Week 6 Blog Post

Going through the images I have taken from the Art Gallery visit, I believe that Tom Roberts’s 1894 oil-on-canvas artwork, “The Golden Fleece”, left the deepest impression on me.

Following an online visit to the Art Gallery of New South Wales via their website, I discovered that Roberts painted it while staying at Newstead Station in the New England tablelands of northern NSW. According to the site, Roberts used this artwork to pay homage to rural life and pastoral industry, and to convey vanishing traditions such as the use of manual shears. It was also originally called “Shearing at Newstead”, but was renamed to reference the Greek myth in which the Argonauts voyage to the end of the world in search of the Golden Fleece. The title reflects the artist’s creation of the rural worker as ‘hero’, and his evocation of Australia as an Arcadian land of pastoral plenty. **

Combining what I learnt and saw on my physical visit with what I learnt from my online visit, I find myself linking “The Golden Fleece” with Banjo Paterson’s 1864 poem, “The Man from Snowy River”. Not only because both emit a strong sense of masculinity, but also because the mood evoked by the artist (through his use of colours) and the poet (through his use of language) is similar.

From the painting, the group of men working together creates the predominant sense of masculinity. This is intensified by the shadows Roberts uses, with only a few patches of white to contrast with. Moreover, the concentration Roberts captures with the two shearers in the foreground of the painting epitomises the idea that during early settlement in Australia, the men were actively involved in the process of “claiming” and “cultivating” the land around them. Yet despite the obvious fact that all the people in the image are working towards a common end, I also get a sense of aloofness, that they only share a “working” relationship, and nothing closer than that. A closer analysis at the painting also shows that the men are split into two lines, and reminds me of the production line layout used in manufacturing factories in modern society. Perhaps this is where I get the cold distancing from.

This is the similarity with the poem. I find that Paterson’s repeated use of the pronoun “He” really sets the man from Snowy River apart from “the stockmen tell the story of his ride”. It makes him feel as though he is a member of the community, only because he is a male (and hence the sense of masculinity exuded by the poem); yet the fact that he is “The Man” distinguishes him, and isolates him from the “stockmen”.

So I suppose that the main theme I gathered from Roberts’s painting and Paterson’s poem is the relationship between people. However, compounding this with the information from the website, I can also see that Roberts, in placing a number of people in such a confined shearing shed, creates the sense of “Australia as an Arcadian land of pastoral plenty”, which I think is a clever and economical use of the space available to him as an artist, and perhaps also captures the actual space that was available to the settlers in the nineteenth century.

To conclude, I think the Art Gallery visit was a mind-broadening experience which made me appreciate artwork more, and also how it can be related to literature.

First image taken by myself. Second image taken from http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/648/

Poem quoted from http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/patersonab/poetry/snowy.html, which obtained it from The Bulletin (16 April 1890).

**Information paraphrased from their website (http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/648/)