Strangers in a Strange Land The Art of Australia

A place of golden beaches and bodies...

barbecues and bikinis...

endless empty land...

Sydney Harbour.

But art and culture?

Australia has been my home for over 30 years,

and I've often thought about the first settlers

who landed here on this fatal shore

over two centuries ago.

To these strangers,

this place seemed utterly devoid of civilisation.

Of course, they were wrong.

But how could these often reluctant arrivals make a new life,

let alone come to feel at home

in an empty, disturbing and distant wilderness?

I want to explore how art

and artists played their roles in this unfolding drama.

From early settlement till today,

I'm taking a trip deep into the art of Australia.

This is one of the great icons of Australian art.

I'll be looking at the work of significant artists,

both past and present.

What is it with this lurid, lurid yellow?

Their work reveals much

about Australia's identity and how it evolved.

She's going up and she's going down.

For me, Australian art has always been a big part of the quest

to make sense of this vast continent

and our place in it.

Its haunting landscapes,

its ever present dangers...

Its dramatic and controversial history.

And, of course, its great beauty.

Australian art reflects the development

of a unique and incredibly diverse culture.

Who's for an ice cream?

It's a great story.

This is my journey into how it all happened,

the story of the art of Australia.

I'd left London in the late '70s

and spent over 30 years here,

as the director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales,

in Sydney.

When I arrived, I had to embrace the dilemma all migrants face.

How to find your way, how to fit in.

And one piece of modern art

that expresses this dilemma says it all for me.

It's called Longing Belonging.

In 1997, Hossein Valamanesh,

an immigrant artist born in Tehran,

left his home in Adelaide

and journeyed deep into the Australian bush.

He brought with him a Persian carpet.

He'd been in Australia for 24 years,

but the carpet was still a powerful and comforting connection

to his previous life in Iran.

Once Valamanesh had laid it out on the ground,

he did something extraordinary.

He set it alight and then photographed it.

What was he up to?

Did he mean to burn it? Purify it?

Or simply get rid of it?

Was it about remembering or destroying his past?

Or both?

I've always loved this work.

It is so surprising, it's so unexpected and so incongruous.

But above all, it's about the dilemma of the migrant,

about making a new life in a new country,

but without abandoning your past.

Like Valamanesh,

the early Europeans were strangers in a strange land, too,

and art would help them develop a new, distinctive identity.

In essence, to become Australian.

And for me,

becoming Australian meant getting to know Australian art.

When I first started here all those years ago,

I have to admit that what I knew

about the art of Australia

could be written on the back of a very small postage stamp.

I used to come down here every day and look at all the paintings

and really get my eye in.

I shall never forget the first time I saw this little gem

of a painting of Sydney Harbour.

It has such wonderful freshness, such clarity, such brio,

such air, such colour,

which gives it a wonderful sense of optimism.

I looked at it and I said,

"Well, that's a sort of Impressionist picture."

For me, I suppose, impressionism meant French.

But, of course, it isn't.

This is the most wonderful example of Australian impressionism.

Arthur Streeton's Sirius Cove, from 1896,

was just one of the many surprises that awaited me

as I immersed myself in the question of how art reflected

Australia's extraordinary transformation

from convict colony to cultured nation.

I'm in good company here. This is a land of migrants.

One in four Australians are born overseas.

But when the British set up a penal colony here in 1788,

they were oblivious to any indigenous culture

and simply brought their own.

Among the 165,000 murderers,

social misfits and thieves

that the British transported, some were artists.

The most prolific was Joseph Lycett.

He was a London engraver sent to Australia for forgery in 1814,

artist and con artist in equal measure.

Lycett was transported here to serve 14 years in Sydney's penal colony.

But he just couldn't break the habit of a lifetime

and soon he was at it again,

flooding Sydney with forged five-shilling promissory notes.

So he was sentenced again,

to three years hard labour in another penal colony

about 150km north, in Newcastle.

Newcastle had a reputation as a hellhole.

Its coal mines were a brutal punishment

for the most dangerous criminals and re-offenders.

But Lycett discovered that the commandant had other plans for him.

Hard labour meant exploiting Lycett's talents.

He designed a church for the jail

and was rewarded with a conditional pardon.

With his new-found freedom, he accepted commissions,

painting pictures that showed not only a well-run prison,

but a place ripe for settlement.

Lycett was a competent illustrator.

