4wdtouring.com.au | 065CULTUREHe may have been a stranger to the camera, but he was
no stranger to the outback.
Before it was a thing, the Melbourne-born artist had
already done a big lap with his wife and kid, trying to nd
“the real Australia.
“I wanted to deal ironically with the cliché of the dead
heart; I wanted to know the true nature of the otherness I
had been born into.”
With easel at hand, the former WWII deserter was hell-
bent on nding out what it meant to be Australian? What
it was that he was supposed to have been ghting for?Shortly after his trip to the Gulf of Carpentaria, Nolan
took his family to Europe and never returned, although
the outback still haunted him according to this diary ex-
cerpt recently printed in The Age: “I suppose this is the
one landscape in the world I understand fully – I still nd
it beautiful, just as if I had seen it yesterday and not ve
years ago. I nd it more than beautiful, I get a tremendous
source of energy from it.”
It may have been a world of beauty and energy, yet
ultimately it was too much for him to be immersed in each
day. He’d glimpsed at the sun, he didn’t want to stare at it.4WD_63_062-073_Classic Aussie Shots-v3.indd 65 28/07/2017 7:39 PM