The artist and the bushranger

I glanced at the rectangular figure and shivered. I’d seen it so many times. Walking through galleries. In textbooks. In homage and in pastiche. Perhaps my room was just cold. I looked again and the shiver came back. This was ridiculous! I’d been sent JPEGs of Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series from 1945–47, paintings I’d always loved, and had only opened the files to check they’d downloaded. Now I had to peer at them sidelong. Kelly’s stylised black armour suddenly brought to mind a coffin, a grave. My own middle age had turned these 26 paintings into a suite of memento mori.

Generations of Australian children have, of course, beheld our colonial version of a Death’s-head. Nolan recalled:

Nolan was a fugitive himself when he made his first sketch of Kelly’s abstracted amour. In 1945 he was in his late 20s — a few years older than the age the bushranger had reached — and the previous year he’d deserted from the Australian Army. Nolan was using a pseudonym and living, fearful of being apprehended, in a menage a trois with the art patrons Sunday and John Reed at Heide, their property on the edges of Naarm/Melbourne — a place which now seems as ubiquitous to Australian modernist art as, say, the sea or that eucalyptus smell.

Nolan’s two years conscripted to the army supply corps had reshaped him. He now had a fascination with violence and the ways a soldier and a gun can be conjoined: ‘You have been taught that your .303 rifle is your best friend and when you are on the end of it you become one with it, as an individual.’² He’d also developed an intense, painterly fascination with western Victoria’s flat, horizon-heavy Wimmera district. The bush was calling him, but he was trying to decipher the message.

Using the name of Robin Murray (apparently a play on Sunday Reed’s nickname for him, Robin Redbreast) Nolan made a pilgrimage to ‘Kelly country’ in central Victoria. He travelled with Max Harris, the poet and fellow member of the 1940s artistic movement, the Angry Penguins. Nolan was yearning for stories that expressed something mythic about the Australian landscape, and he had a family connection to the Kelly saga. Growing up, he’d heard the tales of his grandfather, who claimed to have helped the police try to find the notorious gang. He wondered if anyone was alive to tell him more. ‘I find that a desire to paint the landscape involves a wish to hear more of the stories that take place within the landscape’, he later explained. ‘From being interested in these stories it is a simple enough step to find that it is possible to combine two desires: to paint and to tell stories.’³ Here was an epic that captured the poetry and danger of the luminous bush.

In a Kelly country pub, the two young aesthetes announced to the bar of hardened locals that they’d shout a round to anyone who could tell them Ned-related tales. The pair ended up drinking by themselves. Afterwards, however, Nolan claimed to have met Kelly’s youngest brother Jim, who, having been in jail at the time of the Glenrowan siege, was spared an early death. ‘He was over 80’, Nolan later reported, settling into the memory:

Nolan knew something himself about filial grief and rage at authority. That same year his younger brother, Raymond died in a drowning accident in Cooktown. He was on the verge of being decommissioned from the Australian Army, after serving three years in Papua New Guinea, and the official story went that he’d been drunk at the time of his death. The Nolan family doubted they’d been told the whole truth.

By rendering the bushranger’s fury and dreams of vengeance, Nolan could encode his own turmoil. Returning to Heide, he scoured old newspaper etchings which depicted the Kelly gang. He also borrowed Albert Tucker’s battered copy of the Royal Commission of Enquiry into the Circumstances of the Kelly Outbreak (1881–83) and mined it for details. The tale had the qualities of magical realism: the armour forged in the bush from stolen plough components; Kelly’s bizarre manifesto, the Jerilderie Letter (in which he justified his killing spree); the rumours; the sightings; the apocalyptic end. Nolan loved the naive style of the French Post-Impressionist Henri Rousseau, but he now placed his own seemingly innocent characters in settings with a constant shimmer of violence. Ripolin, the quick-drying enamel paint he favoured, gave the works an iridescence, a dream-like feel. The artist was creating a grand hallucinating.

We see Ned Kelly as a chimera: his gun, horse and armour merging into one being. He rides a flat, yellow plain. Through the helmet’s eye slot is an expanse of noon sky. As if through this slot, we see the police search party. They camp as night is falling. To keep warm, they set a tree alight. The flames rip at the dusk.

We see Ned’s sister, Kate, harassed by the drunken Constable Fitzpatrick: ‘The deceit and cowardice is too plain to be seen in the puny cabbage hearted looking face,’ wrote Ned in the Jerilderie Letter. Fitzpatrick’s louche hand creeps lower.

