Fire's On
Arthur Streeton (1867 to 1943) · 1891
A tall canvas filled with a hillside of hot rock and dead trees under a white summer sky, cut across by the dark mouth of a railway tunnel. Below it, small figures carry a body on a stretcher away from the cutting; a blast has just gone off and a worker has been killed. The title is the warning shout the navvies gave before lighting the fuse. It is at once a landscape of blinding heat and a record of an accident, and Streeton made no attempt to soften either.
Streeton was twenty four when he camped beside the Lapstone tunnel works in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney in the summer of 1891, painting the cutting through the sandstone. The vertical format and the high horizon push the eye up the slope, and the painting is built from broad, confident slabs of pale ochre, pink and blue laid on quickly in the sun. Look at the tree trunks, silver and bare, and at the tiny group at the tunnel entrance, the only place where the brush slows down. Streeton wrote to Roberts describing the explosion and the body being carried out; the painting was finished within days.
The gallery bought Fire's On in 1893, and it is regarded as the finest of Streeton's early works and as the moment Australian painting found a way to show the country's glare rather than translating it into the softer light of Europe. It hangs in the Grand Courts near the other Heidelberg school paintings. Its subject, the building of the railway that opened the interior, and its casual death, make it a more complicated picture than its dazzling surface suggests.
Did You Know? Streeton finished the painting within days of witnessing the explosion that killed a railway worker at the tunnel.
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