With its warm sky that appears to be thick with dust, this image conjures up an Australian west wind — the slow, hot, dusty wind, which brings fatigue and summer lethargy. Indeed, in composing the sky, Long may have had in mind lines from Christopher Brennan’s poem, ‘The wanderer’ (1902):

But a bitter wind came out of the yellow-pale west/ and my heart is shaken and fill’d with its triumphing cry:/ You shall find neither home nor rest: for ever you roam/ with stars as they drift and wilful fates of the sky!

There is in the painting, as in the poem, a pale-yellow sky, and we can easily imagine this young Spirit of the West Wind, playing her hypnotic pipe and forever roaming. This West Wind is dressed in an ‘invisible’ grey gown, with her billowing sleeves and the upward sweep of her skirt suggesting the movement of the wind. And she is absorbed in enticing the nearby magpies into the air with the music of her pipe. Behind her, the vertical, Art Nouveau trunks of the trees provide a contrast to her sweeping form, and offer an element of stability to the scene.

The West Wind was certainly a subject of considerable interest to Long, as he painted three versions of this image, first showing a watercolour version in the ‘Society of Artists exhibition’ in 1907 (245). The West Wind is also a Spirit of nature — a cousin to Long’s other musical pipe playing enchantresses who have power over birds, as visualised in The Spirit of the plains (cat 9) and The music lesson (cat 19).

With its warm sky that appears to be thick with dust, this image conjures up an Australian west wind — the slow, hot, dusty wind, which brings fatigue and summer lethargy. Indeed, in composing the sky, Long may have had in mind lines from Christopher Brennan’s poem, ‘The wanderer’ (1902):

But a bitter wind came out of the yellow-pale west/ and my heart is shaken and fill’d with its triumphing cry:/ You shall find neither home nor rest: for ever you roam/ with stars as they drift and wilful fates of the sky!

There is in the painting, as in the poem, a pale-yellow sky, and we can easily imagine this young Spirit of the West Wind, playing her hypnotic pipe and forever roaming. This West Wind is dressed in an ‘invisible’ grey gown, with her billowing sleeves and the upward sweep of her skirt suggesting the movement of the wind. And she is absorbed in enticing the nearby magpies into the air with the music of her pipe. Behind her, the vertical, Art Nouveau trunks of the trees provide a contrast to her sweeping form, and offer an element of stability to the scene.

The West Wind was certainly a subject of considerable interest to Long, as he painted three versions of this image, first showing a watercolour version in the ‘Society of Artists exhibition’ in 1907 (245). The West Wind is also a Spirit of nature — a cousin to Long’s other musical pipe playing enchantresses who have power over birds, as visualised in The Spirit of the plains (cat 9) and The music lesson (cat 19).