AMANDA LAWSON
A Speculative Venture: Contemporary Art, History and Hill End

Writing in his diary on 2 January 1949, Australian artist, Donald Friend (1915–1989), describes the events of the night before:

Last night there was an impromptu dance — I should say a drunken Breughel peasant romp — at the hall to celebrate the New Year. It was improvised suddenly on the spot by those who had not been invited, and were furious at being left out, to a dance in Sofala, to which the lucky ones went in a bus. Later they went round the village gate-stealing… . (Friend 633)

Friend writes from Hill End, an old gold-mining town about 300 kilometres west of Sydney and the dance took place in the 1890s Royal Hall. He first travelled there in August 1947 in the company of fellow artist, Russell Drysdale (1912–1981). The remnants of the gold rush — architectural grandeur, a scarred landscape, abandoned machinery — a small rural community, and cheap property prices provided the perfect location for Friend and his wartime friend and erstwhile lover, Donald Murray, to realise a dream of establishing themselves in the country.

A town character showed us round an old ruined village living in the memory of its former 50,000 inhabitants — and the fabulous tales of gold strikes. Now there are only a handful of rather sordid, jovial mad peasants who live by fossicking and rabbiting … six rooms for 5/- per week … the country, a garden, chickens and fruit trees and so on… . (538)

Friend found Hill End a captivating place to live and work for several years. Drysdale visited regularly and his Hill End works have come to occupy a central place in the canons of mid-twentieth century modernism in Australia, reinvigorating the nationalistic bush myth in the process (Haefliger 11; Hughes 67-68; Wilson 21–24). A flow of painters followed Friend and Drysdale through the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s: to visit Hill End was almost a rite of passage, and landscape the dominant theme.1 The artists who spent time there in the 1950s are often referred to as the Hill End Group, and the town an artists’ colony. The 1994 Art Gallery of New South Wales travelling exhibition, The Artists of Hill End, brought this artistic heritage to wide public attention, sealing its image within Australian modernism and refocusing artists’ attention on the site’s painting traditions.

In contrast to the focus on depicting a quintessential Australian experience which has dominated both the reception of modernist art from Hill End and the work of the Hill End Group and its successors, it can be argued that contemporary art has an important place in researching and interpreting the site of Hill End in ways that are accessible, speculative and open-ended. This article explores how the determinism of the twin mythologies — the artistic and the gold-rush heritages — is questioned through the work of contemporary artists, revealing a multiplicity of ways of engaging with Hill End’s historicity and its landscape. The introduction of artists working in diverse media through a regional artists residency program has added new perspectives to both the landscape painting traditions and the ‘glory day’ historic interpretations of the site. Characterised by an exploratory approach which resists and reveals the fixity of cultural myths and master narratives, the contemporary art movement questions the universalist assumptions that dominated much modernist art.