SIDNEY NOLAN

The Troopers enquired at the homestead as to whereabouts of the outlaws, but were told to ask the old man who was up bathing in the dam.¹

Sidney Nolan chose these words to describe The Questioning 1947, a painting that is part of the 1946-47 suite of Ned Kelly paintings held in the National Gallery of Australia. The text is from the 1881 Royal Commission report of the police in pursuit of the Kelly gang.

Nolan was also to add footnotes for The Questioning as he did for each of the paintings. The police did not question the old man, as they knew he would misdirect them, but thought the wife could be bluffed, but she was shrewd and well trained and like a good wife would misdirect them. My uncle Jack used to wash himself with a bar of laundry soap in the dam, Velvet Soap, in fact.²

Ned Kelly is the central and enduring theme of Sidney Nolans art and a subject he would return to, most significantly in the mid-fifties, and variously in the following years. The Questioning 1966 is an iteration of the bathing man. The bather also appeared in The Questioning 1954 which closely reworks the original in format and in colour. The Questioning, our present lot, is different in composition and tone. Nolan is working with the brown-ochre palette of the mid-sixties which he used in larger Kelly paintings of the period. Our bathing man is at the centre of the composition, his naked body wet to the knees, and his arms, at work, washing his body. The trees that edge the dam reflect in the water and beyond are touches of green and a sky that rings truly blue.

The Questioning marks a return to the Kelly series. It is fascinating to see how Nolan reworks an image and extraordinary to see how durable and important The Questioning is. The last words on the Kelly paintings are those of Bryan Robertson:

These were the most fully integrated paintings to come from Nolan so far: fresh and vivacious, with a poetic intensity of great depth and feeling. They also combined lyrical elements with some of the pathos of knockabout farce in a new and extraordinary way. The tragedy of the Kelly Story was in the paintings, undiminished; but the means taken to underline this tragedy were unorthodox and fantastic. Nolans ability to register an image in the lightest and most insubstantial manner became clear.³

Footnotes
1. Lynn, E. & Semler, B. (ed.), Sidney Nolans Ned Kelly Paintings and Drawings from the Australian National Gallery, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1985, p.40
2. Ibid., p.40
3. Clark, K., McGuiness, C. & Robertson, B., Sidney Nolan, Thames & Hudson, London, 1961, p.43

Brett Ballard