Stratford only had to look around to make meaningful juxtapositions of past and present. The main theme is nature and landscape, though this extends to the inhabitants and their recreations. On a tragic note, Robert Dowling's Minjah in the Old Time from 1856 records the displaced Aboriginal community huddled under the exploitative patronage of colonial culture. Against this, Brian Dunlop's Eumeralla 6 of 1993 shows the artist Fiona Clarke sitting beneath a blanket in a bare and bright studio, giving on to the now-cultivated landscape that Clarke's ancestors once knew through the Dreaming. Ironically, the cultivating and colonising impulse of the settlers would always have struck 19th-century artists as natural.
Rude nature is displaced, but a greater instinct is fulfilled.
Against the air of geographical surveying of Eugene von Guerard's Tower Hill of 1855, contemporary artists prefer historical surveying, as in Ruth Johnstone's Shire of Belfast from 1993, which uncovers the European associations of the local site. Although it might have lost visual coherence, the theme of the exhibition could have been brought forward to include other genres. Installation artists treat aspects of nature and culture that often escape the picture-making habits of painters and printmakers. The strangely totemic life-forms merge animal and vegetable, taking elements of plants and camouflaged creatures and standing in slithery, spinal rhythms, massed in clumps suggesting the thatch of hair or a clutch of polyps. The more we understand nature through genetics, the more it seems creepy and alien.