We see the search party again. The police are hanging, asleep in hammocks that look like net traps. Their Prussian-style helmets are absurd in this scrubby brown place.

We see the dust storm of the town. Beyond its borders, is the gang member, Steve Hart, beautiful in women’s clothing. He sits side-saddle on his horse, holding the reins with delicacy. The sunset turns the surrounding mountains a complementary shade of pink, but an unholy squall is coming.

We see another of Ned’s sisters, Margaret, quilting the inside of Ned’s armour. Her thread is sky blue but laid out the breast plate resembles a black hole in the ground. Behind her a man brings an axe down hard on timber.

We see the weird shapes of the gang’s armour and then the death of Constable Scanlon. Blood gushes from his bullet wound in the same red as the outlaws’ bandanas. Kelly is a death wish on horseback: wherever he rides people die. At Stringybark Creek, an officer is thrown from his horse and keeps spinning and spinning. Ned, nonchalant, can balance a smoking rifle on the palm of his hand.

We see a brass bed covered by the colourful patchwork blanket which Nolan was given by a fellow soldier. A woman hides under the bed between two men. We see a bride surrounded by police. We see a peacock ‘watch bird’ keeping an officer at bay. A lonely pack horse falling endlessly off a cliff.

We see the Glenrowan siege. The sky is a terrible purple bruise. Lurid flames spread from a burning building and a woman flees with a child. The gang members, turned to strange metal beasts, roil in the gunfire. And nothing can be done to stop it.

Finally, Kelly is in the courtroom being sentenced to death. He’s blockaded by a line of wide-standing boys in blue. A toxic green glow emanates from his helmet’s prison-cell slit. The judge, whose face is half in sickly shadow, is turning spectral himself. We know how the story ends. We’ve known all along: 12 days after Kelly’s hanging, the judge was dead too, and so all this time we’ve been staring at paintings of a ghost story. The black square armour stands in for an absence and an abyss. Right from the start, the story’s hero was already long gone.

The poet Barratt Read recalled watching Nolan painting the Kelly series on the Reed’s kitchen table, his arm occasionally slung around Sunday’s waist. Over the two years in which they were created, Reed acted as the artist’s benefactor, muse and studio assistant, even priming the canvases. But Nolan finished the suite and his decade-long relationship with Reed concurrently, making it hard not to spy in the works the affair and its end. Jewel-tones abut something bleak. There’s the sense a bright light is about to be extinguished.

‘When I had finished them,’ Nolan later revealed, ‘I left Melbourne and never went back — and I never went back to the people I’d been with, it was a major break in my life.’⁵ Nolan had an enduring belief that Sunday had wronged him, not that he’d lowered the break-up’s temperature by swiftly marrying his lover’s sister-in-law, Cynthia Reed.

When Nolan departed Heide, he left a cache of his paintings and drawings. Years later, he demanded the artworks back. Sunday Reed returned 284 items. Missing were the Ned Kelly series, his masterpieces. In a letter concerning their ownership, John Reed wrote to Nolan: ‘You said all your paintings were for Sunday, and I’m quite sure you did not think of them otherwise. They were created with her in a sense that is almost literal.’⁶ It was a claim Nolan did all he could to refute:

The Reeds would spend decades promoting Nolan’s work, hoping their efforts might renew their contact with the artist. (Like the bushranger himself, Nolan attracted devoted disciples.) Only Sunday Reed’s 1977 gift of the paintings to the National Gallery of Australia ended their long siege.

Nolan would continue painting Ned Kelly for the rest of his life. ‘Really the Kelly paintings are secretly about myself’, he admitted in 1984. ‘It’s an inner history of my own emotions, but I am not going to tell you about them.’⁸ The bushranger had become his touchstone. As ‘Giotto used Biblical scenes’, he used his own icon, claiming ‘I like to think that the day before I died, I’d painted a good Ned Kelly painting.’⁹

By creating the starkest outline for his hero, it’s as if Nolan foresaw the way Kelly’s tale would be reduced to cliche — just helmet and beard and his misreported last words ‘such is life’ — and so he got in first, refining the iconography to its bare minimum. He made the void. And in doing so he created a suite of works that still illustrate half our country’s headlining stories: the corrupting force of power; police discrimination; our fascination with criminals; and Australian’s struggle to live in harmony with our environment. With each brushstroke, Nolan painted himself into myth.

This story was first published in The Annual 2023.