In this delicate watercolour, Long captured a lonely, dream-like landscape, and created an idyllic image. He did so through his use of soft, pastel colours and the blurred depiction of the tall spindly gums silhouetted against the sky. The trees are painted almost calligraphically.
In capturing the poetry of place, Long may have recalled the verse of the Australian poet Henry Kendall, who wrote about the Narara area in ‘The names upon a stone’, published
in Songs from the mountains (1880):

Narrara of the waterfalls,/ The darling of the hills,/ Whose home is under mountain walls/ By many-luted rills!/ … There was a rock-pool in a glen/ Beyond Narrara’s sands;/ The mountains shut it in from men/ In flowerful fairy lands;/
But once we found its dwelling-place –/ The lovely and the lone –/ And, in a dream, I stooped to trace/ Our names upon a stone.

Inspired by Kendall, groups of artists regularly made weekend trips to Narara, a suburb of the Central Coast region of New South Wales, about four kilometres north of Gosford which, at that time, largely consisted of orchards and small, mixed farms. But Long had a personal reason for visiting the Gosford area as his sister Eliza Parr and her husband and family lived there.

Long sent home a number of images of Narara Creek from London in 1915, some of which he backdated to the time he was living in Australia. The number ‘234A’ inscribed on the back of this watercolour indicates it is a work that Long sent to Australia in 1916, and backdated to ‘1909’. The soft, pastel colours and decorative treatment of the trees are typical of Long’s work of 1916–17. The watercolour has been re-dated on this basis.

In this delicate watercolour, Long captured a lonely, dream-like landscape, and created an idyllic image. He did so through his use of soft, pastel colours and the blurred depiction of the tall spindly gums silhouetted against the sky. The trees are painted almost calligraphically.
In capturing the poetry of place, Long may have recalled the verse of the Australian poet Henry Kendall, who wrote about the Narara area in ‘The names upon a stone’, published
in Songs from the mountains (1880):

Narrara of the waterfalls,/ The darling of the hills,/ Whose home is under mountain walls/ By many-luted rills!/ … There was a rock-pool in a glen/ Beyond Narrara’s sands;/ The mountains shut it in from men/ In flowerful fairy lands;/
But once we found its dwelling-place –/ The lovely and the lone –/ And, in a dream, I stooped to trace/ Our names upon a stone.

Inspired by Kendall, groups of artists regularly made weekend trips to Narara, a suburb of the Central Coast region of New South Wales, about four kilometres north of Gosford which, at that time, largely consisted of orchards and small, mixed farms. But Long had a personal reason for visiting the Gosford area as his sister Eliza Parr and her husband and family lived there.

Long sent home a number of images of Narara Creek from London in 1915, some of which he backdated to the time he was living in Australia. The number ‘234A’ inscribed on the back of this watercolour indicates it is a work that Long sent to Australia in 1916, and backdated to ‘1909’. The soft, pastel colours and decorative treatment of the trees are typical of Long’s work of 1916–17. The watercolour has been re-dated on this basis.