But for me, his pictures are not really emotive.

They're descriptive, almost decorative.

They feature the indigenous people going about their daily lives,

but for him, they're just part of the strange flora and fauna,

noble savages in a novel land.

His work as an artist eventually won Lycett a full pardon.

He returned to London,

one of a handful of prisoners ever to do so.

There, he published what amounted to a promotional brochure

for the colony, an enticing book,

Views In Australia.

Though at this time few Brits, if any,

had actually seen anything like this

and even fewer had actually been here.

So when these pictures were first seen in Britain,

it was something of a revelation.

It was a little bit like receiving postcards from another planet.

The introduction boldly asserts,

"The dens of savage animals

"and the hiding places of yet more savage men

"have become transformed into peaceful villages

"or cheerful towns."

Sadly, Views In Australia was not the success

that Lycett had hoped.

Shortly after the publication of this volume,

he went back to forging banknotes

and was caught yet again.

In this very volume, in the Mitchell Library in Sydney,

is a note that tells his fate.

Barely legible, it says...

"He was seized by police in his own house,

"cut his throat,

"was conveyed to the hospital under a surgeon,

"then, recovering,

"tore open his healing wounds and died."

Lycett chose death

instead of returning to Australia's darker realities.

Despite his own propaganda,

this strange land still had no cultural identity.

It was still just a convict colony.

Lycett's art lives on in Joan Ross's work.

Let me hold it for you, yes.

She uses it as the starting point for her video art.

Many contemporary artists like Ross

are preoccupied with the art of the past

and the impact of colonisation.

In this work, Lycett's landscape is invaded by Europeans

and high-vis safety wear.

It's called BBQ This Sunday, BYO.

When the colonials arrive on their magic carpet,

they're actually coming with all the necessities for barbecue,

but from my point of view it's the aboriginals that are...

-They're hosting it?

-They are hosting it.

I wanted to reconfigure colonisation to some degree

and give the aboriginals more authority in the work.

Even though I thought Lycett used...

depicted aboriginal people in quite a sensitive way

most of the time,

I still wanted the work to be a little bit of a turnaround.

What is it with this colour,

this lurid, lurid yellow?

I'm using the high-vis fluoro as a metaphor for colonisation.

Why is yellow that colour?

Well, this colour has started to invade our lives

through safety jackets

and an obsession with safety.

The thing about that colour is that when you wear it,

you can have control over land.

Ultimately you still got a bit of sympathy for Mr Lycett, don't you?

I have a soft spot for Lycett.

He was a forger, he couldn't help himself to forge again.

There's a certain empathy

with people who want to turn against authority, I think.

Actually, I think you've just nailed it.

I think that's what it is.

BIRDS TWEET AND FOLIAGE RUSTLES

Another of Ross's cheeky works is 'The Claiming of Things'.

In this video,

it's the colonial artist John Glover

whose painting gets colonised.

Glover was one of a new generation of free settlers

who came to Australia.

Unlike Lycett, he wanted to stay,

and his landscapes are painted

with great affection and sensitivity.

By the 1830s,

the colonists were still grappling with this strange land

but were settling in ever greater numbers.

Short on skilled labour,

the colony was offering free passage to migrants.

These new settlers soon outnumbered the convicts,

setting Australia firmly on a course

to becoming a free society.

They pushed to new frontiers

beyond the mainland into the wilds

of Van Diemen's Land, present-day Tasmania.

When you're in Tasmania,

you do feel sort of remote.

Somehow, you're always conscious of the fact that it's an island.

The first thing they tell you

is there is nothing between this and Antarctica.

John Glover arrived in Australia

17 years after Lycett.

He docked here, in Hobart,

in 1831, on his 64th birthday

with a reputation back in England

as a classical landscape painter.

Keen to follow his immigrant sons,

he had given up his old life,

resolving to make a new home on the other side of the world.

While Lycett came to Australia

at His Majesty's pleasure,

Glover came of his own free will,

was granted this land and made this his home.

He called it Patterdale after the small town

close to where he had lived in England's Lake District.

He painted it with all the love

and attention you'd expect of an artist making a new Arcadia.

He arrived hoping to find a beautiful new world

and declared,

"There is a graceful play in the landscape in this country

"which is more difficult to do justice to

"than the landscapes of England."

His paintings reflect a new comfort with the place.

The process of colonisation had moved on.

