan, who travelled  north-west to Mount Tom Price in the Hammersley Ranges, Olsen made the long journey across the continent himself and resultant paintings are resonant with first-hand experience.

1. John Olsen – Gold!, Pancontinental Mining Limited, Sydney, 1986, catalogue introduction.
2. In op. cit., unpaginated.