National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Ocean to Outback: Australian Landscape Painting 1850–1950

Inspired by the South Australian copper-mining town, Wallaroo is an atmospheric and mysterious painting. Located on the Spencer Gulf coast, Jeffrey Smart visited Wallaroo in 1951 and made a number of watercolour studies of the town’s buildings, beach, mining sites and breakwater. Returning to his studio, Smart ‘began mixing all the sketches together, trying them this way and that, seeing how they could agree in a large composition–a painting in oils’.1 In Wallaroo two young men carry a boat ashore, one figure stepping out of the water and swinging his arm out to balance himself. The entire composition is an exercise in balance–the stretch of sand meeting the curve of the breakwater, the height of the chimney balancing the weight of the figures. Each element is carefully placed to direct the eye around the painting. There is an eerie stillness to the image, created by the long shadows and abandoned environment. The rusty ochres and greys of the earth and sky contrast with the bright strip of sand and the buil