Glover's Tasmania is fertile and productive,

with contented cows and cosy homesteads.

Glover's paintings have real feeling.

You can sense his engagement with the landscape.

In My Harvest Home,

he celebrates the first wheat harvest on his property.

Glover's convict labourers

happily toil as the sun sets.

There is no hint that the workers are convicts,

assigned to Glover's farm

by one of the most cruel and oppressive penal colonies

on the planet.

It's a terribly optimistic picture,

a statement of British triumph over an alien environment.

John Glover was a professional artist, so less pictorial,

more interpretive.

When he saw these eucalypts on his land,

he painted his trees

with wonderful twists and curls.

To me, they look rather like elegant tentacles.

This was the artist imposing his imagination on the landscape.

Yet this was a British vision,

one still tied to the classical ideals, traditions

and depictions of Europe.

Like Lycett, Glover painted the original inhabitants

in many of his landscapes.

But while Lycett included the indigenous people

he'd actually seen in Tasmania,

Glover's depictions were a fantasy.

There were no Aboriginal people on his land.

White settlers had been attacked,

and in reprisal, there were brutal massacres.

He arrived in Tasmania

at the back end of the Black War.

Literally thousands of Tasmanian Aboriginal people

had been killed or hunted down.

Now the rest were being shipped off the island.

Glover's land was empty of indigenous people.

It had been forcibly cleared.

The architect of the clearance policy was a government official,

George Augustus Robinson.

Ironically, he bore the title Protector of Aborigines.

To end the bloodshed,

he brokered peace between settlers and indigenous people.

Glover was a close friend of Robinson's

and a supporter of his policies.

In this work, commissioned by Robinson,

Glover said he wanted to paint...

"The natives at a corroboree,

"under the wild woods of the country,

"to give an idea of the manner

"in which they enjoyed themselves

"before being disturbed by white people."

Whilst Glover was painting fanciful pictures of a lost world,

the terrible reality of Robinson's clearance policy

was still becoming clear.

In the 1830s, his peace plan meant moving hundreds of indigenous people

to Wybalenna on Flinders Island,

20 kilometres off the coast of Tasmania.

They arrived on the promise

that they'd soon be returned to their homelands.

Ricky Maynard is a documentary photographer

and a direct descendant of the Aboriginal people of the region.

-Hiya, Ricky.

-Hi, how are you, mate?

-Good to see you.

-Great to see you again, mate.

He lived on Flinders Island

and photographed its landscape as an act of remembrance,

to restore the forgotten history of what happened here.

This place here, Wybalenna, it was established by a forced removal

from our traditional lands in the northeast of Tasmania.

Wybalenna was titled the Friendly Mission

which, in fact, became a death camp.

That's why I made this picture, Death In Exile,

which happened to our people.

In this church, Robinson, the pious Methodist,

tried to convert the people to Christianity

and educate them in the ways of civilised Europeans.

But the island was soon rife with disease.

Within four years, half the population had perished.

Hundreds were buried here, in unmarked graves.

People died not only of disease

and the brutality of the soldiers themselves,

but they also died of broken hearts.

In this evocative image, Broken Heart,

Ricky imagines himself as one of Robinson's victims,

looking due south to his homeland.

His work exposes

not only the terrible realities of what happened here,

but also celebrates

the extraordinary survival of his people.

After the demise of Wybalenna,

one of the few survivors was Truganini.

She became a macabre poster girl

for the extinction of the entire population.

The so-called last Tasmanian Aboriginal.

And, see, this is where the great Western myth begins,

the myth of Truganini as the last Tasmanian,

which, of course, is just absolute nonsense.

Around all these islands in the strait, we had many communities.

But history doesn't want to deal with all that.

It wants to deal and create the myth of the Aborigine dying off,

as a dying race.

The reason why I do my work

is not only to tell the journey of deaths in exile of our people,

and so we are telling the truth of our history.

Today, Ricky's art

puts Aboriginal Tasmanians back in the historical picture.

In the mid-19th century, however,

Aboriginal people were fading fast from Australian art,

just as the white population was about to soar.

In 1851, Victoria split from New South Wales

and eventually, there would be six self-governing colonies.

Victoria would become the richest.

When prospectors discovered gold near Melbourne,

the population swelled rapidly to four times its size.

At its peak, two tonnes of gold

flowed into Melbourne's Treasury building each week.

