Reshaping a Serpentine River
In some of the earliest works in the collection, new structures of dams and bridges sit conspicuously above the landscape. These are celebrated with fanfare in works such as Louis Le Breton’s Opening of Fitzroy Bridge, Rockhampton, Queensland 1874, a hand-coloured wood engraving that would have appeared in newspapers across the colony. But what requires closer attention is what artworks can tell us about alterations to the water’s very course. Where chains of waterholes and the braided forms of streams once slowed and held the water, the clearing of vegetation and intentional and accidental widening of banks have allowed water to move off the landscape at an alarming rate.
There are a number of examples of European changes to the passage of water throughout Central Queensland, but none quite so large or well documented as the Fitzroy River.1 This river system is the largest watershed area on the east coast of Australia. Spanning over 140,000 square kilometres, it collects the waters that run through the lands of more than a dozen Aboriginal cultural groups. Tunuba (also spelled Toonooba) is the Darumbal language name for the Fitzroy River, described by Elder Bill Mann as a lifeblood for Darumbal people, being a vital site for hunting and fishing.2 The public artwork Munda-Gadda 2017 by Darumbal artist Raymond Garrett suspends in concrete the fluid form of the Ancestral Being responsible for all the surrounding waters: Munda-Gadda (Rainbow Serpent). Set into a public playground at Rockhampton’s Riverside precinct, his work invites children to play over sections of the Serpent’s body that appear to move below and above the surface.3 In his statement on the work, the artist recounts how Munda-Gadda is responsible for all above-ground and underground water bodies that run through the landscape and the water held in plants. Munda-Gadda is the river Tunuba.4
In her timeline of changes to the Fitzroy River, historian Barbara Webster charts over the first eighty or so years of European settlement the extensive and numerous dredging and dyke-building projects designed to ‘train’ the twisting river to become straighter and deeper to aid the navigation of large vessels. This has involved tens of thousands of tonnes of quarried stone and a similar quantity of dredged spoils, multiple dredging vessels, numerous dykes, pitches, and bank walls stretching more than 30 kilometres (along with ongoing efforts to repair, replace, extend, raise, and reposition them), decades of political debate, countless engineers and surveyors, industrial actions, and the death of at least one labourer.5
Taken together, the outrageous expense and seemingly unending effort required to literally and symbolically reshape Tunuba as the port of Fitzroy seems like an irrational and somewhat hopeless exercise. But this elaborate water scheme, along with many others like it, could in fact be easily rationalised in the name and economics of empire. It was what made it possible for Central Queensland to be absorbed into the expanse of the colonial project: to conquer new markets for the sale of British goods, while setting up new sites of primary production, and exporting its profitable products of meat and wool to Great Britain.
The river, despite its sustenance, richness, and complexity, was thus reduced by the colonial settlers to a single function and value: a waterway. More specifically, it was the means of transport for exporting and importing goods between Central Queensland and other parts of the colony, other British colonies and, of course, Great Britain. The convolutedness of this system of trade made possible by barely navigable waters is captured in the hand-coloured wood engraving Transshipping cargo at Keppel Bay (plate from Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, Sydney, 1886-88) c. 1886 by English-born, Australian-based artist Julian Rossi Ashton. The title tells a story of intermediate destinations through transhipment, and the transfer of people and goods at sea into smaller vessels to help navigate the estuaries and rivers. Produced at the same time—a period that saw the port of Rockhampton become the second-largest in the colony6—and in the same medium of hand-coloured wood engraving, William Fitler’s The wharf, Rockhampton 1886 imagines shipping as a part of genteel modern life, with wharves not a crowded and sleazy site of trade, but a clean and open place for both men and women to promenade around. A photograph taken some thirty years later by Jens Lundager, made into a postcard of Rockhampton, shows the Fitzroy River having seemingly conformed with modern engineering—running in straight parallel with the street. The river vanishes into the distance just as it bends sharply around what is now Norbridge Park. It is pictured in perfect symmetry with the bend of the street running in the opposite direction in the foreground. In this way, the geometry of Lundager’s composition makes the river appear seamlessly integrated with the modern transportation network.
Managing the Waters of Deep Time
The Fitzroy River starts part of its journey in the Carnarvon Range, an important Central Queensland landscape that is the headwater of five significant rivers that flow in multiple directions to reach the coast. Two of these move south-west to connect up with the northernmost reach of the Murray–Darling basin, and make their way out through the interior, ultimately emptying into the Southern Ocean. Another two (the Dawson and the Nagoa, which meets the Comet at Expedition Range to become the Mackenzie) head in the other direction, forming the Fitzroy River, which meets saltwater at Keppel Bay after travelling through Rockhampton. There are also the many smaller bodies of water—of no less significance—of creeks, tributaries, ephemeral channels, and waterholes. The aquifers beneath the sandstone that recharge the Great Artesian Basin are both immense and ancient, telling a story of deep time when the inland area of the continent lay under the sea.
