Sidney Nolan’s ‘Riverbend’ at CMAG

Sidney Nolan’s epic panorama Riverbend (1964–65) has a temporary home at Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG). Until July, 2024, it will hang in CMAG’s Nolan Gallery in conversation with Nolan’s iconic Ned Kelly Series (1945–1947).

Dr Anna Wong, Director, Galleries Museum and Heritage, said “we are thrilled to be able to collaborate with the Drill Hall team to bring these two major related works together for the first time”. Virginia Rigney, Senior Curator of Visual Art commented that while Riverbend may be familiar to many Canberrans, this is a rare opportunity to consider the resonance between it and the significant body of Nolan paintings held at CMAG, in particular works such as Kelly in Bush, 1945. The pairing of the works – made just under twenty years apart, invites deeper consideration of Nolan’s longstanding engagement with the Kelly myth and articulations of the Australian landscape.

Sidney Nolan (1917–1992), Riverbend (detail), 1964–65. oil on board (oil paint and gel medium on Masonite). nine panels, each 153 × 122 cm. Australian National University Art Collection. Acquired 1965. © The Sidney Nolan Trust. All rights reserved. DACS/Copyright Agency, 2024

Sidney Nolan (1915–1992) painted Riverbend far from Australia in his studio on the Thames in London, England, shortly before he undertook a prestigious fellowship awarded to him by the Australian National University in 1965.

This nine-part, eleven metre-long work, is an intensely personal depiction of the Australian bush, painted from memory in a matter of days between 27 December 1964 and 14 January 1965. Generally acknowledged to be one of Nolan’s most significant achievements, the ambitious scale of this work reveals his intention to create an immersive experience for the viewer.

This epic panorama is placed in dialogue with the first works of the ‘Ned Kelly’ series that Nolan painted some twenty years earlier near another river – the Yarra – on the outskirts of Melbourne when he was classified as Absent Without Leave from Military service during World War II.

Nolan had spent childhood holidays fishing with his father and uncle on a bend of the Goulburn River at Toolamaba, just upstream from Shepparton in Victoria, and travelled back to the area on a visit to Australia in 1963. It is the memory of this landscape which is depicted in Riverbend. He identified it as “my father’s country”.

This Country is home to the traditional lands of the Bangerang People, the people of the tall trees, the river is Kaiyala to the Kaiyalduban Clan, meaning ‘father of the waters’. Nolan commented on his difficulty in “understanding the country”. It seemed impossible, he said, to “be articulate about it from our own particular level of tradition…we have only experienced the fringe of what we know to be Indigenous.”  In Riverbend, Nolan finds a very pragmatic and immediate way to evoke the experience of being confronted by the magnitude of the Australian bush.

Nolan was a wandering romantic, constantly searching for inspiration, self-understanding and self-identity, always out in the world. The creation of Riverbend followed a period of intense travel throughout Antarctica and the Australian outback. Nolan’s father was also gravely ill, and he died shortly after the painting arrived in Australia in March 1965. These events inspired Nolan to reconsider his own story, and allegorise his own myth through a return to the figure of Ned Kelly.

Here and there in the dappled landscape, we discern Nolan’s iconic bushranger playing a kind of hide-and-seek with the Victorian police. Look closely to find the naked figure of Trooper Scanlan falling from a tree. Nolan’s fascination with the Kelly legend derives in part from the fact that his grandfather was one of the policemen tasked with pursuing the declared outlaw through northern Victoria from 1878 to 1880.

Manning Clark, in his History of Australia, proposed that there was a connection between Kelly and the bush landscape, which resonated for Nolan

“He [Kelly] lived in Eleven Mile Creek in one of those tracts of country where the bonds of civilisation had been so loosened that men threatened to become as savage as the region.”

Nolan met Clark in London in 1964, forming a lasting intellectual connection over their shared desire to articulate a certain European idea of ‘Australia’. In Nolan’s first Kelly paintings, Clark had already identified how the bush ‘alienated’ European occupiers: how they were brutalised by the environment, reducing them to ‘unfeeling, unaware’ people preoccupied with the question of their own survival.

In Riverbend, Nolan’s more mature and introspective attitude is realised in the way he no longer depicts Kelly and the police as victors or victims. Rather, the figures in the landscape are abstracted amongst the trees, each is stripped of uniform, bare limbs evoke Eucalypts trunks, while another is subsumed by the primordial mud of the river’s murky waters. All the figures are portrayed as vulnerable humans, subjected to the times into which they were born – troubled, inward looking men at the edge, confronting the uncompromising force of nature.

The nine panels of Riverbend add up to make an enveloping panorama while also breaking down to suggest the frames of a filmstrip. Motion and stillness co-exist. The violent adventures of the Kelly gang and their pursuers are ultimately absorbed and diminished by the still expanse of grey-brown water and whispering, immemorial bush.