SIDNEY NOLAN

In 1947 Nolan made a trip to Queensland by plane, a journey that would give him a fresh insight into the landscape and provide him with new subject matter for his work.

'He read Captain Cook's Voyages at the John Oxley Library: "Read a good deal about Cook & beginning to feel him connected with all the barrier reef visions & treasures... Perhaps he isn't really, but there is something moving about his precise descriptions of how he found his way through the coral"'¹ Cook's ship the Endeavour had become stuck on a coral reef as it made its way up the east coast and was forced to pull in for repairs at a spot named by him Endeavour River. It was here that Sir Joseph Banks and his men made extensive botanical collections and where both a kangaroo and dingo were sighted for the first time.

Nolan, however, became temporarily absorbed in painting a series of works based on the Eliza Fraser story and did not execute many of the Queensland landscapes for another year, joining them with other outback paintings from his 1948 journey. When they were exhibited in March 1949 at the David Jones Art Gallery, the Sun critic Harry Tatlock Miller wrote: '[Nolan's] first exhibition of Queensland outback paintings makes an amazing impact and leaves an indelible impression...a sense of vast space - still, silent and everlasting. Time itself is arrested... These pictures remain in the mind persistently flavouring the following hours, as a night's dream will haunt and colour the ordinary day.'²

1. Nolan diary, 17 July, 1947, in J. Clark, Sidney Nolan, Landscapes and Legends: a retrospective exhibition 1937-1987, International Cultural Corporation of Australia, Sydney, 1987, p. 89
2. Clark, ibid, p. 95