Coming of Age The Art of Australia

A place of golden beaches and bodies, barbecues and bikinis,

endless empty land,

Sydney Harbour, but art and culture?

Australia's been my home for over 30 years.

And I have 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 am taking a trip deep into the art of Australia.

'This is one of the great icons of Australian art.'

Hi, Ben.

'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's evolved.'

She's going up, but 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.'

-Holding that.

-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.

When it comes to honouring its war dead, Australia is unique.

Unlike Europe and America,

the National Day of Remembrance is April 25th -

Anzac Day.

The day in 1915 when the new nation went to war under British command.

This was just over a decade

after Australia's separate colonies had unified.

Artistically, Australia's own brand of impressionism

had helped define the nation's identity.

But proving itself as a country

started with a terrible rite of passage on a faraway battlefield.

Artist George Lambert produced a massive painting of what happened.

It takes pride of place here in the Australian War Memorial.

The landing at Gallipoli.

Lambert was already a renowned portrait painter.

But there's a grim sense of the anonymous in this painting.

Soldiers crawling up these lethal cliffs like ants.

As one critic noted, it has the "uncanny lack of anything

"individual or personal in the scrambling, crawling khaki figures."

It's like these soldiers are being consumed by the landscape.

This, such a defining moment in Australian history,

has been captured by Lambert in a curiously objective way.

Even visitors complained on first seeing the painting

that there was a lack of action and the terror of war.

I think this is a modern, unheroic image of war.

Lambert was a flamboyant, theatrical character.

But now he was under orders to sombrely record

how Australian troops had scaled precipitous cliffs

under relentless Turkish gunfire.

Gallipoli wasted over 8,000 lives for no military advantage.

It marked Australia's national coming of age.

Even for such a dramatic, historical moment as Gallipoli,

Lambert painted a very dispassionate picture.

Especially when compared to work by soldiers in the trenches.

One of them was Napier Waller.

He sketched the war not as an observer, but as a participant.

In May 1917, his right arm, his painting arm, was blown off.

Later, using his left hand,

he drew himself being stretchered from the battlefield.

It's just one example of an amazing visual record

from ordinary soldiers.

This is The Anzac Book.

It's the most wonderful collection of sketches

and stories made by the soldiers in the trenches.

Here, a wonderful drawing, done in 1915.

Luxuries for the Turks. Here's the luxuries, a box full of bombs.

These drawings touched people deeply,

their mischievous humour defined the Australian response to war.

It helped people deal with the loss of so many.

Gallipoli, 1915, and underneath, written in pencil,

"At the landing and here ever since."

It's a drawing that's full of poignancy and humour.

A bestseller when it was first published in 1916,

The Anzac Book's rugged egalitarianism

and wry stoicism illustrates how war shaped the national character.

'Australia still has official war artists.

'And they now have more freedom to explore the realities of war.'

Hi, Ben.

Looks great, looks great.

'Portrait painter Ben Quilty is one of them.

'A star on the contemporary art scene,

'he recently joined Australian forces in Afghanistan.'

The idea of a war artist seems, sort of, a bit archaic, doesn't it?

It's funny, I thought that, too. I thought, "What can I do?

"What am I going to do? How can I fit in?"

I was in a navy-blue uniform, so I'd be shot first, I was sure of that.

And the Lamberts, they took a sort of a view of the heroism of war.

You've done almost the opposite

and gone straight into the agonies of war.

I think we see the heroism through the film footage that news cameramen

take of men under fire.

So, I think the role back then was to tell the story

that a news cameraman tells now.

Contemporary art's more about the human condition

and the great big panorama of life, I guess.

Life and death in a war zone.

You live under constant threat, there is nowhere safe on the base.

The first night I was there, three rockets came in.

This is a tortured soul, I mean, what have you done to these people?

All three of these men have post-traumatic stress disorder.

I asked them to pick the pose,

something that summed up their whole experience.

For Lance Corporal M, he just said,

"I'm just exhausted." And he just lay down.

-So, these three...

-Yes.

-..they all said, "This is how I feel."

-Yes.

Really?

'Quilty's work has the brutal honesty

'first seen in The Anzac Book.

'Yet after World War I,

'there was an altogether contrasting artistic response to the suffering.