Shipped back to the motherland,

it enabled Britain to pay off all her foreign debts.

One of Victoria's fortune-hunters

was the Austrian artist Eugene von Guerard.

He didn't strike it rich, but spent his time painting.

Like this view of the newly founded gold town of Ballarat.

He was part of a new breed of artists,

arriving from all over Europe, who were influenced by Romanticism,

an art movement that embraced emotion

and the sublime power of nature.

Part painters, part explorers, they pushed deep into the countryside

to record the vast, untouched wilderness in rich detail.

In 1855, von Guerard headed over 250 kilometres west of Melbourne

to paint this dramatic landscape,

an extinct volcano, its crater filled with water.

These volcanic lakes, he said,

reminded him of the landscape in Germany around where he studied art.

He was a Romantic.

He believed it was the job of the artist

to reveal the beauties of nature.

Von Guerard had an unerring eye for the details of the natural world.

He was both meticulous and symphonic in his art.

Like Glover, von Guerard included indigenous people in his work.

But, again, they're idealised.

They appear as tiny, made-up, foreground figures,

dwarfed by the vast, panoramic landscape.

At least here, though, Aboriginal people were actually present.

In fact, one young man sat next to von Guerard.

His name was Johnny Kangatong.

I think von Guerard believed that the Aboriginal population

was rapidly disappearing

and he wanted to capture this image before it was too late.

And so he produced this tender, intimate, thoughtful portrait.

What's so surprising is that then, Johnny turned round

and did a drawing of Von Guerard, sketching.

And it's a totally different drawing.

It's almost a modern drawing.

He's given colour to the coat and the boots

and the trousers and the hat.

And it's fascinating to see the two side by side.

Two completely different ways of seeing things.

After this picture,

indigenous people featured less and less in Australian painting.

By now, they were largely settled on reserves or missions,

and from now on would be seen mainly in photographs

as objects of scientific study.

In the huge panoramas of Von Guerard and other Romantics,

people are incidental.

Their views, like Glover's,

were framed by the world they'd left behind.

They made the distinctive Australian landscape look distinctly European.

Nicholas Chevalier was a Russian emigre

who painted the Buffalo Ranges in Victoria

as if they were the European Alps.

This up here is completely weird.

There's a whole lot of kind of iridescent green.

God knows where that came from.

Another Romantic was William Piguenit.

Australian-born, he was taught to paint by a Scotsman,

and when he painted the upper Nepean Valley in New South Wales,

it looked like the Scottish Highlands.

It was as though these artists

were looking at Australia through a distorted lens,

by bringing their own familiarities to this unfamiliar place.

But nonetheless, they loved that landscape,

they embraced that landscape,

its scale, its physicality,

its sheer presence, its wilderness.

The Romantics revelled in the majesty of the landscape.

But they were blind to its realities.

Yet one artist, who experienced the brutal fury of nature, wasn't.

He created a ground-breaking painting, Black Thursday,

the first to really capture the human drama of life in Australia.

The English artist William Strutt was a sensitive soul,

educated in Paris.

In February 1851, he experienced temperatures in Victoria

soar to near 50 degrees and ignite the mother of all firestorms.

By the end of Black Thursday,

about a quarter of the state had been burnt out.

At least 12 people had lost their lives

and around one million sheep had perished.

Even a ship 20 miles offshore had been covered in burning embers.

These terrible events stayed with Strutt.

He kept newspaper accounts of the day

and captured the horror of the fire in an epic historical painting.

This is a terrific picture. I love it.

Right in the tradition of epic European history painting,

full of detail and drama.

Let me just show you some of the amazing detail in the picture.

Look down here.

This bundle of dead birds and the old boot and the open book here.

And then along here is a figure that really intrigues me.

To me, he looks as though it's taken directly from Goya's Third of May.

The figure just doing this.

Along this end, I've always loved these horses.

This one leaping and bounding over the cattle here.

And this one - that's a wonderful face.

That staring, glaring, fearful eye in the horse.

Strutt depicted other human dramas,

expressing the hazards and the hardship of colonial life.

He painted a brazen highway robbery that took place in 1851,

showing not only that anger and despair of the victims,

but also, long before Ned Kelly,

the figure of the bush ranger as popular hero.

He also painted the burial

of ill-fated explorer Robert O'Hara Burke,

shrouded in the Union Jack,

immortalised in a grand history painting.

