Nolan: Origins: The Australia Sidney Nolan Invented.
Australia is an awkward country to paint.
It is too large for the eye to comfortably contain, its light can flatten rather than illuminate, and its distances have a habit of making people look incidental. Then there are the stories: Bushrangers, explorers, drought, gold, desert, shipwrecks, heroic endurance. We have spent generations turning geography into mythology, perhaps because the landscape alone never seemed quite enough.
Sidney Nolan understood that instinctively.
Nolan: Origins, now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, brings together more than 150 works from the years in which Nolan developed the visual language that would make him one of Australia's most recognisable modern artists. Spanning his formative period through to 1953, the exhibition follows him from St Kilda and Heide into the Wimmera, Queensland, K'gari and Central Australia, while reuniting his complete 27-painting Ned Kelly series.
The exhibition is therefore less interesting as the origin story of an Australian icon than as the story of an artist discovering how a country could be turned into an idea.
Nolan began in St Kilda, surrounded by beaches, amusement parks and popular culture, before entering the more radical milieu of Heide and the Angry Penguins. His early work already resisted the distinction between observation and invention. Luna Park, for instance, is recognisable as a place, yet feels more like a memory of one: Bright, artificial and faintly unsettling.
The Wimmera changed the scale of the problem. During the war, Nolan encountered an inland landscape that offered little of the picturesque. In works such as Kiata and Railway guard, Dimboola, distance becomes almost physical. Colour and line begin to carry psychological weight. The landscape remains recognisable, but it is no longer simply scenery.
Then came Ned Kelly.
The Kelly paintings have become so familiar that their strangeness is easy to overlook. Seen together, the complete series feels less like a collection of Australian icons than a sustained experiment in turning a person into a symbol. The black armour removes Kelly's face and personality, leaving a shape that can stand for almost anything.
Nolan was painting the series after deserting the army and living under an assumed name. The parallel with Kelly should not be overstated, but it is difficult to ignore. Kelly gave Nolan a historical figure through whom rebellion, violence, alienation and identity could be explored without becoming autobiography.
The paintings neither sanctify nor condemn him. They are interested in what happens when history turns a complicated person into folklore.
That concern runs through Nolan's landscapes. His paintings of Queensland, Eliza Fraser, the outback and Central Australia are not straightforward records of places. They are encounters with places already saturated by stories. The Australian interior, so often presented through colonial mythology as empty, was never empty. Nolan's work belongs to that colonial moment, and some of its assumptions remain visible. That does not diminish the paintings. It makes looking at them more complicated, and therefore more worthwhile.
The same tension appears in his Burke and Wills paintings. The explorers move into a landscape that seems almost indifferent to human ambition. Nolan finds something distinctly Australian in the gap between grand intentions and inevitable failure.
By the early 1950s, the landscape had become increasingly porous. In Temptation of St Anthony, biblical imagery enters the Australian desert. European art history meets Australian light. The result is neither wholly one thing nor the other, which is precisely the point.
Nolan's great subject was never really the bush.
It was what people projected onto it.
That is why the carcass paintings remain so arresting. There is no outlaw mythology or heroic expedition to absorb the viewer. There is simply the evidence of drought and death. Looking at them now, against a country increasingly accustomed to environmental extremes, they acquire meanings Nolan could not have anticipated. Art has a habit of changing as the world around it does.
Nolan left Australia for Britain in 1953, but by then he had already found a way to carry the country with him. Not as a series of views, but as a mental landscape: Kelly as silhouette, the explorer as doomed ambition, the desert as theatre, the dead animal as evidence.
That is what makes Nolan: Origins worth seeing beyond its familiar names and images.
Nolan did not discover a fixed Australian identity. He helped construct the visual vocabulary through which Australia learned to imagine itself.
The irony is that those images have become so familiar that their invention is easy to forget.
The exhibition gives them back some of their strangeness.
And perhaps that is the most interesting thing Nolan can still do: Make a country we think we know look unfamiliar again.
For those inclined to see the mythology at closer range, Nolan: Origins is on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery Road, Sydney, from 3 October 2026 until 7 February 2027, bringing together more than 150 works from Nolan’s formative Australian years, including the complete 27-painting Ned Kelly series, a rare opportunity to see how one artist helped turn a country’s landscape, histories and contradictions into a visual language of its own.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of The Trustees of the Sidney Nolan Trust / DACS.
