Sidney Nolan

Skinner Galleries, Perth
James O Fairfax AO; purchased from the above in 1962

Sidney Nolan, Skinner Galleries, Perth, November - December 1962, cat. 1
Sidney Nolan, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 September  -  29 October 1967, cat. 104 (label on reverse)
Sidney Nolan: Burke and Wills, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, November 1985 -  January 1986, cat. 15
Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends. A Retrospective Exhibition 1937 - 1987, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia, 1987 - 1988 (label on reverse)
Sidney Nolan Retrospective 2007, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2 November 2007 -  3 February 2008,  National Gallery of Victoria, 22 February - 18 May 2008, Queensland Art Gallery, 6 June - 18 August 2008, cat. 83

Jane Clark, Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 135 (illus.)
Barry Pearce, Sidney Nolan 1917 - 1992, The Beagle Press for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 180 (illus.)

There are some minor retouchings to paint losses (top right hand and top left hand corner). There is a minor area of retouching in the white area (lower right quadrant). This work has recently had a light surface clean; for a full conservator's condition report, please contact the department. This work is otherwise in good condition.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The first of Sidney Nolan's several Burke and Wills series arose directly out of his 1948 journey to remote inland Australia, and there is a deliberate, marked discrepancy or disjunction between their dry-brushed, rippling, red-brown earth and the alien, daguerrotype-stiff and faintly comic figures of the doomed explorers. When the artist revisited the subject in the early 1960s it was after his discovery and exploration of acrylic paint in the Gallipoli and Leda series, and in this second sequence surface and motif became more smoothly integrated and unified. As Sarah Engledow has recently remarked, 'by the 1960s man and camel became fused in the seamless treatment of their construction. The figures are apparitions, ghost-like in a landscape of mirages – man and nature finding themselves together at the Gulf of Carpentaria in a place where water and earth meet in a shifting, indivisible mix."¹ 

In paintings such as the present work, the former hard profile contrasts of oil and enamel have given way to an overall soft, pearly refulgence. The University of Western Australia journal The Critic responded warmly to this new sensuality: 'Ravishing is the only word for it ... These skies are immensely high, light ... with a flush of pink or burgundy coming through the heavenly blue. The sense of immense space, empty, desolate, is ... hallucinatory.'²  Interestingly, a similar description can be found in Alan Moorehead's account of the Burke and Wills expedition (a book written at Nolan's suggestion), where he writes of how the explorers ' ... had seen the fantastic dawn colours of the desert and had walked through country where white salt pans ran through scarlet sandhills with the cloudless sky overhead – a landscape of red, white and blue.'³  Both writers may well have had the present work in mind; its glowing tricolour-opal palette is certainly distinctive.⁴

The works of the second series are also noticeably different to those of the first in the form of their key motifs. Burke and Wills have become as stylised in their way as the figure of Ned Kelly. Across a number of works, including Camel and figure (1962, Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Burke and Wills at the Gulf (1961, National Gallery of Victoria), we see the same naked, bearded man sitting behind the hump of the camel, making a bizarre symmetrical animal silhouette, like Dr Doolittle's Pushme-Pullyu. In his Critic review, Allan Edwards described how the explorers on their camels 'perched precariously on the steep rump seemed to have grown into the beasts, a kind of desert centaur. Sitting well back they look rather like figureheads on the wrong end of the ship of the desert.'⁵

While sharing surface and symbol with other paintings in the series, the present work is particularly remarkable for its inclusion of an Aboriginal figure. Tom Rosenthal has remarked on the general absence of Indigenous figures from Nolan's historico-mythological paintings;⁶ apart from the Tasmanian massacre picture Aboriginal Hunt (1947, private collection), a handful of incidental figures in the Kelly series (Bush Picnic, 1946, National Gallery of Australia; Glenrowan, 1946, National Gallery of Australia) and the implied Aboriginal friends and anthropological subjects of Daisy Bates (1950, National Gallery of Australia), Nolan's Australia is by and large a terra nullius. Here, however, the gesturing Aboriginal in the present work is fully integrated into the picture and the story – after all, it was only with the help of the Cooper's Creek natives that John King, sole survivor of the expedition, managed to stay alive.

Still, it is not co-operation and accommodation that Nolan describes but misunderstanding. Through a series of mirrorings or oppositions – the explorer's left arm akimbo against the Aborigine's leg raised in the resting position; the explorer's missing (hidden) right arm against the Aborigine's fully extended, pointing one⁷; the mounted white man above the horizon against the pedestrian black below; Burke's hopeless disorientation against the Aborigine's confident traditional knowledge of place – Nolan describes the tragic incompatability of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal culture. If the arc on the left of the picture is indeed the sea, and not just a salt lake or mirage, the Australian may well be telling the European to go home.

Notwithstanding their shadows of tragedy, the 1962 Burke and Wills paintings were a great success, and a highlight of the artist's Commonwealth Games exhibition at the Skinner Galleries in Perth. Designed to promote the artist to the state, the nation, the commonwealth and the UK, the show grossed almost £20,000, with purchasers including H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Western Australian Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art and Design of Australia, Melbourne and the newspaper publisher and art collector James Fairfax, who bought the present work.

1.  Sarah Engledow, 'Through blue eyes', Portrait, no. 30, Summer 2008-2009, p. 24
2.  Allan Edwards, The Critic, vol. 3 no. 5, 23 November 1962, quoted in Jane Clark, Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, Sydney: International Cultural Corporation of Australia, 1987, p.134
3.  Alan Moorehead, Cooper's Creek, London: Harper and Row, 1963, quoted ibid., p. 135
4.  This meteorological – geological colour also has a curious imperial resonance in its faint but clear echoes of the colours of the Union Jack. Nolan had attended a Buckingham Palace cocktail party in June 1962; the Skinner Galleries exhibition in which the present work was first shown was part of an arts festival coincident with the Commonwealth Games in Perth, and its opening was attended by H.R.H. Prince Philip; Nolan was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1963 New Year's honours list.
5.  Edwards, op. cit.
6.  see T.G. Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan, London: Thames & Hudson, 2002, pp. 114-115
7.  It may be drawing a long bow, but it is possible to posit a connection between this visual gag of a one-armed man and another with his arm outstretched and pointing, and the same conceit in another classic Australian painting from the same year: Jeffrey Smart's Cahill Expressway (1962, National Gallery of Victoria)