'Many craved a return to a world before the mud and death

'of the trenches.'

'The heroes in South Australian artist

'Hans Heysen's work are gum trees.

'He worked on this painting, Droving Into The Light,

'throughout the war years.

'It would have been a comforting vision of home,

'as tens of thousands were dying in France.

'People loved Heysen.

'Reproductions of his work hung in thousands of Australian homes.

'Ironically, while painting this ode to the bush,

'the German-born artist was treated with suspicion

'and racially taunted.'

'Instead of conflict, artists painted rural scenes.

'Elioth Gruner made this picture in 1919.

'He called it Spring Frost.'

This is an immensely popular painting. Why? It's Arcadian.

It's unconfronting. It's reaffirming. It takes no risks.

It's a kind of retreat to certainty.

'Gruner painted it from life.

'It was so cold as he worked,

'he wrapped his legs in sacks to avoid frostbite.'

'These paintings represent a desire to erase the horrors of the time.

'But war and the changes it brought would force art to move on.'

Getting over the war was a time for nation-building.

For a celebration of our society and for the great and the good.

This was embodied in the creation of an event in 1921 that would

become the biggest day in the Australian art calendar -

the Archibald Prize.

It's awarded annually for the best new portrait painting

of a man or woman distinguished in

the arts, letters, science or politics.

When it first began, there were a few dozen entries,

now there are hundreds.

The prize was founded by an eccentric media proprietor,

John Feltham Archibald.

From the 1880s, he published The Bulletin.

It reflected attitudes to race at the time

and was quick to lampoon those who became too big for their boots.

It's ironic then that the prize which bears Archibald's name

was and still is such an unbridled celebration of Australian success.

He loved all things French

and even changed his name from John Feltham to Jules Francois.

The Archibald Prize lives on.

These days, it's more about fame.

But the early winners were, like Australia, conservative.

George Lambert won the prize in 1927 with this

picture of Rupert Murdoch's grandmother, Annie.

What a contrast these portraits of today are

to those of the early 1920s.

All of those worthy citizens, so staid, so solid,

so safe, so reliable.

It was the reassurance.

But thankfully change was on the horizon.

A small band of artists rejected stuffy portraits

and embraced the European modernist movement.

In the 1920s, buoyed by a massive new migration scheme

to bring people from Britain, Australia was growing.

Artists were enthralled by progress brought about by mechanisation

and mass production.

But not all change was welcomed.

Foreign influences were viewed with suspicion.

As was the fact that many of the leading modern artists were women.

Though she came from a highly respectable English family,

her uncle a private chaplain to Queen Victoria,

when it came to modern art, Grace Cossington Smith

was something of a radical innovator.

In 1917, she painted soldiers parading through Sydney's streets.

It's one of Australia's earliest modernist paintings.

By 1925, Cossington Smith was celebrating the growing city,

rising up to a luminous blue sky.

And Margaret Preston made a print of Sydney's bustling Circular Quay,

with vibrant lines and bold colours.

In the late 1920s,

these first modernists were given further inspiration

with the rise of a man-made structure so modern and so massive,

it couldn't be ignored.

Across Sydney Harbour, a giant archway was taking shape.

I've got to admit, I don't have a great head for heights,

so I've been avoiding this for ages.

But it is spectacular.

It is dramatic.

And when I think of building this 80 years ago, with these workers,

the steelworkers sort of flying around up here,

treading carefully across beams and then swinging from beams,

and looking at this incredible structure, it is amazing.

There's 39,000 tonnes of steel in this structure,

and over six million of these rivets.

It is one of the great wonders of the modern world.

Paid for with British loans and built from British steel,

this was nonetheless the great symbol of a modern Australia.

You can imagine the impact that the building of this bridge had

upon the people of Australia.

At that time, there was a depression,

and here they were building this great steel leviathan

reaching across Sydney Harbour, and people looked at this thing

and they said, "If we can build this, we can do anything."

So it's not surprising modernists were drawn to it

like moths to a flame.

For Grace Cossington Smith, the bridge touched the sublime.

In the curve of the bridge,

radiating arcs of light shine like glittering halos.

In The Bridge In Curve, the same exultant energy can be seen.

But in 1930, the conservative Sydney Society of Artists

declined to exhibit this hardly radical work of modern art.

