Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The Cynthia Nolan Collection, until 1976
Charles Osborne Collection, London
Sotheby's, Sydney, 29 November 1993, lot 184
Private collection, Brisbane
Joel Fine Art, Melbourne, 16 October 2006, lot 82a
Private collection Melbourne

EXHIBITED
Institute of Contemporary Arts, Poetry International Festival, London, 19 - 24 June 1972

LITERATURE
Andrew Turley, A Day by Day Guide to the Adelaide Ladies, Sydney, 2016, pp. 100-101 (illus. and front cover)
P. Genoni & T. Dalziell, 'From the Origins of Gallipoli to an Orange Head: Incidents in the Friendship between Sidney Nolan and George Johnston', Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 45, Issue 1, 2021, p. 76-93 (illus.)


The present work, belongs to a group of 9 paintings within the Adelaide Ladies series that Andrew Turley, author of A Day by Day Guide to the Adelaide Ladies, described as being 'based on early memories, reawakened by Sidney's journey to the Adelaide Festival through Dimboola in Victoria's west. The Wimmera region, and more specifically Dimboola, was where he served in the military from 1942 to 1944 and where the first seeds of the Adelaide series were sown. He remembered "Wimmera farmers... you saw them at the saleyards looking woebegone and dry. You would also see the girls at sales, but more often at country shows looking at the beasts and looking at the men, wondering which was the better and which was the worse". The epitomised the dried, sad, dressed-up country woman look he was trying to capture in 1964.

When Sidney stopped in Dimboola, heading south with Russell Drysdale and Hal Missingham on February 24th 1964, he recalled faces from 20 years before and wrote to Cynthia: "Before, the population was 2,000 and now it is just the same. Almost all of the faces were familiar but some had been on babies and now they were on men, faces on young girls were now on leather tanned women staring out of foamy floral frocks, not at all part of the desert next door... As the distinctive look of the "Dimboola nine" drew to a close, the 'burning desert next door' and the fierce scrub fires Sidney witnessed there in 1944 flared briefly in 'Orange Head' before his sentiment started to darken'.1

1. Andrew Turley, A Day by Day Guide to the Adelaide Ladies, Sydney, 2016, p. 83