The irony is that these pictures were painted not in Australia,

but back in England, and many years after the events.

Black Thursday was painted 13 years after the fire,

and the burial of Burke, 50 years after the burial.

They are great historical records,

but they could hardly have spoken to Australians at the time.

Wildfires, the bush ranger, Burke and Wills.

These are all key elements of the Australian story,

parts of the country's creation myth.

But these carefully composed paintings

often struggle to find a home either in Britain or in Australia.

Strutt had missed the boat artistically,

unlike the next generation of artists, who took Impressionism,

the defining art movement of their time,

and made it distinctively Australian.

In the 1880s, the founding fathers of this revolutionary art movement

were students at the School of Art

of the newly built National Gallery of Victoria.

Arthur Streeton, whose nickname was Smike,

and Tom Roberts, known as Bulldog.

Both attended classes here.

Roberts led a student mutiny in the form of a letter to the newspaper,

publicly rejecting the methods of their teacher,

the Romantic painter, Eugene von Guerard.

They thought that laboriously copying classical statues

and the works of Old Masters was hopelessly outdated.

Von Guerard soon resigned.

Roberts, who had been to Europe

and was inspired by French Impressionism,

led the charge out of the studio and into the bush.

The spiritual home and nerve centre of Australian Impressionism

was here, in Heidelberg on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Smike Streeton was given the run of a large, abandoned farmhouse

and invited Bulldog Roberts

and other young artistic men and women to share their summers here.

They were young and ambitious. Their art, new and refreshing.

They became known as the Heidelberg School.

It was in a farmhouse on this very site that, in 1888,

the Heidelberg School was born.

And thanks to Roberts and Streeton,

these views have become immortalised in their art

and firmly fixed in the Australian psyche.

Finally, Australia had artists who found the harsh light,

the strange trees and the parched land beautiful

because they were painting a place they considered home.

This is Streeton, writing in a note.

"I sit on a hill of gold.

"The wind seems sunburnt and fiery as it runs through my beard.

"And I smile as all the light, glory

"and quivering brightness passes slowly and freely before my eyes."

Now, this picture, Golden Summer by Arthur Streeton.

This is the quintessential Australian Impressionist painting.

The long shadows and the warm glows

evoke the feeling of lazy summer afternoons.

Colonial painting

was the descriptive art of the European arrivals,

but Streeton, he was born and bred here.

He saw a beauty in this landscape that his predecessors had not.

This is a welcoming place, a painting with atmosphere.

By now, the country was keen to shed the memories of its convict past.

And what better way to do that

than with pictures of simple, honest folk

toiling in golden pastures under blue skies?

Soon, these artists began to spread their revolution further afield,

depicting Melbourne's beaches, city streets and Sydney's harbour.

Streeton and his good friend Tom Roberts

came up to Sydney from Melbourne.

They wanted to paint Sydney Harbour and they came to this very spot.

They wanted to soak up the atmosphere,

to feel the light, the colour, the breath of wind.

But they actually made quite a home of it.

They pitched their tents around here, they had a dining tent

and, apparently, they even had a piano.

They didn't want to be in the studio.

They wanted to paint out here in the open air.

And I think there's something wonderful

about a painting that's done in the open air.

These paintings have a truth to them

that could never be captured in a studio.

Inspired by the French Impressionists,

they worked quickly with bold brush strokes to capture fleeting moments.

Mosman's Bay by Tom Roberts has a wonderful, luminous quality.

The water is still, silent and deep.

Moving clouds are caught in transient reflection.

Yet these Bohemians of the bush weren't quite as they seemed.

They were never really sons of the soil. Far from it.

Their real home was the urbane world of marvellous Melbourne.

The city was transformed by the 1850s gold rush

into one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world.

By the late 1880s, it had grown in stature,

boasting grand cultural institutions and a burgeoning social scene.

It was a world in which Tom Roberts was right at home.

He was a dandy, who dressed in the latest fashions

and befriended the smartest circles in town.

When he wasn't roughing it in Heidelberg,

he worked in a studio in Grosvenor Chambers

on fashionable Collins Street.

Here, he painted portraits of society's great and good.

Roberts was far more interested than Streeton in making money,

and he suggested they put on an exhibition of their work,

what's become one of the most celebrated exhibitions

in Australian history.

