Pople won the Glover Prize for landscape painting in March 2012 with a work that included the figure of Martin Bryant, the convicted perpetrator of the Port Arthur Massacre in the foreground of the landscape of Port Arthur. Later in that year, a work entitled "Degas's Night" which included Degas' sculpture "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years" on the background of red-light district in Darlinghurst, New South Wales was also the cause of controversy.