...searching around the other day for a canvas and came across the picture of the big woman - it seemed to have possibilities so I redrew portions of it, got to work and am very excited to find I've got a cracking good picture near completion.²

Inspired by the Hill End landscape, Woman in a landscape shares an obvious relationship with Drover's wife. Drysdale's rugged personification of the outback woman, who gazes searchingly across the landscape, has increased in scale to heroic proportions.

In May 1949 Woman in a landscape was awarded the Melrose Memorial Prize. The judges were the artist Hans Heysen, Joseph Burke, Professor of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne, and Louis McCubbin, Director of the National Gallery of South Australia. Burke said prophetically of the choice: 'It will not be popular. It may shock some people because it is not a pretty picture. But Art should be criticism of life and not a sugary imitation of it.'³ Two days later letters appeared in the press from people who considered the painting to be an insult to Australian womanhood:

Unfortunately for the Commonwealth it will be necessary to prevent this picture appearing in England and Europe, where the effect would certainly defeat the immigration policy, as any decent person would abhor the idea of his wife or mother appearing like the picture in a few years after arrival in this country.⁴

I have been a bushwoman for more than forty years in the far north and have been over most of Queensland, but I have never seen a woman so hideous as that depicted. It is an insult to the bush folk. Why has such a horrible picture been allowed to be shown?⁵

...no outback Australian woman of white blood would be found with such hideous proportions and apparel as the artist portrays...⁶

The painting had its supporters, and in particular Mrs A.F. Lord of Blinman in the Flinders Ranges far north of Adelaide, who wrote passionately:

I sacrifice myself on the altar of Art. I am a 'Drysdale'. I can account for the appearance of my sister on canvas. Her somewhat ungainly stance is probably caused by worn sandshoes and a couple of obstinate bunions on her right big toe; 'the simple, unbroken line' of her figure, to the fact that she had not taken her 'Venus Form' tablets lately, and that just when the artist was around, she left off her corsets. Her lank locks? Well, her perm. had only just grown out. The point is that Drysdale caught her off guard. To all the hunters with palette and brush I say, 'Sneak up on themcatch them on the hop and you'll get a dozen Drysdales a week'.⁷