This view from Roberts’ property at Kallista conveys a joyous response to his environment. Six tall trees in the centre of the painting provide a strong structural element through which the landscape is viewed. However, in depicting three of these white-trunked eucalypts as dead, Roberts showed his hand as a conservationist and directed attention to the way trees were being destroyed at that time in rural Victoria. In the summers of 1919 and 1920 bushfires had burned large tracts of rural Victoria and, in 1920, they threatened the town of Sassafras (later renamed Kallista), in the Dandenong Ranges, 45 kilometres east of Melbourne.