Artists statement

In 1904 the Australian artist Frederick McCubbin painted his triptych The Pioneer. McCubbin hired models and painted the work near Mount Macedon in Victoria, with views across land owned by his friend, William Peter McGregor who was the second chairman of the mining company BHP.
While McCubbin was always non-committal about the narrative within his work, The Pioneer is undoubtedly a romanticisation of the selectors, who cleared the land in a frenzy of slashing and burning for the mass cultivation of imported livestock. The impact of the cloven hooves of these animals upon the newly bared land changed the composition of the soil forever.
The title of McCubbin’s work, The Pioneer, marginalises thousands of years of nurturing land management by Aboriginal communities. McCubbin's triptych, with its association to the coal mining company and its almost religious view of land clearing by European settlers, offers an unintentionally prophetic vision of the sustained Anglo dominance of Australian popular culture, the continuing extractive nature of the country’s economy and the death of Australia's natural environment.