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Now 61, Dobell quit school at 14 determined to become a cartoonist, but spent less time drawing than he did washing windows and running errands. He became an architect's apprentice, later studied art in Sydney; at 29, he won a small traveling grant which he used to study at the University of London's Slade School of Fine Art. Money was so scarce in Depression London, he recalls, that "I considered myself lucky to get one meal of plain bread every three days." To help pay his rent, he shared his room with a burglar ("I used the bed at night when he went to work"). Paid as little as $16 a portrait before winning his first Archibald Prize, Dobell recently completed a number of works commissioned by the Duke of Edinburgh to hang in the royal collection at Windsor Castle.
Wonderful Mateship. If Dobell strips away the veneer of personality, Russell Drysdale, 48, skins the desiccated outback to the bone. Astringent portraits of the eroded bush such as Road with Rocks (see color) jolt Australians into sharp awareness of the harsh existence in the interior. His outback is a silent,, lonely world of baking heat and glittering stars; his children are stringy, his aborigines stoic, his trees skeletal. In his dusty frontier towns, iron-roofed shanties with peeling walls rise like castles of desolation. Here a pubkeeper may charge one shilling for any drink in the house because "it makes it bloody easier for adding."
Admits one city dweller: "Drysdale compels us to see what we want to ignore." This week, in testimony to his success Sydney's New South Wales Gallery is opening the biggest Drysdale exhibit ever shown: no paintings since 1937 from collections in three countries.
Drysdale's affection for the outback comes naturally. Raised on his family's 5,000-acre sheep station in New South Wales, he quit school at 18 and hired on as a "jackeroo" (apprentice manager) at a sheep station, stalked crocodiles and wild boar, began sketching outback scenes when confined to a hospital in 1932. Three years later, he quit the "wonderful mateship" of sheep raising to enroll in art school, fearful that at 23 he had embarked on an art career too late. In retrospect, Drysdale feels that his late start helped him: "I'd had no close association or interest in art in my early youth, therefore I had no prejudices."
Leda and the Swan. Unlike Dobell and Drysdale, Sidney Nolan, 43, is an expatriate, headquartered in London. But intellectually and emotionally, he remains attached to Australia, says: "It contains all the sources of one's energy." In such landscapes as Greek Harbor (see color) Nolan reveals his obsession with the surrealistic qualities of the outback. "It's a landscape as old as Genesis," he says. "It looks like the bottom of the sea."
Nolan was not content to be a land scape painter. "I suddenly felt the need to fill up my pictures," he explains. "Australian landscape is very bare and my paintings needed peopling. I dug into the past to find myths that explained the present." Over the menacing backdrop of the outback, he superimposed folk heroes of the bush—badmen, aborigines and fortune seekers.