Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

optimistic outlook of the nation in the early 1920s. In these works the artist once again uses solitary figures to personify the rural ideal. When she painted pictures of men in the bush, such as In Australia c.1922-23 (which ironically ended up in a French public collection), Rix Nicholas consciously addressed the artistic conventions of the day in order to create a place for herself within the art world's structure. Her paintings of women in the bush, however, had a different function. They explicitly represented her own experience of country life and implied that the bush could be both worked and enjoyed by women. In The magpie's song c.1922-23 (Rix Wright Collection) for example, the woman pictured is a visitor to the bush, enjoying its ambience. Though her dress is not rural, her expression and self-assured pose suggest that, like the artist herself, she is responding to the invigorating and regenerative atmosphere of country Australia. Monaro pioneer c.1922-23 (Art Gallery of South Australia) is an even more assertive statement. The indomitable strength that Rix Nicholas identified as a meaningful trait in her paintings of Etaplean peasants is also used to describe an Australian bushwoman. Monaro pioneer contradicts the notion that women were absent from the history of rural Australia. This woman is no visitor listening to birdsong; she is a pioneer, an active and revered participant in rural settlement. In the 1930s and 1940s Rix Nicholas continued to explore the theme of women in the bush, painting a number of pictures such as The fair musterer 1935, Bringing in the sheep c.1936 (Bega Valley Shire Art Gallery) and Autumn evening's golden glow C.1942 (private collection), which used the bush as a site for female achievement. The women in these works avow the artists own status as a legitimate bushwoman.7 The 'fair musterer' can ride, muster sheep and do a man's job, although she does not deny her womanliness. Her costume, for instance, is typical of the kind of dress worn by women working on the land at this time. It clearly denotes her gender, but also suggests that she has assumed a new kind of femininity. The idea that women could play a part in bush life was not entirely new. It had been a feature of popular literature and theatre in Australia since before the First World War. Melodramas such as The Squatter's Daughter gave women decisive roles to play and represented the bush as a place where women could assume and maintain managerial identities.8The heroine of The Squatter's Daughter often performed tasks that were not normally assigned to women. Similarly Norah Linton, the girl protagonist in Mary Grant Bruce's Billabong books, could ride, swim, shoot and kill snakes.9Norah had a significant part to play at Billabong and she was granted a sense of equality with the boys. Her gender, however, was never compromised. Dress and accessories always subtly denoted her difference in much the same way as they do in The fair musterer. Mary Grant Bruce's obituary in the Bulletin revealed how important Norah was in the imagination of several generations of Australian women: she was 'much more than a character in the pages of a book — she was US, as we liked to fancy ourselves in supreme moments of idealism'.10 Rix Nicholas represented such a moment in The fair musterer , although her picture goes further. No longer simply characters in a story, the women of fiction have been transformed into a worthy subject for 'high art'. Dr John Pigot is a lecturer in the history and theory of art at Monash University (Caulfield), Melbourne. A N A T IO N A L H ER O IN E 141