Notes
- I wish to thank Jane Clark and Peter King for their assistance.
- E. Lynn, Sidney Nolan. Myth and Imagery, London: Macmillan, 1967, p.41.
- E. Lynn, Sidney Nolan—Australia, Sydney: Bay Books, 1979, illustration on p.177. In conversation Nolan commented ‘that is probably Lawson; but maybe it is Manning Clark, who is also something of a bush poet, I suppose…’ (Lynn, Sidney Nolan—Australia, p.176).
- S. Nolan, ‘Faithful words’, Angry Penguins, no.4, 1946, p.44.
- ibid. For Rimbaud's influence see also R. Haese, Rebels and Precursors. The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art, Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1988, pp.175–76, and J. Anderson ‘The early work of Sidney Nolan 1939–49’, Meanjin Quarterly, September 1967, pp.312–19.
- Nolan, ‘Faithful words’, p.44.
- “Three poems by Arthur Rimbaud’, Angry Penguins, 1946, no.4, p.42–43. For the connection between symbolist poetics and the visual arts see Dee Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art. Sites of Imaginary Space, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
- J. Clark, Sidney Nolan. Landscapes and Legends: A Retrospective Exhibition, Sydney: International Cultural Corporation of Australia, 1987, pp. 38, 145.
- ibid, p.74.
- ibid, p. 120.
- ibid, p.102.
- D. Bates, The Native Tribes of Western Australia, I. White (ed.), Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1985.
- D. Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent among the Natives of Australia, London: Murray, 1938. Note that Bates was assisted by the writer Ernestine Hill in the writing of her autobiography, ‘My natives and I’, serialized in several newspapers and later edited into The Passing of the Aborigines… (see Australian Dictionary of Biography, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, vol.7, p.209). On Daisy Bates see also M.E. McGuire, ‘The legend of the goodfella missus: white women, black society 1840–1940, PhD thesis, Department of Fine Arts, University of Melbourne, 1991; M.E. McGuire, All Things Opposite. Essays on Australian Art, Prahran, Vic.: Champion, 1995, pp.59–60; and the quasi-fictional biography by Julia Blackburn, Daisy Bates in the Desert, London: Seeker and Warburg, 1994.
- C. Nolan, Outback, London: Metheun, 1962, p.213.
- Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines…, p.198. Cynthia also follows Bates's own self- description closely in detailing her strenuous activity: ‘She was pushing, through the heavy sand, a billy cart on which stood two four-gallon kerosene tins; Daisy Bates was carting water for her sick children and aged friends…through the heat and dust-storm the billy cart was trundled, making three and sometimes four 2-mile journeys in a day’ (Nolan, Outback, p. 213). This description of water-carrying follows Bates's version of how she had ‘to carry my supplies a little over a mile across the steep sand-hills in two four-gallon kerosene tin buckets twice and sometimes three times a day’ (Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines…, p.212), and that after receiving ‘a little go-cart to carry two tins’ she then ‘trundled this heavy load over the sand-hills, in the summer making three and sometimes four two-mile journeys in the day’ (ibid, p.213).
- McGuire writes that the ‘outdated Edwardian dress’ worn by Bates testified to her ‘chastity, gentility and respectability’; her dress ‘was a sign’ that she ‘had not been contaminated by the impurities of Aboriginal life’ (McGuire, ‘Legend of the goodfella missus…’, p.207).
- Bates's references to cannibalism may be compared with the self-dramatisation of the Norwegian zoologist Carl Lumholtz in his travelogue called Among Cannibals, cited by Geoffrey Blainey in Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1975, p.112.
- Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines…, p.189.
- ibid, p.190.
- Nolan, Outback, p.213.
- ibid, p.216.
- Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines…, p.144.
- Nolan, Outback, p.214.
- Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines…, p.155.
- Nolan, Outback, p.215. She continues: ‘There were not sufficient people to assist with prudence, understanding and infinite patience, the gradual merging of two so different and incompatible ways of life’ (p.215).
- Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines…, pp.142–43. Note, however, her assumption of Celtic superiority: ‘It is impossible to describe these songs adequately even when one is familiar with the trend of thought, daily life and speech and the cadences natural to the expression of aboriginal[sic] emotion. If you are a Celt you can sense what the singer is unable to express, and feel the varied emotions passing through him. Subjects that have lent themselves to epics in other lands can only be rendered by the aborigine[sic] in a crude sentence’ (ibid, p.143).
- ibid, p.237.
- ibid, p.243.
- Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines…, facing p.132.
- ibid, facing p.186.
- M. Gilchrist, Nolan at Lanyon, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1976, catalogue, p.38 (article and photograph from the Melbourne Herald, 16 July 1946). See also S. Carroll, ‘The Aunt's Story’, Age (Melbourne), 30 January 1999, Extra/ Features, p.5.
- Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines…, p.228.
- ibid, facing p.132.
- Nolan, Outback, pp.220, 215.
- ibid, p.57. These words echo the ‘Aboriginal saying’ quoted at the beginning of the book, ‘He who loses his dreaming is lost’ (ibid, p.6).
- ibid, p.214.
- Compare the interpretation of Sidney Nolan's purposes and cultural limitations by M.E. McGuire in ‘Whiteman's walkabout’, Meanjin, vol.52, no.3, 1993, pp.517–25.
- Brian Adams, Sidney Nolan. Such is Life, A Biography, Melbourne: Hutchinson, 1987, p.113.
- See Barry Smith, ‘George Johnston's Anzac. The role of Sidney Nolan and Peter Finch’, Quadrant, June 1977, p.66; Smith suggests that the face of the Anzac on the cover of Johnston's My Brother Jack ‘seems to be Sidney Nolan's face’ (p.67).
- Clark, Sidney Nolan, p.170.
- Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines…, p.139.
- ibid, p.143.