THE STATION AND ART 285 



Gippsland ; and Mr. Lister-Lister, President of the 

 Royal Art Society of New South Wales, has seen, as 

 no other eye before his had seen, the Golden Splendour 

 of the Bush. All of such scenes are to be found within 

 the compass of a cattle- walk or a sheep-run, but the 

 distinctively pastoral landscape has not been forgotten. 

 A typical such picture was to be seen in the 1910 

 Exhibition of the Royal Art Society in Sydney. Neither 

 sheep nor cattle, it is true, are to be there in the painting 

 named, " A Type of a Coming Nation and a Land of 

 Cattle and Sheep," but only a grizzled bushman, stand- 

 ing beside his horse and dog, and gazing at the vast 

 expanse of sunbrowned herbage. There is little in 

 the picture, it may seem, and Darwin, seventy years 

 ago, found little in the scene. Yet on those brown 

 pastures are reared more than a hundred millions of 

 sheep, and out of them has come the greatest pastoral 

 industry in the world. 



As is to be expected in a young country, where art 

 must traverse the same stages as it passed through 

 in older lands, Australian art is still weak in figure- 

 painting. Nevertheless, it has been successfully 

 achieved by some of the more eminent Australian 

 painters. The genre pictures of Mr. Tom Roberts are 

 understood to be his most characteristic work, and they 

 render various aspects of Bush life with truth and 

 energy. He is still largely inorganic, or, if animal 

 and human, at best muscular, as when he depicts the 

 effects of heat on a dusty Bush road, the rush of a 

 flock of thirsty sheep to a water-hole, or the strenuous 

 activity of sheep-shearing. Mr. Fred McCubbin has 

 delineated, with a pathos that reminds us of Millet, 

 the hard struggles of the pioneer Avith Nature. And 

 Mr. George Lambert, in " Across the Black Soil 

 Plains," powerfully exhibits a team of straining horses 

 pulling a wool- waggon.* Nor should the highly skilled 

 photographic artists of the weekly journals be left out 

 of account. The station-scenes and landscapes artisti- 

 * li. E., Sydney Morning Herald. 



