Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

'A WAVE TO MEMORY' Sidney Nolan Mrs Fraser Lynne Seear Facing page Sidney Nolan Australia/England 1917-92 Mrs Fraser 1947 Ripolin enam el on hardboard 66.2x107cm Purchased 1995 w ith a special allocation from the Queensland G overnm ent. Celebrating the Queensland A rt Gallery's Centenary 1895-1995 Below Etching by Robert Gibbings from his book John Graham (Convict) 1824, Faber & Faber, London, 1937, reproduced with permission of Laurence Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Robert Gibbings And in this sandy forest a ganger takes a part of a sprig with a flower and wears it in his hat, wears it all day, a wave to memory setting him apart. Barrett Reid, 'Fraser Island, looking west'.1 I n 1947 Sidney Nolan spent an extended period in Queensland, including . several weeks in Brisbane and on Fraser Island (formerly known as Great Sandy Island). In Brisbane's John Oxley Library he read, among other things, accounts of the shipwreck of the English brig, the Stirling Castle, off the south-east Queensland coast in 1836. Nolan was intrigued by the story of Mrs Eliza Frasers survival after the wreck, her captivity (or salvation) by local Aborigines and her controversial return to England. This spectacular colonial narrative of the displaced gentlewoman, made vulnerable to both the material primitivism and the perceived sexual savagery of'native' life, proved an ideal source for Nolan. It continued the project he had begun a couple of years earlier with the 'Ned Kelly' series, in which he merged motifs from popular culture with modernist aesthetics; and it provided him with imagery which allowed for some personal blood-letting. Nolan had left Melbourne for Queensland in early July 1947. Specifically, he fled the 'huge emotional climate' of Heide, the home on the banks of the Yarra River he had shared with art patrons John and Sunday Reed for eight years.2It has become acceptable now to openly acknowledge that Nolan and Sunday Reed were lovers and that he lived with the couple in a passionate and ultimately harrowing ménage à trois for almost a decade. For a long time, however, the domestic details of this intensely influential period of his personal and working life were excluded from commentaries on his work. Inserting Sunday Reed back into the picture enables us to observe the symbiotic relationship between Nolan's Eliza Fraser and the woman who has recently been termed his 'monstrous muse'.3 Mid-1947 was an opportune moment for Nolan to heed the call of the culturally influential Australian Geographical Walkabout Magazine to 'know his country'.4 The dynamic atmosphere of crisis and creativity that had been so much a part of wartime Melbourne was on the wane. The Contemporary Art Society, the formal structure used by the Reeds to promote 'modernist' art practice in Melbourne, had (temporarily) ceased operations, and other core members of the Heide 'group' were dispersing — Albert Tucker left for Europe; his estranged wife Joy Hester was living with Gray Smith in Sydney. In 1945 Nolan's younger brother Raymond had drowned while on secondment with the navy in Cooktown, North Queensland, and the artist declared that he needed to make an investigative pilgrimage to the site, to pay tribute to his brother and to find out as much as he could about the incident for the sake of his parents. In this way, Nolan was able to initiate what would eventually become his permanent exile from Heide. Needless to say, he arrived in the north (after his first trip in a plane) with plenty of emotional baggage on board. In Brisbane, Nolan stayed with the precocious young poet Barrett Reid (who had been the youngest contributor to the modemist aesthetics journal, Angry Penguins ) and it was with Reid that he made the trip up the coast to Fraser Island.5Nolan first heard of Fraser Island from his friend Tom Harrisson, a former British army major who trained parachute commandos there during the war. His descriptions of the island's exotic beauty had been one of the factors that enticed the artist north. On arrival, Nolan was not disappointed: No wonder Harrisson was impressed ... Ninety miles long and 30 miles wide ... it covers a lot of country. Strange coast line, medium sized cliffs covered in small thick scrub, but the most impressive part is the way in which great cliffs of sand make a pattern against the scmb ... The size of the island has rather taken me back.6 At this time most of Fraser Island was a Forestry Commission reserve and travel to the area was restricted. The island's Indigenous owners, the Ngulungbara, Batjala and Dulingbara peoples, had long since been forcibly resettled and the atmosphere in the loggers' camps, where 200 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965