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

I find a strange island sometimes where ghosts of ancient glories linger, where the winds and the flowers are sweet and the people are still gentle and smiling, where man is conscious of his grandeur and is content to live simply in harmony with the forces around and within him. Yet if we found this island we would destroy it in a month. Ray Crooke 19491 ‘Kingfisher’, Thursday Island marks the beginning of Ray Crooke’s longstanding interest in painting the people and landscapes of Far North Queensland and the Pacific. The work was painted after Crooke’s 1949 visit to the Torres Strait where he stayed for several months on Thursday Island (Waiben) working as a cook, labourer and trochus-shell diver. Crooke first visited the Torres Strait and Thursday Island in 1943 as a soldier with the Australian Army. The artist enlisted in 1940 and during the war travelled extensively throughout Far North Queensland and the Pacific. For his first stay on Thursday Island soldiers were billeted in the abandoned Federal