Extract from ABC News
Analysis
It's the light that shocks you most. Is there any light like it anywhere else in the world?
You know that moment when you touch down back in Australia — OK, the last time you did that was a while ago — to be overwhelmed by that brutal, brilliant noonday light? And that breathless pink and blue blush at the edge of the eastern sky at dusk, when the scrub to the west is ablaze in orange?
I wonder at the tens of thousands of years of sunrises and sunsets that our first nations people saw and made their life under — imagine, tens of thousands of years. And I wonder at the slowly accumulated knowledge and understanding of weather and threat and impending change that they gleaned from those millions of days under these skies.
Standing in front of the greatest paintings made in this country by the men and women who came here after them, with that light still glowing from pigment and brush-stroke, I wonder if these 19th-century Australians saw the land the same way. And now I also wonder at the Indigenous eyes that must have been seeing them see their land — ancient eyes watching back at them, unseen in the bush, missed by the brush. Strange what you can't see for looking.
Almost 30 years after the landmark exhibition, Golden Summers, about the celebrated Heidelberg school of 19th-century Australian painting, the National Gallery of Victoria has revisited these times in the exhibition She-Oak and Sunlight, framing these masterpieces as an Antipodean Impressionism, and one that has for too long hidden the women who painted unseen, outside of the frame.
It is a mighty collection of the great and the quietly sublime. Walking past the fugitive colours and tones of bush and sky, I hear another gallery visitor say to her partner, "It's like seeing old friends again, isn't it?"
And it is. I even had to rescue my husband who was having a little frozen flashback moment in front of Arthur Streeton's The Purple Noon's Transparent Might. "This bloody painting … we studied it for a year in school!"
NGV director Tony Ellwood nodded sympathetically, wryly observing that it was on the wall of every doctor, dentist and accountant's waiting room for the entire last half of the last century.
Every country has their own Whistler's Mother.
But here's a surprising upside to pandemic and lockdown: it meant that works like these, that ordinarily could never be taken from the walls and from view, could finally be cleaned. And my god how these works now shimmer, and in a way only possible when made under the glare of the still, hot haze of an Australian sky.
It is exhilarating to see what these artists saw: the sweep of Coogee beach still identical all the way down to the rocky point; the millpond sea of Ricketts Point and Mentone on Port Philip Bay, and the blue, blue, blue, of what for them was a happy new land.
But despite their keen eye and surging passion for their homeland, they did not see and not record it all, for the exhibition finishes on the ceremony paintings of the 19th-century Wurundjeri painter William Barak. His works tell just a fragment of our other, crucial story, one that even the pitiless Australian light has blinded many of us to for far too long.
I hope you will seek out the show.
This weekend, read about the new power rising in Australian politics. And we have sorted your streaming this long weekend, with our iview collection of the best investigative journalism in Australia from 4 Corners: you can catch up on anything you may have missed here.
Have a safe and happy weekend, and even though Bluesfest has been cancelled, Double J will help you out with a program of some of the best music recorded at the festival over the last few years — check it out.
I'm taking a two-week break to lie down and do absolutely nothing, so here's the soundtrack of my easter 2021 from the fascinating Evelyn Ida Morris — music that is hopeful and gloriously still. Go well.
Virginia Trioli is presenter on Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne and the former co-host of ABC News Breakfast.
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