Her painting is more a picture of the imagination.

It's bright, it's colourful, it's optimistic, it's modernist.

I think the real drama of the construction

of this great bridge was better captured not by painters,

but by artists in another modernist medium -

photography.

French-born Henri Mallard climbed all over the bridge

to document its progress and revel in its scale.

His photographs bring alive the drama of construction

and reveal a real eye for composition.

There is a dynamic, masculine energy in them.

Mallard photographed the bridge

from almost exactly the same spot as Cossington Smith's painting,

but he came up with a world of heavy industry

and monumental construction.

This energy wasn't limited to photography.

The thrill of progress meant modern design of all kinds

was increasingly fashionable.

In the 1930s, new styles, including Art Deco,

were embraced by advertising and popular culture.

As memories of the war began to fade,

the hedonism for which Australia is so well known emerged.

Of course, the most famous space for this was the beach.

Bondi. This is an absolute mecca

for beach bunnies, tourists, surfers and swimmers.

But way back in the 1930s,

the modernist photographers came down here for quite another reason.

They saw these bodies as part of the modern world,

as components in a great construction,

a great composition, not unlike the Harbour Bridge.

George Caddy was a hedonist to the core,

a prize-winning professional dancer nicknamed The Bondi Jitterbug.

But he wasn't strictly ballroom.

When he wasn't dancing, he was hanging out on Bondi Beach,

capturing on camera the fad of "Beachobatics".

These amazing pictures were only rediscovered in 2007.

They reveal the figure as a sort of human Meccano.

They were a celebration of Australian vitality,

a show of physical prowess,

with the beach the primary stage for this display.

The beach was the literal embodiment of modern Australia,

and in 1937, Max Dupain symbolised it most famously

in this photograph.

Max Dupain's Sunbaker is one of

the great modernist images of Australian art.

It all looks very natural, but of course, it isn't.

It's a very studied composition. It's almost classical,

with the body shaped like a low pyramid.

In Sunbaker, Australian physicality is a monument worthy of celebration.

Strong but relaxed, beautiful, but safely avoiding the overtly erotic.

Such was the pull of the beach that painting soon followed photography.

Charles Meere's Beach Pattern has a photographic quality.

People are frozen like statues.

It's an impressive but strange, almost surreal, painting.

Grand, statuesque, posed heroic figures.

And these idealised bodies,

all marshalled into the intensity of a composition.

I often think of it as some kind of modernist beach utopia.

Certainly, there is nothing natural about it.

And apparently, Meere, when he was painting this,

never actually went near the beach.

Beach Pattern turned going for a swim

into something almost heroic.

It embodied how Australians saw themselves by the end of the 1930s.

Confident, optimistic, white.

Everyone ready, and...action.

This was a time when the immigration of anyone

not white or British was heavily restricted.

The era of the White Australia policy.

It turned Beach Pattern into a potent symbol

of the ideal Australian.

Over time, as Australia's make-up changed,

Meere's vision became open to parody and subversion.

The work of leading contemporary photographer

Anne Zahalka echoes this change.

She first reinvented Meere's picture in 1989,

to comment on the changing ethnic make-up of Australia,

and as this continues with wave after wave of migration,

she returns to it. In this latest version,

an ever more diverse group embrace the beach.

Holding that...

Excellent.

People were not being represented

within these dominant popular images of Australia,

so I wanted to inject kind of the new breed

and blood into a scene like this.

Hold that.

Good.

That now is a very democratic, egalitarian image.

-It's terrific.

-Yeah.

Well, I think the beach is a great leveller.

I think it does allow us to kind of be equal and to share a space.

Eve, leaning back a bit more.

And Angel, you can come forward a little bit more this way.

It is one of the most popular images

at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I understand,

so people do somehow identify with it.

It's an image that strikes a chord with people.

It's sort of how Australians want to see themselves,

and yet it doesn't represent.

-I always think of that as a very Aryan picture.

-Yeah, totally.

I think Hitler would have loved it.

Well, it's sort of almost, you know, just before the war,

so it's kind of... It is of that time.

-Who's for an ice cream?

-Come on, Edmund. Perform for me.

Perform for the camera.

Nice. Very nice.

Brilliant. Thanks. Thank you.

The Aryan flavour of Beach Pattern

points to the contrast in 1930s Australia.

