Sidney Nolan

(Birdsville Hotel) (from ‘Drought photographs’ series) 1952

Sidney Nolan’s ‘Drought photographs’ series from 1952 captures Australia’s dry and deserted rural heartland.

Nolan was an avid and innovative photographer, even creating his own wide-angle camera to capture the panoramic qualities of the outback. Despite continuing to take photographs, this was the only series Nolan intended for exhibition. It was commissioned by The Courier-Mail to document one of the worst droughts in the history of far north Queensland, but the images were deemed too graphic for display by the newspaper and never published.

On Nolan’s first trip to the Australian outback from June to September 1949, he took hundreds of photographs of trees, buildings and dusty figures that later became important motifs in his famed ‘Ned Kelly’ (1946–47 and 1954–56) and ‘Central Australia’ (1949–1953) series of paintings. This image of the iconic Birdsville Hotel is saturated with light, providing sharp contrasts to the shade created by the building’s awning.

Nolan’s close-up of the hotel’s frontage simultaneously obliterates and replaces the landscape’s horizon line, emphasising its importance to the town. It also reflects that sense of the panoramic, which Nolan explored in his outback images.