The expression of the spirit of a place which in landscape painting is aesthetically more important than a literal topographical recording, can really only be achieved after a lifetime's experience of an area one has constantly observed, painted and loved for its innate characteristics. I gaze across the red gum plains of the Mernda landscape from my studio and witness them in all seasons and moods. Such a painting as this, free of all inhibitions of literal transcription are done relying purely on memory impressions. These are often inspired by a particular season or day, but the content of the work is a total of past experience and observations that lie in one's mind. The staccato quality of tree forms against vast horizontal spaces, the open colour planes and marks that define forms, the calligraphy and tonal resonance of the work, all find their origins in direct observations of nature that remain with me. Experience has taught me that the more direct and less complicated one can express an idea in watercolour and gouache, the more significant and vital the work will be. Occasionally one succeeds and manages a complete statement without recourse to reworking or additions. This painting typifies the direction in which my major work started to move in the late 1980's. Part of the John and Gillian Borrack Federation Bequest, donated to the City of Whittlesea in December 2001 by Gillian and John BorrackJohn Borrackmernda

Saunders Waterford - water coloursigned: M Chapple (lower left)

Gift of Mack Jost, 1999

Gift of Mack Jost, 1998

Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program by Mack Jost, 1992.oil on composition boardSigned, lower rightrobert dickerson, the antipodeans, redfern

Gift of Peter and Marlyn Bancroft, 2004

Gift of Mack Jost, 1993

Gift of Harold Price, 2006

Anne Scott Wilson is a video and photography artist interested in memory, motion and the body. Her work often experiments with movement and light exposure over time. The images in Fly Rhythm series record landscapes from the Dandenong Ranges to Altona and were produced for an exhibition at the Wyndham Art Gallery called EXPERIMENT in 2012.australian art, australian photography, photography, female artist

Undated black and white photograph, which mostly shows buildings in Sussex Street, Linton, near the corner of Sussex and Clyde Streets. Surrey Street can be seen in the foreground but there are no houses along it."View of Linton from school. Large tree gum planted was in front of cottage dad built when they were first married. Now half covered with ivy". "(16)".sussex street linton, surrey street linton

Gift of the Friends of Horsham Art Gallery, 1990

warrandyte

Nadine Christensen’s practice encompasses painting, installation and drawing and has comprised an ongoing investigation into natural phenomena. She draws on diverse sources including design and illustration, architecture, new and arcane technologies, science fiction, animation, tall stories and curiosities to engage the changing possibilities and conditions of light and perception. Christensen’s work also explores the desire to map and understand our environment as well as the role of narrative and story telling in the unfolding of information throughout contemporary culture. Recent work samples from small moments in her larger paintings and utilises aspects of external surfaces and everyday objects such as piles of dirt, tables, ropes and chains that occupy the juncture between the real and the imagined. Montage style paintings combine Christensen’s highly recognisable gradational and flat colouring, 3D rendering and trompe l’oeil effects while the imagery itself veers from representational and identifiable elements toward pure abstraction.

non-fictionIn dog-eared school exercise books, Georgina Oswin, a mother of seven, recorded the simple pleasures and struggles of life in rural Australia in the 1880s. Her diaries describe vividly her large family's daily household chores, farming activities, squabbles and passing love affairs. This is a record of colonial social history which has been brought together by a kinswoman of the pioneer Oswins, Mary Karney. oswin family, mornington peninsula -- family history

ill, p.124.non-fictionA pictorial history of various diesel and electric locomotive liveries working on government and private railways in Australia.diesel locomotives - australia - history, locomotives - australia - history

Black and White photograph of a man sitting on grass, with a post and rail fence in the backgroundchatham family archive,

Digital photo