Burning at Glenrowan by Sidney Nolan

Nolan's decision to use the Kellys as a theme was reinforoed by a number of experiences:

As a young child he visited Melbourne's Aquarium, where he saw the unusual combination of fish in green water, a Cobb and Co. coach and Kelly’s amour, which were then displayed there. He recalled that 'it all looked naturally in place'.

His grandfather, William Nolan, once a sergeant during the pursuit of the Kellys at Beechworth, told his grandson how the police did their best to avoid any encounters. He also spoke of the rumours, often false, that were spread by the local inhabitants about the Kellys, and mentioned that blacktrackers were not used, though Kelly feared their expertise in the bush.

Nolan read J. J. Kenneally's The Complete Inner History of the Kelly Gang and Their Pursuers, first published in Victoria in 1929, and also the Report of the Royal Commission on the Police Force in Victoria, issued in 1881. Some passages that Nolan read in both these publications became the themes of individual paintings, and these accompanied each entry in the catalogue of the first exhibition in 1948. Subsequent catalogues followed this practice, using passages like these:

Burning at Glenrowan. 1946

Very Rev. Dean Gibney: 'l got no answer, of course, and I looked in and found the bodies of Dan Kelly and Steve Hart lying together. As far as I could tell they were burnt from the waist up'.

Siege at Glenrowan. 1946

At about eight o'clock in the morning a heart-rending wail of grief ascended from the hotel. The voice was easily distinguished as that of Mrs Jones, the landlady. Mrs Jones was lamenting the fate of her son, who had been shot in the back by police, as she supposed fatally. She came out of the hotel crying bitterly and wandered into the bush on several occasions, etc.

On Burning at Glenrowan and Siege at Glenrowan Sidney Nolan says:

These [paintings] were once joined together and I had Mrs Reardon and her baby still fleeing for their lives. It was once six feet [1830 cms] by four [1220 cms], but late one night, Jack Bellew, a journalist, said, 'Look Sid, that painting is too bloody big, cut it in two'. I told him to leave it alone, but to prove it was not too big I would cut it in two. You see I come from a long line of Irishmen. So I cut it and looked at them separated and together, and they looked better together. Unfortunately I had patted them forever.

The Kelly paintings contain oblique references to Nolan's own life. As his life changed, so the Kelly of the paintings changed from an unassailable and defiant hero, to the dejected, forlorn and rather frightened outlaw who appears in later paintings. Nolan said, 'As in the early paintings I used him as a shorthand for my own emotional state'.

With this series, Nolan explores the role of myth in art, and the symbolic forms of Kelly's helmet and armour became important devices to focus the viewer's attention. Nolan was aware of the black square that 'had been floating around in modem art for some time', and that had been used by international artists like Malevich and Moholy-Nagy. 'All I did was put a neck on the square', he said. The helmet and its pictorial use was the modern device in the series, and its imposition on his lyrical landscapes created a difficult visual problem for Nolan.

The helmet casts gloom and, by exposing his eyes, the aperture reveals Kelly's moods. The eye-slit in the helmet — lifting the earth up to the sky or, as in Burning at Glenrowan, showing the fire burning behind the eyes — suggests alternative views of the landscape.

The Kelly paintings and the drawings of around the same time do not have the usual relationship of preparatory sketch to finished composition. None of the Kelly drawings in the National Collection could be considered studies in the ordinary sense of the word. This is definitely the case for the two displayed in this exhibition, Kelly, tree and trooper and Kelly at Glenrowan. Nolan's approach to the Kelly paintings was substantially different to the way he dealt with the drawings, demonstrating that he attacked the paintings afresh. The series of Kelly drawings, produced in a flash of feverish inspiration in the course of no more than a few hours, seems, nonetheless, to have been important in the process of Nolan's thought about the paintings. The division of the picture plane and the placement of characters are two compositional elements that are addressed in these and subsequent sketches. Nolan produced some sketches after the paintings were completed, as if he was recalling both the Kelly history and the process of painting, and comparing the actual hero and his own interpretation of the legend.

The series of drawings of bushranger heads, which Nolan made in January 1947, also appears to have been produced in a short period and, like the 1946 series, has a life independent of the Kelly paintings. The colourfully kerchiefed faces, another device used to identify bushrangers, invoke many outlaws and not necessarily the Kelly gang.

Nolan has frequently returned to the Kelly theme since 1947 and recently said:

‘I don't know what to say if people say I paint Kelly because that's all I can do, because it's like saying Giotto used Biblical scenes because he hadn’t read the Koran . . . it wasn't part of his culture.’

I'd like to think that the day before I died I'd paint a good Ned Kelly painting.

During the siege at Glenrowan, a group of press reporters arrived there on a special train from Melbourne. Although their accounts of the siege varied or, as some believe, were biased against the Kelly gang, their observations are exciting to read.

The following extracts are from the Melbourne Australasian Sketcher 102, vol. viii, Saturday 17 July 1880. This was the last issue in a series titled 'Destruction of the Kelly Gang'.

1991–1992

• City of Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, VIC
  27 August 1991 – 6 October 1991
• Benalla Art Gallery, VIC
  12 October 1991 – 10 November 1991
• Orange Regional Gallery, NSW
  16 November 1991 – 26 January 1992