There was the thrill of progress, fun in the sun,

but also xenophobia, extremism and the Depression.

Australian modernism, so far pretty safe and decorative,

failed to confront these contradictions.

This was about to change.

The turning point came when modern artists began to arrive

from Europe, where the dark clouds of war were gathering again.

These artists, who had seen

the worst of war and its aftermath in Europe,

went out into the streets to paint the darker side of urban life.

And they inspired and encouraged other local artists to do the same.

Leaving Warsaw to escape anti-Semitism,

Yosl Bergner arrived in 1937, aged just 17.

He instantly related to the plight of an urban underclass.

Bergner painted the most challenging picture from this era,

Aborigines In Fitzroy.

This painting was among the very few

to depict indigenous people since the 1860s.

But works of this kind didn't sell.

Even more influential was a charismatic refugee

from Soviet Russia, Danila Vassilieff.

Instead of bronzed bodies, he painted this picture,

Poverty And Prostitution.

Instead of sun and sand, he painted darkness and depression.

This encouraged a new generation of Australian artists

to make social comment, beginning a trend that's alive and well.

Today, Melbourne is well known for its street art,

which is often dismissed as mere vandalism.

But that's nothing compared to the violent row

that erupted in 1939 over what counted as art.

It began when a media baron

challenged the conservative art establishment head on.

Rupert Murdoch's father Keith

staged an exhibition of 217 paintings

by the great European modernists.

The exhibition opened here, at the Melbourne Town Hall.

It was Australia's first blockbuster art exhibition.

The impact was electrifying.

Imagine walking around down here in 1939

and seeing on the walls of this very room

paintings by Van Gogh,

Matisse, Picasso, Dali.

Little wonder that the younger generation of artists

flocked to see these paintings.

On the first day, 2,000 people were turned away,

and a staggering 30,000 saw it in the first week.

Seeing these now famous works of art in the flesh

had a powerful impact on young artists,

and further jolted Australian art from its complacency.

But there was a fiery backlash.

JS MacDonald, the director of the National Gallery of Victoria,

dismissed artists like Picasso as "perverts and degenerates".

The big galleries overlooked the opportunity

to buy many pictures, today worth millions.

Australia could have had one of the great collections of modern art,

but for a young country on the brink of another war,

it was the wrong time and the wrong place

for this so-called radical art.

But the cat was out of the bag.

It increased the public's acceptance of modern art.

This gave artists the inspiration to be bolder, just as war began,

a war that would see the bright optimism

of the earlier modernists eclipsed.

Australia followed Britain into battle once again in 1939,

but this time there was an enemy on the doorstep - Japan.

And, after the fall of Singapore in 1942,

Britain would not be there to protect Australia.

At this time, the Australian War Memorial was building

its central shrine, commemorating the sacrifice of the first war.

The sacred space decorated by none other than Napier Waller,

the soldier-artist who, after losing his arm,

had turned to mosaics and stained glass.

But, if World War I had led to a retreat to safety and conservatism

in art, World War II was about to have the very opposite effect.

A new generation of artists were deeply affected by it.

Not in any patriotic sense -

they were drawn directly into the terror and anxiety of war.

Albert Tucker was a follower of Vassilieff.

In 1941, he painted a bleak vision of urban poverty,

ironically titled Spring In Fitzroy.

A year later, Tucker was stationed at a local military hospital...

..where he drew and painted

the appalling wounds of injured soldiers.

Following his discharge, he returned to Melbourne, deeply affected.

He saw ugly moral decay all around him, and neither his paintings

nor his view of wartime Australia were a pretty sight.

Tucker's paintings, like Victory Girls,

attacked the moral collapse he saw war bring.

Drunken American GIs with pig-like faces, groping women.

Caricatures of prostitution, wrapped in patriotic colours.

Never had Australian art been so angry, so sarcastic,

so openly sexual.

It was hard to ignore, especially for an unconventional couple,

John and Sunday Reed.

Heirs to great wealth, they had the money to nurture

the first new art movement since Australian Impressionism,

throwing open their home, making it a space where creativity was king.

This was Heide.

This beautiful, tranquil,

benign house that was once a dairy farm, this was to become

an absolute hotbed of radical politics and radical art.

