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TEACHERS’RESOURCES RECOMMENDED FOR Lower and upper primary CONTENTS 1. Plot summary 1 2. About the author 3 3. Interview with the author 3 4. About the illustrator 4 5. Interview with the illustrator 4 6. Pre-reading questions 5 7. Key study topics 6 8. Other books in this series 9 9. Worksheets 10 KEY CURRICULUM AREAS Learning areas: History, English, Literacy THEMES Meet Sidney Nolan Australian History Art history Written by Yvonne Mes Australian identity Illustrated by Sandra Eterović PREPARED BY Random House Australia PLOT SUMMARY PUBLICATION DETAILS Sidney Nolan was born in Melbourne in 1917. His ISBN: 9780857589798 (hardback) grandfather told him stories of his time as a police ISBN: 9780857985910 (ebook) officer trying to catch the bushranger Ned Kelly – stories that made a lasting impression on young These notes may be reproduced free of charge for Sidney. use and study within schools but they may not be reproduced (either in whole or in part) and offered for commercial sale. Nolan left school at 14 to study art, and from 16 he worked in the art department of a hat factory. Bored Visit www.randomhouse.com.au/teachers for with the work, he again began studying art. Although information on other Random House Australia he was not conscientious at college, he read widely teachers’ resources and great books for the at the public library. He was captivated by the classroom, and to sign up for our Teachers’ modernist movement, loved philosophy and eNewsletter. literature, and considered becoming a poet. Copyright © Random House Australia 2015 Modernism was slow to gain momentum in Australia, and Nolan was desperate to travel to Europe to continue learning and developing his own art. He attempted to raise the funds to travel, and approached the art patron John Reed for help. Reed refused to Nolan’s request for money money, but he and his wife Sunday saw potential in Nolan’s art folio. They invited him to dinner at their home, Heide, in outer Melbourne. At Heide, Nolan was relieved and delighted to meet likeminded people but his happy days were numbered. WWII had broken out and Nolan was conscripted to serve in the local army, guarding food supplies around Dimboola, in country Victoria. Meet Sidney Nolan Yvonne Mes & Sandra Eterović Although he disliked being in the army, he loved the publisher Max Harris. Nolan married Elizabeth landscape and painted whenever he could. Nolan’s Paterson but, shortly after the birth of their hand was injured while in service, and at an army daughter, the couple separated and Nolan moved in hospital he met returned soldiers. He was horrified to Heide in 1941. Sunday Reed and Sidney Nolan by their stories of fighting in the war and anxious had a love affair that last many years, which John that he too could be sent to fight. He tried to be Reed reluctantly tolerated. discharged from the army. When his attempt failed, he went absent without leave (AWOL) and assumed With WWII raging in Europe and the Pacific, many the name Robin Murray. Although they were Australian men were conscripted into local military unhappy with the deception, the Reeds helped Nolan service. At the time, conscripts could only be made hide out at Heide and in a studio in Parkville, to serve locally; only volunteers could be sent to Melbourne. fight on overseas service. However, after WWI New Guinea had been classed an Australian territory, Between 1945–1947, Nolan painted 27 works at which meant conscripted soldiers could be sent to Heide featuring an abstracted Ned Kelly form, as New Guinea. This became necessary as Japanese well as scenes from Kelly’s life. The work was forces invaded many areas of the Pacific, including painted in a faux-naive style and combined a stark, New Guinea. Japanese planes bombed Darwin in modern rendering of the Australian landscape, and 1942 and a Japanese submarine entered Sydney Ned Kelly as a persecuted outsider. Nolan left the Harbour the same year – Australians had never Kelly series with the Reeds at Heide, and began before felt that a world war was so close to them. travelling around Australia, painting the landscape. While still serving in the army, Nolan had continued In 1948, the Reeds showed the Kelly series in his contact with Sunday Reed and the Heide Circle. Melbourne, to mixed success. The Reeds arranged to He was involved in Max Harris’s modernist group show the series in Paris, where Nolan’s work was and journal, both named Angry Penguins. In 1944, received more enthusiastically. The following year, two poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, art historian Sir Kenneth Clark offered to support concocted a tale of a modernist poet, ‘Ern Malley’, Nolan if he moved to London. In 1950, Nolan finally who had died young and whose writing had been reached Europe, and began to find wide recognition discovered by his sister. In one day, they wrote a for his work. series of ‘nonsense’ poems intended to mock the style of modernist poetry. The poems were sent to FURTHER BACKGROUND Max Harris, who admired the ‘fake’ poems and published them in an edition of Angry Penguins. INFORMATION FOR TEACHERS Nolan’s artwork featured on the edition’s cover. When the hoax was revealed, the Angry Penguins Modernism was a loose movement with many were ridiculed and even charged with publishing offshoots. Modernism emerged in response to a ‘obscene’ material. variety of social changes and events: the rise of industrialisation, the growth of modern cities, and In the midst of the Ern Malley hoax, Nolan’s anxiety widespread moves away from traditional rural about deserting the army, and his affair with Sunday industries; political revolution, such as in France; Reed, Nolan’s childhood fascination with Ned Kelly and later the violence and destruction of WWI. If re-emerged. In later life Nolan dropped hints that society had changed so much because of these the Kelly series was a metaphor for his own events, modernists questioned whether society’s old experiences, but he would not say any more. rules, assumptions and even religions were still relevant. Modernists were willing to challenge and Nolan’s affair with Sunday ended unhappily and he reject conventional (or accepted) forms of art and severed the friendship with the Reeds in 1947, thinking and try to find new ways to communicate leaving the Kelly pictures at Heide. In 1948 Nolan ideas and images. married John Reed’s sister, Cynthia, and adopted her daughter, Jinx. Together the family travelled Heide was a base for an informal group of artists, throughout Australia as Nolan sought new subjects known as the Heide Circle. Nolan’s Heide to paint. Some of Nolan’s works were inspired by contemporaries included Albert Tucker and Joy flights over central Australia, which allowed him to Hester, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval and poet and paint aerial perspectives of the landscape. There’s so much more at randomhouse.com.au/teachers 2 Meet Sidney Nolan Yvonne Mes & Sandra Eterović By the 1950s and 1960s, Australian viewers were http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/ more receptive to modernism and proud of Nolan’s works/?artist_id=nolan-sidney&page=1 and international success. The Ned Kelly paintings http://nga.gov.au/COLLECTIONS/AUSTRALIA/ resonated with many Australians due to the GALLERY.cfm?DisplayGal=13 Information about Heide, which is now a changing politics and self-image of the country in modern art gallery, and Nolan’s art produced the twentieth century. Post-WWII, Australians at Heide: http://www.heide.com.au/ and increasingly looked beyond white Australia’s http://www.heide.com.au/assets/files/Educati traditional ties with the British Empire. Australia’s on/UnmaskedSidney-Nolan-and-Ned-Kelly- self-image was as a young, modern, independent 19501.pdf country. Changes in technology and increasingly diverse immigration also allowed Australians to ABOUT THE AUTHOR experience a wider range of cultural influences. The real Ned Kelly had been an Irish-Australian outlaw at Yvonne Mes is a children's author and illustrator. odds with the more powerful and wealthy British- She writes short stories, picture books and junior Australian establishment. As a symbol, Ned Kelly novels. Yvonne has a Bachelor of Children's Services, was relevant to many people who viewed Australia a Certificate in Professional Children's Writing, and a as breaking away from old politics and class systems. Certificate IV in Visual Arts and Crafts. At the same time, Sidney Nolan’s rapid, self-taught Yvonne coordinates Write Links, the Brisbane style of painting, his simplified forms and moodily or children's writers and illustrators group, and is vice boldly coloured landscapes contrasted with previous president of Book Links QLD (Inc.) She writes eras of Australian landscape art. The first European reviews for Buzz Words magazine and is a member of and British artists to paint Australia’s flora and fauna SCBWI, CBCA, Book Links and the ASA. sometimes struggled not to make their subjects look like the very different landscapes and animals of Yvonne grew up in Amsterdam but has made her their homelands. The early 19th century fashion for home in Australia. She has two decades experience Romanticism, in which the natural environment was working with children of all ages, abilities, many often made to look ‘heroic’ according to the era’s cultures and in various settings. tastes, also influenced the disparity between the reality of Australia and the European-style representations: the colours were muted, the light INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR soft, the plants looked like European ones and the 1. Can you tell us a little bit about your research for marsupials sometimes resembled European animals this project and the resources you used? such as badgers, cats, stoats, mice and rabbits.