Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

NORTH OF CAPRICORN Arthur Evan Read and Ray Crooke Elizabeth Bates Facing page Arthur Evan Read Australia 1911-78 North of Capricorn 1956-57 Oil on plywood 91x183.2cm Gift of W. Hecht 1960 Queensland Art Gallery Below Arthur Evan Read The cane town 1955 Oil on plywood 78.5 X 105.7cm Acquired 1955 H.C. Richards Memorial Prize (winning entry) Queensland Art Gallery D espite the vagaries of its geography and climate, the slice ofAustralia located north of the Tropic of Capricorn is popularly perceived as the 'tropics'. Idealised views of the Pacific islands, perpetuated by writers and artists since the time of Captain James Cook, have helped to structure a notion of the 'tropical paradise'. In his description of Tahiti, for instance, Alan Moorehead presented a definition that could comfortably apply to any utopian location irrespective of geography: Although it lay in the tropics just north of Capricorn, its hot, damp climate was not oppressive, there was fresh water in abundance in the mountain torrents and flowers and fruit grew everywhere.1 In 1938 Xavier Herbert, mesmerised by Australia's north, produced his epic novel Capricornia. The subject was 'a country none of which is far from heavy jungles or wild rivers, alternately burned or drowned by the dry and wet seasons which divide the year'2— and it blurred the edges of Utopia in the minds of urban southern Australia. Even for the inhabitants of Herbert's 'Capricornia' the region was perceived as a land 'that the fools down south called the land of opportunity'.3 After spending six years in north Queensland, in 1958 the artist Arthur Evan Read stated that in his work of the period he had aimed to 'always express the artistic content [that] I feel is in the everyday life of the tropic north of Australia'.4Read credited his time in the area as contributing substantially to his development as a landscape painter.5After a brief initial visit to the north in 1949, he returned to Sydney to paint street scenes, but, like many before him, the unique qualities of north Queensland drew him back. As a painter, he was obviously attracted to the relaxed lifestyle of north Queensland but was conscious that he had placed himself in the midst of one of Australia's most productive rural districts. The tropical Queensland coast is dotted with a string of towns that emerged with the development of the State's sugar industry. In this environment, Arthur Evan Read produced a series of works described by the artist as composite paintings of cane towns. North o f Capricorn 1956-57 (Queensland Art Gallery) is one of many begun by the artist in the 1950s at his home in Flying Fish Point, east of Innisfail on the Johnstone River.6The area surrounding this river has been described by historians as 'the first attempt by a white population to establish an agricultural community in a total tropical rainforest environment'.7 Although North o f Capricorn cannot be recognised as a representation of a particular town, the artist has included local 'icons' that tie the painting to the Innisfail and Johnstone Valley district. The water tower in the painting is recognisably based on the Innisfail tower built by local contractors in 1935s and the bare brown hills that surround the town may refer to the Basilish Range outside the town of Mourilyan, which was cleared of tropical rainforest during 1936 in an attempt to control cane grub.9 The hamlet in North of Capricorn shows little of the wildness for which the area was renowned prior to the Second World War, a wildness that had seen the title 'the nightmare city of the north' bestowed on the town of Innisfail.10By contrast, Read's paintings combine the colour and luxuriance of tropical life — described by Moorehead — with the civic pride of a postwar society. Very much the romanticised ideal, Read has presented his cane town in a relaxed siesta mode, the hovering heavy skies the only reminder of the true uncertainty of tropical existence. Read's town is physically and philosophically removed from the site of Ray Crookes painting Sunrise, Albion Hotel, Normanton 1962 (QAG). Although it is set in the 'deep north', Crooke does not present a conventionally designed townscape, but provides a composition that melds landscape, still life and figure study into a psychological portrait of a 'north' quite removed from the 'tropical'. Unlike the entrapped characters of Herbert's Capricornia, who in their blind search for meaningful existence gave little respect to the region's beauty and power, Ray Crooke 254 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965