The passions and feelings and debates

that were aroused in that house shaped modern Australian art.

They called Heide an open house of table and mind.

In these rooms, artists like Vassilieff,

Albert Tucker and his wife Joy Hester

immersed themselves in the cultural and intellectual trends of Europe.

They were Australia's home-grown Bloomsbury Set.

Sunday's best friend, the vivacious Joy Hester,

was the only other woman in the group.

Her husband, Albert Tucker, photographed both Joy

and the vitality of the Heide group in their prime.

The energy unleashed was always intense and often dark.

Joy Hester expressed it in her evocative series of human faces.

Her style was strongly influenced by Vassilieff's

quick-fire methods of working.

She painted these on Heide's living room floor as the group socialised.

Her work is about emotion -

the face a metaphor for the human condition.

Heide was no place for the faint-hearted.

It was not only a breeding ground for new ideas, but also

a sexually-charged atmosphere where the status quo was challenged.

This was no place for voyeurs. It was a place for participants.

One participant, Sidney Nolan, was just 21 and newly married

when he met Sunday Reed.

He already had a reputation for pushing boundaries.

In 1940, his painting Boy In The Moon had been

blasted by the conservative gallery director JS MacDonald.

He dismissed it as "foreign,

"a painting that fails to shock or amuse."

Nolan was agonising over what direction his creativity would take.

When we became friends, years later, it amazed me

to learn that Sid might never have become an artist.

In fact, I remember Sid telling me once that he nearly became a poet

and not a painter.

And it was here in the kitchen at Heide

that he and Sunday would share their love of poetry.

Sunday and Nolan were drawn together.

He to the charismatic older woman, she to a singular young talent.

They began an affair in open view of the others.

Nolan's marriage collapsed.

He was desperate for Sunday to leave John, but she wouldn't.

Reluctantly, John Reed endured the affair.

However, the war forced Nolan away from Heide and Sunday.

Joining the Home Defence Force, Nolan was stationed

hundreds of miles inland from Melbourne, in the north of Victoria.

Nolan wrote, "Being in the Army, I forgot about Paris

"and Picasso and completely identified with

"what I was looking at."

He was surrounded by flat, dry farming country,

its endless skies pierced only by grain silos

and, in it, Nolan produced pictures like Wimmera,

one of the first modernist paintings of the Australian landscape.

Kiata is another of my favourites.

In it, Nolan's innovative way of imagining the land

evokes the feel of the place perfectly.

But this was just the start.

Nolan's response to the landscape, to his bittersweet love affair,

and the war, would drive his creative journey onward.

The Second World War was more directly experienced than the first.

Darwin was attacked

and thousands were conscripted into bloody jungle conflict.

And Britain was in no position to offer support.

In 1944,

fearing he would be sent to the front line in Papua New Guinea,

Nolan left his post.

First, he laid low in Melbourne.

In early 1945, he reappeared at Heide.

This period proved as much of a turning point for Nolan

as it did for Australia as a whole,

which emerged from war needing to redefine its place in the world.

In a burst of intense creative energy, Nolan painted 27 works

on a single theme that addressed Australian identity head-on.

He reinvented the art of Australia.

He chose the story of Ned Kelly,

the outlaw who fought his last stand with the police

in his home-made helmet and armour.

As early as 1906, it was the subject of the world's

first feature-length film - The Story Of The Kelly Gang.

Nolan was forever curious and inventive, and the outlaw

Ned Kelly was the perfect metaphor for him and his mischievous spirit.

His Kelly has become one of the most powerful symbols

in Australian art and identity.

Nolan took Kelly's helmet and framed it into an unforgettable symbol.

He said he got the idea from modern art in Europe.

But his earlier painting, Boy In The Moon, had also been a prototype.

He placed it into the landscape

because it symbolised Kelly's alienation.

For Nolan, the ubiquitous Australian landscape was not the objective.

For him, it was the human drama.

Nolan's great achievement was to use the Australian landscape

not as the subject but as the stage, the backdrop for the human story.

This was unprecedented.

The paintings take us through the main events of the story.

Among the many scenes,

he depicts Constable Fitzpatrick abusing Ned's sister Kate...

..the Kelly Gang shooting police at Stringybark Creek...

..and the murder trial which ended in Ned being sentenced to hang.

