SIDNEY NOLAN

Lord Alistair McAlpine Collection
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; a gift from the above in 1995

Burke and Wills: From Melbourne to Myth, National Library of Australia, 27 March - 2 June 2002

Tim Bonyhardy, Burke and Wills: from Melbourne to Myth, National Library of Australia, Canbera, 2002, p. 46 illus

Good condition. Superficial surface dirt.
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In Burke Lay Dying Sidney Nolan pictorialised the heroism of failure. It is a theme to which he and we fellow Australians are much inclined. In the beginning there was Ned Kelly, the outlaw caught and ingloriously hanged. Gallipoli was a glorious defeat; and Burke and Wills the most expensive and best equipped exploring expedition to fail, its lowest ebb being the death of its leaders. Here we see the hero fallen. The dynamic leader laid low; the red-bearded personality dying. He instructed John King to 'place the pistol in my right hand, and that you leave me unburied as I lie.'¹  The detritus of the gamble lies about him - a rifle leans against the trunk of a mighty gum, made the mightier still by the bodily frailty of Burke. A telescope, pistol and a memoranda book are nearby. Burke is said to have endeavoured to write ... 'I hope we shall be done justice to. We have fulfilled our task, but we have been abandoned. ... King has behaved nobly. He has stayed with me to the last, ... .'² The lean awkwardness of pose expresses the agony of starvation, Burke the leader ever vigilant, but now looking to a distant horizon different from the terrestrial. Thematically and pictorially Nolan harks back to earlier traditions in Australian art, as well as embracing the ageless romantic theme of man against the might of nature. Australian colonial art is rich in images of people succumbing to the bush, lost, a body known only to the crows, as in S. T. Gill's The Unlucky Digger that Never Returned 1852. The illustrated press revelled in such moments, George Stafford's The Gold Seeker being closer to Nolan in the barren landscape chosen for the surface grave.³ Yet, even in this moment of bodily anguish, Nolan conjures up a landscape peculiar to the beauty of the Great South Land, painterly brushed ochres contrasting with the distant hills of the finest blue.

1. Burke to John King, 29 June 1861, quoted in Clarke, Jane, Sidney Nolan: Landscapes & Legends, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p.107
2. Quoted in Clark, ibid
3. Illustrated Australian Magazine, January 1852, illustrated in Astbury, Leigh, City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, p.61