Roberts had the thought

of producing small paintings on the lids of cigar boxes,

which they could then sell to his friends

for a couple of guineas each.

He actually got the idea from one of his artist pals,

Louis Abrahams, who worked in his father's cigar shop.

They'd cut the lids off the cigar boxes and paint on the inside.

They were a standard size, nine inches by five inches,

so it became known as the 9 by 5 Exhibition.

In 1889, these rough and ready pictures were exhibited

on the first floor of Buxton's Rooms in the heart of Melbourne.

It was the first time in Australian art that a group of artists

had banded together to present such a bold, unified vision.

It caused a sensation and divided the critics.

A report in the Evening Standard encouraged readers to attend.

It said,

"These daring young Impressionists are making an effort

"to engage amateur art lovers by presenting,

"for the first time in Australia, a series of their impressions.

"Persons interested in art should not fail to visit it."

And they did.

The exhibition was well attended by the public,

but Melbourne's leading art critic,

James Smith of the Argus, loathed it.

To him, these weren't paintings, but unfinished, slapdash sketches.

Here are some that have survived

out of the 183 that were in the exhibition.

They are little sort of intimate, spontaneous cameos of the landscape,

of the cityscape...

and of people too.

And typically, Roberts made the best of a bad thing,

so he pasted that appalling review up at the exhibition.

People came in their droves, bought the paintings

and it was a great commercial success.

And then he wrote a response to the Argus,

which then became a kind of Impressionist manifesto.

He said, "It is better to give our own idea

"than a repetition of what others have done before us,

"which could never help towards the development of what we believe

"will be a great school of painting in Australia."

Suddenly, Roberts' commercial venture

took on the status of a rebellion

an attack on the stuffy conservatism of the old guard.

These pocket-sized paintings are now prized Australian works of art.

They were crucial in redefining painting for generations to come,

and publicly launched the first school of truly Australian painting.

The Heidelberg paintings were very timely.

They were full of good, decent people. Hard workers.

Industrious settlers. Rugged individuals, making a new home.

The art was an inspiration.

It spoke to the settlers and pioneers

that they could make something of this place

and transform it into a nation.

For the first time, artists weren't merely passive observers,

craving the colours and landscapes of home.

They were agents of change.

1891 marked the end of a 40-year economic boom

that saw Australia rise from colonial outpost to modern society.

It was now colonised by factories, businesses, roads and railways.

Arthur Streeton travelled to the Blue Mountains west of Sydney

to paint one of the great engineering feats of the age.

The cutting of the Lapstone Tunnel.

This picture, Fire's On, with its vertical structure

and high horizon, was a radical departure for Streeton.

It's a powerful image that shows intrepid men taming the landscape.

I feel hot. I want to mop my brow as I look at this painting.

But then I go in and look more closely...

and I see something very different.

A real moment of human drama.

In a letter to Roberts, he reports, "All is serene as I work,

"but now I hear, 'Fire, fire's on,' from the gang close by.

"Boom, and then rumbling of rock.

"The navvy with me and watching said, 'Man killed.'

"Then men, nippers and a woman hurry down."

"And they raise the rock and lift him onto the stretcher,

"fold his arms over his chest...

"..and slowly, six of them, carry him past me."

It's about the forging of a new nation, it's about building,

it's about construction, it's about the blood, sweat and tears

that went into the building of that nation.

And, somehow, Streeton's caught that moment

and enshrined it in a great Impressionist painting.

Art was creating new heroes and sending a message.

"This land is ours. Rightly or wrongly, we have tamed it."

While Streeton was captivated by the cutting of a railway tunnel,

Roberts found another symbol

that summed up the achievements of the nation.

Sheep shearing.

By the late 1800s, sheep were the new gold.

Australia was the largest producer and exporter of wool in the world

and the fleece from its Merino sheep earned millions of pounds.

Roberts travelled to a sheep station

to pay homage to this great Australian success story

and described in his own words the hum of hard, fast working,

the rhythmic click of the shears,

the spirit of strong, masculine labour.

In 1888, Roberts sought a subject that would sum up the 100 years

since European settlement, and he said to himself, "Wool."

After all, the wool industry was supporting the nation.

Roberts was fascinated by the shearing of the rams.

They were the last in line,

so the end of the shearing season was in sight.

This is one of the great icons of Australian art.

Tom Roberts' Shearing the Rams,

painted over a two-year period, from 1888 to 1890.

