On the wallaby track

05/11/12 • 4 min

With an evident empathy for rural labouring life, and a nationalist message, this much-admired painting by a principal member of the Heidelberg group was painted close to the artist's Melbourne home, using his family as models. Key influences for Frederick McCubbin at this time included the academic naturalism of Bastien-Lepage and the new focus on everyday subjects by leading French Barbizon school artists Corot and Millet. The title of the painting - 'On the wallaby track' - was a term used for itinerant workers roaming the bush on the fringes of properties looking for work.

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Fire's on

Arthur Streeton's visions of the landscape have defined an image of Australia. 'Fire's on' in particular is considered his greatest evocation of the country's heat and sunlight. Painted a year after the artist left Melbourne for Sydney, it constitutes a radical new type of landscape in his oeuvre. Its vertical composition and the high horizon line bring focus to the steep terrain with precarious rocks and dead tree-trunks. The painting captures a critical moment during the construction of a railway line across the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney: the death of a railway worker in an explosion. 'Fire's on' was the warning call before the blast, as the gang dynamited the Lapstone Tunnel through the hillside. The human drama of the painting, however, is overshadowed by the heroism of the landscape itself.

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The hills behind Hermannsburg

Otto Pareroultja and his brothers Reuben and Edwin worked and painted at the Lutheran Hermannsburg Mission west of Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Initially influenced by their countryman, Albert Namatjira, and by Rex Battarbee, the Melbourne watercolourist who worked closely with the Hermannsburg artists, the Pareroultja brothers developed their own distinctive styles. In their paintings, the desert landscape is less representational than in Namatjira's work, and is animated by their use of vigorous, sinuous lines, dynamic areas of repeated patterning and strong colours massed together. These elements are clearly evident in Pareroultja’s c1954 painting 'The hills behind Hermannsburg', which explores the common Hermannsburg school motif of a white ghost gum in front of a distant mountain range. The painting has a graphic quality, rendered in Pareroultja’s customary high-keyed colour contrasted with distinctive black line-work. His use of brilliant yellow highlights and unpainted areas of white paper add luminosity to the landscape, emphasising the clarity of central Australian light. This vibrant approach to painting has had a strong influence on Ivy Pareroultja, Edwin’s daughter, who is currently leading a revival of the Hermannsburg painting style.