Hans HEYSEN
Germany 1877 – Australia 1968
Australia from 1884; Europe, England 1899-1903

Patawarta: land of the Oratunga 1929
oil on canvas
66.2 (h) x 92.0 (w) cm
M.J.M Carter AO Collection 1969, Art Gallery of South Australia

There could not be a more striking contrast than that between the fertile landscapes of the extremely pretty Adelaide Hills and the vast open spaces of the Flinders Ranges. The oil painting Patawarta: Land of the Oratunga 1929 depicts a harsh and uninhabitable land, where all form of life is diminished except for a few blackened skeletal trees in the foreground. Rugged and uninviting hill formations offer no signs of life. In Heysen’s words, the undulating forms sweep back and forth like ‘arrested waves on the verge of breaking’[1] as if warning of the danger they hold. It is not a landscape with which the average Australian viewer of the late 1920s was familiar, nor one could they relate to.

© Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2008
Andrews, Hans Heysen, exhibition book, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2008, p 110

[1] Heysen letter to Lionel Lindsay, 1928; also quoted in Lindsay, Art in Australia, third series, no 24, June 1928 (unpaginated)