Fred Williams in the You Yangs

John McDonald | johnmcdonald.com | 21st September 2017

Unlike colonial era artists Fred Williams didn’t think of Mother England when observing Australia’s landscape. Its defining character, for him, was a “random scatter of elements with no focal point”. And he deployed the vocabulary of abstraction to express its spaciousness. The result was revolutionary – “From the oldest landscape in the world … something we’d never seen before.” Background on the artist is here.