Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought
Outback

From 22 June to 13 September 1949, Sidney Nolan journeyed to the remote areas of South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia with his wife, Cynthia and eight-year-old daughter, Jinx. Travelling by air, road and water, Nolan carefully observed his surroundings, making notes and taking photographs that recorded his excitement.

Inland Australia seen from an aerial perspective provided Nolan with an entirely new spatial challenge. He simultaneously thought of Paul Klee and Aboriginal artists in relation to the abstracted landforms that appeared as random patterns upon the earth’s surface. Like a cubist painting or collage, Nolan’s subsequent series – completed in Sydney – suggest their own reality, with constantly shifting patterns in which images of mountain ranges appear and disappear. The ebb and flow of the landscape was not lost on Nolan and in many images landmasses rise like waves, presenting multiple, simultaneous views which play on notions of reality and illusion.

In these paintings Nolan acknowledged and reconciled his personal responses to the Indigenous and European elements of the Australian landscape, and thereby helped encourage and promote a greater understanding of Australia to audiences, both in Australia and abroad.

Sidney NOLAN
(1917–92)
Inland Australia 1950
oil and enamel paint on composition board
121.5 x 152.0 cm
Tate, London
Purchased, 1951
© Tate, London 2003