On the Wallaby Track
Frederick McCubbin (1855 to 1917) · 1896
In a clearing of pale, thin gum trees a woman sits on the ground with a baby asleep in her lap, her hat pushed back and her face tired, while a man in shirtsleeves crouches nearby coaxing a fire under a billy can. Their swags and a few possessions lie beside them. The light is the soft grey gold of a Victorian afternoon, and the trees seem to go on for ever behind the little family. The wide canvas gives them room, and the silence of the bush surrounds them.
On the wallaby track was the expression for tramping the countryside looking for work, a common fate in the depression of the 1890s. McCubbin painted the picture near his home at Blackburn outside Melbourne, using his wife Annie and their son as models and a neighbour as the man with the billy. Look at how the figures are placed low and off centre so that the landscape dominates, and at the handling of the trees, built from feathery vertical strokes that dissolve into the haze. The colours are muted, closer to the grey greens of the real bush than the bright light of Streeton's Sydney paintings.
The gallery bought the painting in 1897. It became one of the most loved images in Australia, a picture of hardship treated with dignity, and it fixed the idea of the bush as a place of endurance and family. McCubbin, the quietest of the Heidelberg painters, spent his whole life in and around Melbourne and taught at the National Gallery school there for decades; this is his largest and best known work outside Victoria.
Did You Know? McCubbin's wife Annie and their baby son posed for the mother and child, in the bush near the family's home at Blackburn.
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