4WD Touring Australia — October 2017

064 | 4WDTouringAustralia

Sidney Nolan

‘Remains of Cattle’, 1952

Bore 1, North Queensland

© Sidney Nolan/National Library

of Australia

In 1952, the Courier Mail asked the country’s most famous

artist Sidney Nolan (he of the Ned Kelly paintings) to take

a camera to North Queensland and shoot the effects of a

drought.

Nolan arranged dead carcasses as though they were still

alive, and the result was so powerful and confronting that

no paper in Australia would print them.

Nolan’s message was clear. Death might be a taboo, but

it’s also a certainty. A certainty that should see us take ad-

vantage of every single moment we have air in our lungs.

Nolan’s monochromatic images of livestock in various

stages of decrepitude drew from his background as an

artist. After all, he was at the vanguard of the Australian

Modernist painting movement along with Arthur Boyd

and Albert Tucker, looking at new ways to represent the

light that lay on their doorstep.

They called themselves ‘The Angry Penguins’ and

they were intrigued by the rise of photography in the

1950s. After photographing these unloved plates of the

drought-sticken outback, Nolan returned to painting his

bush landscapes with a new vigour, no matter what Euro-

pean city he happened to be in.

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