Why did Nolan choose Kelly as his subject?

He wanted to interrogate what being Australian really meant.

Set against the bush, the flat cut-out shape of Kelly

represents being in the place but not entirely part of it.

It speaks of harmony with and alienation from the land.

Nolan perhaps identified with Kelly.

He, too, was a fugitive from the law until an amnesty in 1948.

The creation of the Kelly paintings was also intertwined

with his return to the emotional turmoil of Heide.

The paintings were made here at the dining room table at Heide.

Nolan painted them with Sunday virtually in his arms.

They were that close.

The menage a trois had, by this stage, been going on for six years.

The tensions at Heide became too much to bear

and, after the war, the scene imploded.

Diagnosed with cancer, and in love with another man,

Joy Hester left her husband Albert Tucker.

Their young son was adopted by the Reeds.

But Sid Nolan still wanted them to split up. Sunday refused.

Nolan quit Heide. His sudden departure devastated everyone.

He left Sunday and all his Kelly paintings behind.

When the Reeds exhibited the 27 Kelly paintings in Melbourne

soon after, the response was muted.

Only one sold.

Never a fan, JS MacDonald said,

"Nolan has a second-rate boogie-woogie notion of depiction,

"especially in these Kelly daubs."

Attacked by the critics, painted by a fugitive,

it seemed unlikely that Nolan's Kelly paintings would ever

become the acclaimed works they are today.

The story of how Australia came to embrace Nolan

and modern art began when he and other artists turned their attention

to a place so remote few white people had ever experienced it.

In 1948, Nolan married John Reed's sister Cynthia.

The newlyweds embarked on a life-changing journey.

By now, it was possible to take a train deep inland to

Alice Springs, gateway to the remote Outback.

Thanks to this train, artists could now

leave the cities and the coastal fringe

and travel inland

to the real interior, the Red Desert, the Outback.

And what they saw there would change the soul of Australian art.

They entered a place of haunting beauty,

captivating and unsettling in equal measure.

Nolan began to photograph what he saw.

He wasn't the only one.

Painter Russell Drysdale came here

to record the stark realities of Outback life.

Sent out by the Sydney Morning Herald to cover the severe drought

in New South Wales in 1944, his drawings of dead animals and eroded

landscapes ended up on the breakfast tables of thousands of Australians.

Drysdale's drawings inspired his painted landscapes.

His was a surreal and desolate vision of the Outback,

a land populated by hardy and stoic survivors.

The Drover's Wife stands impassive against the desiccated landscape,

accepting the inhospitable surroundings.

Drysdale said, "Surviving the far regions of the centre

"demanded a different set of values."

Sofala is among his most famous works,

with its melancholic evocation of the heat in the stillness

of an Outback town.

But however remote the places depicted

in these Outback country scenes,

these artists had only scratched the surface.

From Alice Springs, Sid and Cynthia Nolan boarded a mail plane.

It flew over the MacDonnell mountain ranges and, for the first time,

Nolan saw the vastness of the dry interior from high above.

The aerial viewpoint made him think hard about this land,

about its scale and its ancient spirit.

He raised the horizon line,

thus emphasising its vast and unending range.

He said he wanted to know more about the true nature

of the otherness into which he'd been born.

Cynthia Nolan recalled,

"Our foreheads pressed against the glass windows.

"We found our own land and heard its voice alone."

Works like Inland Australia were the result.

The intense colour and eerie shapes evoke this otherness.

Nolan painted it quickly on a tabletop,

using photographs he took from the plane.

But it's not an actual place. It's a fusion of memories -

what Nolan called a composite picture.

And there was something else inspiring all this.

For Nolan and Drysdale, being immersed in the Outback meant

more than painting the landscape or its white settlers.

It meant an encounter with Australia's original people

that was to have profound consequences.

Nolan took hundreds of photographs of the Aboriginal people

who lived and worked on the cattle stations he visited.

At this time, the late '40s, they weren't citizens.

Officially, they were wards of the state, with few, if any, rights.

Aboriginal people couldn't vote, couldn't hold office,

couldn't marry or travel without official permission.

Their children were routinely taken from them

and placed in institutions or with white families.

Permanent separation was rigorously enforced.

