This is Roberts’ most unusual painting, in both composition and mood; completed just before his 70th birthday. The clamourous colour and light offer an exact effect, observed at a stone quarry facing due north on a cliff above the sea on a Tasmanian east-coast island, at midday in late summer. Most of what we see is the aftermath of blasting: a visual crackle of small-scale fallen rocks, centre foreground that echoes the noise of explosives. More significant, our gaze rise upwards across a rosy-yellow rock face to enter clear blue zenith air, and then todive back along a fast-descending earth-sky edge and into a void beyond the frame. The overall composition is a great zigzag.