Hill End with cultivated and intelligent detachment achieves its real and significant beauty to an artist, its sense of history, its charm, of form and dignity, its life of contrast that its roots in the past give it in this day and age.
(Letter from Drysdale to Donald Friend, April 1948, quoted in Wilson 1995, p. 69)

The disused mining town of Hill End provided Drysdale with subject matter for many of his major paintings of the late 1940s. Hill End relies heavily on a photograph that Drysdale took of the area. Completely devoid of figures, the work shows one of the most distinctive buildings in the township, the ruinous edifice that the artist had also painted in The cricketers and Woman in a landscape. Drysdale reveals his fascination with the crumbling shapes and various textures of the building - the wrought iron, flaking plaster, and the intricate brickwork typical of the Victorian architecture in many Australian country towns - erected with such confidence and all too soon deserted.