Nolan and Cynthia became acutely aware of the yawning gulf

between the white and indigenous worlds.

Nolan's view about white culture's place in Australia changed as he

became more and more impressed with what he saw of indigenous culture.

He wrote to his friend Albert Tucker, saying of Aboriginal

people, "They inform the landscape in an extraordinary way.

"The barrenness and harshness is all in our European eyes and demands."

This was also true for Russell Drysdale.

He painted indigenous people with individuality and dignity.

Shopping Day speaks of alienation

and society's demand for assimilation.

But Drysdale doesn't pity his subjects.

In Group Of Aborigines, they stare back, firmly holding our gaze.

Drysdale and Nolan championed both the Outback and its people.

It inspired a huge outpouring of work, which, at long last,

found favour back in the cities.

In 1949, a predecessor of mine

at the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired this painting,

Pretty Polly Mine -

the first public gallery to purchase a Nolan.

The board of trustees was so shocked, they banned him

from buying any more pictures without their prior approval.

But the tide was turning.

Art reflected how post-war Australia was changing.

The British Australian monoculture began to broaden.

The glaring inequalities

and lack of Aboriginal civil rights began to be questioned.

The work of another artist would embody these changing attitudes.

He united the Outback landscape, its people

and the moral and political issues facing Australia,

inspired by what he'd witness on this remote track.

Painter Arthur Boyd had been associated with the Heide scene.

In 1951, he travelled to a mining town at Arltunga,

over 100km east of Alice Springs.

The scenery here is remote and spectacular.

But what captured Boyd's attention was, in fact,

the plight of the Aboriginal people.

On this road, he saw a truck go by, carrying a wedding party.

The white dresses

in bizarre contrast to the truck that usually carried cattle.

It was an image that was to remain with Boyd

and out of it came his famous Bride paintings.

The Bride series is among the most bewitching of Australian paintings.

Today, they fetch record-breaking prices.

It is because they are both beautiful and incendiary.

These pictures brought the most taboo of subjects

glaringly into the light - interracial love and violence.

But the genius of Boyd is that he did so

in a hauntingly poetic fashion that went way beyond social comment.

There are 31 in the series,

telling moments from a tragic story of the courtship, marriage

and death of a mixed-race Aboriginal man and his white bride.

Boyd lends the theme a surreal air.

Reflected Bride is a memorable image -

the groom entranced by the reflection of his wife,

a spectre in a haunting Outback setting.

The power of these paintings lies in their compassion.

The depths of feelings - of love, of lust and anguish -

are almost palpable.

Boyd instils the human experience with an almost mythic dimension.

Boyd, Nolan and Drysdale's art

changed Australia's relationship to itself.

They not only changed perceptions at home, but overseas.

Boyd's Bride paintings made his international reputation,

and in the late '50s he moved to London where Sid Nolan

and Russell Drysdale already had studios,

their work well received by critics and audiences.

Modern art in Australia was finally recognised,

but decades after Europe.

The agony of the war, the comfort of tradition,

and the suspicion modernism aroused restrained its initial promise.

More radical urges, greater darkness and maturity,

finally enabled Australian modernism to find an independent voice.

By 1960, in response to the great otherness of the Outback

modern art in Australia had come of age.

It's ironic that having discovered the heart of this continent, three

of the brightest stars of Australian art were so keen to leave.

They had a real regard for the indigenous world

and its culture that they had encountered.

But there remained a vast gulf between those two worlds.

Artists had helped to open Australian minds.

By uncovering what lay at its heart

they had expanded Australian identity.

Modern art was a white thing, but that couldn't last.

Sid Nolan was among the first to grasp

that there was no turning back.

In 1949, after seeing some Aboriginal rock art

on his trip to the Outback, he made a bold prediction.

He said,

"I feel sure that in the future the works of many other

"Australian artists will be hailed in Europe.

"But I'm of the opinion that the Australian Aborigine is

"probably the best artist in Australia."

In the heart of the continent lay an artistic tradition

that while incredibly ancient,

to Western eyes looked utterly abstract,

and therefore stunningly modern.

Soon the art of Australia would be

transformed by the revolutionary impact of the abstract

from both the Red Centre and from overseas.

The next chapter would allow the art of Australia

and the country itself not only to shed the baggage of the past,

but also to reach to the world.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd