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

English-born Donald Murray (1908-1988) met Donald Friend during the 1930s while working as an artists’ model at Dattilo Rubbo’s Rowe Street studio. 


From 1938 to 1940 Friend was chief adviser to The Ogoga of Ikerre in Nigeria, Africa, where he began his life-long passion for collecting indigenous art and artefacts and living in exotic places. 


In 1956 Donald Friend compiled Hillendia, an illustrated social history of the town published by Sydney Ure Smith.


In 1967, the town of Hill End was declared a historic site, based on the significance of the artists who worked there, as well as the gold rush history commemorated in the surviving natural and built environment of the region.