Arthur Boyd’s Australia

Arthur Boyd’s Australia was one of three exhibitions the NGV held in 1970 to mark both the bicentenary of James Cook’s first landing in Australia and the associated 1970 Royal Visit.

Boyd’s Australia is the landscape of his native state, indeed the landscape of his childhood, youth and early manhood, indelibly imprinted on an inner vision fed by both truthfulness and zest of observation. Boyd is emphatically not, like Sidney Nolan, an explorer of strange lands. Neither the extremes of the Australian scene nor his new country of residence, England, have evoked strong and deep responses in Boyd the landscapist.