1.7.1 The Wharncliffe Hours: The Annunciation of the Shepherds
This is both an interesting piece in itself, and also a fine example of much early painting of Nature and our relationship to it.
Books of Hours were beautiful prayer books of medieval times and the Wharncliffe Hours originated in France in the...
1.7.2 View in the Grampians from the top of the Serra Range
This is an enlargement of the central section of this big canvas (69 x 92 cm).
It takes you straight into the great clefts and crags of the mountains near my home in western Victoria, Australia. But, much more than a personal reference, this is...
1.7.3 The Repast of the Lion
With Rousseau I feel that initial responses are misleading. At first, one is carried away by the lushness, all the green vegetation and gorgeous fruits. The style of naïve primitivism also misleads one to a position of almost cartoonish optimism a...
1.7.4 Colonial Evening – Landscape after George Raper
It would be too simplistic to say that an ‘other’, intrinsic Nature can be only either sublime (Von Guerard) or fearful (Rousseau): it can be viewed through many more prisms than those. Philip Davey’s Colonial Evening is quite a different perspect...
1.7.5 The Rabbiters
If Nature is to Philip Davey a dream, an enchanting dream, then to Russell Drysdale it is a nightmare. His paintings of Depression-era Australia are surreal, grotesque and confronting. ‘The bush’ is stripped bare by drought, pests (in this case r...
1.7.6 Explorer Attacked by Parrots
Superficially similar to Drysdale’s crushing surrealism in tone and block-like structure, Albert Tucker’s ‘Explorer Attacked by Parrots’ is more fascinated observation, humourous comment upon a collision: the collision of European myth and civilis...
1.7.7 Red Landscape
Briefly, Williams’ vast, featureless landscapes and earth tones have us back in the fatalistic ‘eternity’ of Drysdale. There is something dwarfing, eternal and elegiac about them as the horizon recedes forever and the semi-aerial view reveals the ...
1.7.8 Princess Parrot/Sceptre Banksia
I feel it wouldn’t be fair to have a section on ‘Nature paintings’ that doesn’t include scientific wildlife and botanical artists. Theirs is such a rich field and they have made such an important contribution to our understanding and appreciation ...
1.7.9 Water Dreaming for Two Children
This image shows us a very different sensibility from that of how ‘the west’ sees Nature. Johnny Tjupurrula was an Aboriginal man who lived at Papunya in Australia’s remote Outback. I am the first to admit that, try as I might, I find interpreting...
Explore Other Sections
1. Build the Nature-Human Relationship
This section is designed to foster appreciation and insight that will – hopefully – lead to novel ways to build a better relationship between human beings and Nature. This section is also atypical ...
2. Reduce Consumption
I hope Reneé Descartes would forgive us for saying that, at least for the modern world, he was wrong. When, in 1637, he said: “I think, therefore I am”, he could not have anticipated that the majo...
3. Replace God of Growth with God of Quality
In a supposedly secular age there has arisen a global religion and god like never before, a religion whose reach and power makes every other belief system before it seem pitiful and insignificant: ...
4. Work, Volunteer, Act for the Environment
What we do in our day-to-day lives can have great impact. Section Four divides up these actions into three groups – Work (4.2 & 4.3), Volunteering (4.4), and Action, e.g. voting, protesting, et...
5. Reduce Population
Even on top of Mt. Everest, in one of the remotest, most difficult places on earth, there is a great traffic-jam of people jostling for position. And yet, ever more vociferously, we deny that overp...
6. Ensure Media Acknowledgement of Environmental Context
The media is one of the three, great ‘poles’ of power in the world (alongside political and corporate power) and how they frame and present ‘the environment’ has a profound effect on how we respond...
7. Stop Further Loss of Natural Habitat and Species
New York is an exciting, mesmerising place. Human culture is extraordinary and often wonderful. Our powers of transformation of the natural world seem limitless. The trouble is, we don’t seem to be...
8. Assist Energy Descent and Transition
Our current energy largesse is an extraordinary ‘gift’, an unprecedented gift of the ages; millions of years to produce and from millions of years ago. Coal, oil and gas, forming...
9. Support New, Environmentally-Aware, Economic Systems
Just as with the previous section – ‘Energy’ – which is, inescapably, all about fossil fuels so pre-eminent and extraordinary has been their dominance and transformation of the world in the last 20...
10. Reduce Wastes to the Rate of Natural Assimilation
Section 10 will attempt to organise this enormous topic by addressing the context and status of pollution in 10.2, before focussing in on air pollution; particularly greenhouse gas pollution and cl...
