Curator Statement

This was an important painting to me because I’d been starting to work on quite a large painting about the outback. I had the background down, I’d put in the feeling of Ayers Rock, and I got a phone call from a man, or from the secretary of a man, to say that a very important man that was the head of a university in Japan was coming to see me. And as a mark of respect to me, that he would be wearing traditional clothes. So I suddenly started to change the painting and to kind of anticipate not so much of what he might look like, but what he might feel like. So the central figure on the right hand side is the feeling of the man, his clothes, I’ve given him kind of gold spots on his kimono and an important hat; I knew that he would come with an entourage so there are some people behind him, spotted people, and he was coming essentially, not just to see me but in a sense it was like, you know, coming to experience something of Australia. So the symbol in the middle of the painting is an Aboriginal symbol for growth and renewal; it has the fish in it, there’s a black sun on the left hand side, and a series of kind of little marks in the landscape almost paying reference to Fred Williams, I think, the harshness of the Australian landscape. At the bottom of the painting, a series of tourists and their cameras set up. Most tourists experience Australia through their cameras and with a fleeting view of being in the outback but I hope this picture shows something of the heat of the outback and something about the relationship between Australia and Japan and people coming to seek things from this land. There’s even in the right hand corner, half way up, a kind of Ned Kelly figure starting to go the other way, a brief reference to Sidney Nolan, and in the top left hand corner an aeroplane, which I’ve often put in paintings, which is really the symbol of my father who was a pilot during the war. The visit from an important man from Japan. And of course, I had already been to Japan, I first went there in 1962, and I had already started quite a relationship with various companies in Japan and I guess I was already quite well known there. The Japanese, in a sense, were the first people to really understand what I was doing and of course the Japanese themselves have a very sophisticated understanding of the mark that you might make on the canvas.