It's a really studied composition.

He did over 70 preparatory drawings for this painting.

It's at the height of the Impressionist period

and it has Impressionist moments.

And it was always thought

that it must have been painted in the studio

but, interestingly, recent research indicates

that he actually painted it pretty much in situ.

And I think it's that which gives it its quality of authenticity.

There's a sense of spontaneity in this kneeling figure here.

You know, he was there, he caught that.

The man drinking up here with a cup the size of a bucket.

But above all, I love this little face here. A nine-year-old girl.

She's looking at Mr Roberts painting.

I'm reminded of any Raphael painting.

In every Raphael painting...

there's a figure looking directly at us, the viewer.

And I think... I think Roberts picked that out from Raphael,

that little trick.

But it's a wonderful moment of engagement.

It celebrates the wealth and optimism

the wool industry was giving Australia.

The irony is that by the 1890s, things had moved on.

The click of the shears was fast being replaced

by the clatter of machines.

Within a year of this picture being painted,

the shearers went on strike.

But for Roberts, that wasn't the point.

The heroic rural worker had played a lead role

in Australia's coming of age.

Ultimately, this is a declaration of independence

on the behalf of a new country ready to stand on its own two feet.

Nationalistic fervour reached new heights in 1901

when the six self-governing colonies came together here

in the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne

and formed the Commonwealth of Australia.

And who better to immortalise the opening of the first Parliament

in this huge painting than Tom Roberts?

It took two and a half years to complete the picture

and he had to make 250 portraits of the great and the good

and then place them all correctly.

All this took a huge toll on Roberts' health.

His eyesight suffered and his will was drained.

He once called it his 17-foot Frankenstein.

It's a long way from the fresh air of Impressionism.

As Roberts struggled with his stuffy record of the birth of a new nation,

Australia came of age and art had helped it to do so.

The work of the Impressionists resonated powerfully

because they were the first artists to accept this strange land,

to see Australia simply as home.

They were strangers no longer.

Truly getting to know this vast continent

remained central to Australian art.

What it's like to experience the place

in many ways is the great muse for Australian artists.

I'm obsessed with it. The scale, the colour, the atmosphere.

It's just an incredible environment to work in.

Internationally acclaimed video artist Shaun Gladwell

is just as preoccupied

with interpreting Australia's unique environment

as the Impressionists were.

Inspired by the desert and the famous film Mad Max,

Gladwell's mesmerising video, Interceptor Surf Sequence,

sees him take centre stage as a daredevil stuntman.

To me, it's like a landscape painting in perpetual motion.

It's always been a great interest of mine,

a composition of landscape painting, and that sense of space

that was always, you know, played out within the frame.

I actually think about painting all the time when I'm making video art,

but I actually want to be in that landscape.

Somehow, the landscape here, maybe because it's so empty,

is very physical, it's got a very strong physical presence to me.

-Is that...is that something that you feel?

-Yes, absolutely.

I feel like, as an artist, I understand it with my body.

But it's also a very humbling space physically,

because I always relate the scale of my body

to the scale of this environment.

I just cannot stop thinking about this space,

I cannot stop engaging it, because it's such an ancient landscape,

but it's also layered with, you know, cinema, art, history,

but also the myth that's been generated from this space,

it's just so incredible.

I feel like we all have something to owe this space

in terms of how we've constructed our national identity.

Keep pedalling.

You've got a long way to go.

Shaun's work is driven by the ongoing need

to forge a relationship with the Australian landscape.

By Federation, Australia had grown from a penal colony

into a fully fledged nation

with its own character, myths and icons, its own national identity.

Lycett's propaganda, Glover's idealism

and Von Guerard's romanticism

had been replaced by home-grown Impressionists

like Streeton and Roberts,

who painted Australia as it really was.

But the vision of Australia they created was moving on.

It was fast becoming an industrial power,

a nation of miners, factory workers and city dwellers.

At the turn of the 20th century,

nearly one third of the population lived in cities,

and that number was set to rise.

The Impressionist paintings of Arcadian landscapes

were now of another era.

Of course, they still had great emotional appeal.

They still do. But after Federation, the focus was firmly on the future.

Australia was marching into the 20th century.

It would take another 50 years and the upheaval of two world wars

before Australian art would come of age.

And when that moment comes, the results are violent,

dramatic and utterly bewitching.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd