Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Hill End, 1947

Hill End, 1947

Ink and wash on wove paper

SV / 299


In 1947, the central NSW gold-mining towns of Hill End and Sofala inspired Australian artists Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale to create some of their best known landscape paintings.

Drawn by media reports that such towns were stuck in a time warp and virtually extinct, Friend and Drysdale drove to Hill End and Sofala in early August. What they found were small, die-hard communities surrounded by an eerie, evocative, lunar-like landscape marked by 19th century goldfields excavations that would provoke some of 20th century Australian arts’ most enduring imagery.

Margot Riley, 2015

Beyer’s cottage

This view shows Beyer’s cottage with the two-storeyed Australian Joint Stock Bank on the left looking across to St Paul’s Presbyterian Church on Beyer’s Avenue, careful attention is given to rendering the vernacular elements in the landscape. Remnants of this once fabulous gold-rush town – its ramshackle buildings, sheds, and fences – are orchestrated in an ensemble of shrubbery, rocks and gully to create a poetic scene that is a total landscape.