William Robinson, who is known for his artistic dedication to the landscapes that surround his South-East Queensland and Northern New South Wales homes, brings his fern-and-gum rainforest painting style to Central Queensland in Shaded pool, Carnarvon 2008. As confirmed by the work’s title, the sandstone of Carnarvon Gorge is suggested by a small band of red painted into a wall of light-coloured rock. The combination of tree ferns, moss-covered rock, and a small cascading stream point more specifically to a sheltered remnant rainforest section. This imagery places the viewer inside the gorge, looking up and out to where sunlight hits a stand of thin trees. Robinson’s characteristic vertigo-inducing perspective frames the relationship between the steep rocks and the movement of water over time. The tunnelling viewpoint helps our eye trace the circular water flows—moving downwards with the stream, fed by springs formed at impermeable rock layers, before moving upwards as it might through evaporation, and held in the rock shelter by the ferns and moss in the overhang. In this space carved out by water—its once forceful passage archived in rock—there is just enough light, humidity and temperature to give life to a collection of plants that would not exist just metres away.
The absence of water—drought—is perhaps as powerful a symbol as the presence of water. In art filtered through a Western lens, it plays out in familiar romantic images: scorched clay pans, deep fissures through the landscape, ghostly remnants of the vegetation that couldn’t hold on, and the thirsty livestock that mirror the human settler experiences of desperation and displacement. To a Western sensibility, these images are readily accepted as the ‘harsh realities’ of the dryland context of Central Queensland and many other parts of the continent.
Carmen Beezley-Drake is a Rockhampton-based artist who paints local bush scenes with great familiarity and affection. Her gestural abstract forms reference a tradition of Australian modernists working in the landscape genre, most obviously Fred Williams. In The summer dam 1995, cows, kangaroos, and emus are the life that surround the shrinking dam water, where most of the vegetation in the immediate vicinity seems to have failed.
To be able to make continuous use of water inland—where periods of drought can be followed by severe flooding and water sources can be fragile or ephemeral—Aboriginal people have always accounted for extremes.7 The first archaeological excavation on the Dawson River Basin, prompted by an environmental impact study of the Gyranda Wier, presented material evidence of pre-colonial Aboriginal use of the riverine areas of Central Queensland.8 This included implements for bread making from the ground seed of native millet (Panicum decompositum); freshwater mussel shell scatters, middens, remains of fish and freshwater tortoise; the remains of campsites; and numerous cultural items.9 Other archaeological projects have documented a number of Aboriginal fish traps around coastal areas of Central Queensland, and permanent inland weirs have been recorded at river sites, in the form of stone walls and complex organic constructions engineered out of growing vegetation and dead organic matter.10 Some contemporary scholars have observed that Aboriginal people have had a profound influence on Australia’s riverine ecosystems, their knowledge continues to be largely ignored by Western contemporary freshwater management.11
The way land was divided for private ownership under settler pastoralism has made it possible for individuals or companies to use and manage, or mismanage, sections of larger bodies of water. Fencing properties meant that Aboriginal people were effectively cut off from many of their significant water sites. The exception was for those working on properties, where their knowledge was invaluable to pastoralists looking to tap into artesian water sources.12 Squatter appropriation of waterholes was one of the factors that led to violent conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people, and subsequently the ‘dispersal’—a troubling euphemism—of Aboriginal people by the Native Mounted Police.13 The settlers’ livestock both emptied and polluted precious water sources, and reprisals were swift for Aboriginal people seeking to defend them.14 In this way, settler colonial control over water is explicitly entwined with the darkest chapter of our nation’s history, and the pastoral development of Central Queensland has been the stage for some of the most horrific scenes of frontier violence and massacres.
Clearing the Way for Dryland Farming
From the early nineteenth century onwards, European farming practices and mining dramatically accelerated natural rates of erosion in Central Queensland. The most severe consequences have been the creation of deep eroded gullies that had never existed over the millennia of continuous Aboriginal occupation.15 This has largely been the result of sheep and cattle grazing, as well as urban and industrial land clearing, which have together degraded the land and removed the vegetation that is essential to protecting the soil and the banks of rivers and streams. It’s possible that the colonial settlers were simply unaware of the effects their water usage was having on the landscape. However, newspaper reports from the period suggest otherwise: the impacts of transferring European agricultural and herding practices to the very different environmental and geological conditions of Eastern Australia were observed by settlers as early as the 1840s.16
Some of the bucolic pastoral scenes featured in the collection provide some glimpses to the new conditions of a changed landscape by the late nineteenth century, including ones that chronicle time spent in the region in by the relatively unknown British artist Lefevre James Cranstone (1822–1893). Having trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, he skilfully used watercolour or pen and ink to produce genre works that recorded his voyages across three continents—and his eventual immigration to Australia, residing for a period in Central Queensland.17 Cranstone was included in the first and second exhibitions at the Rockhampton School of Arts (1884 and 1885), which presented work brought with him from England as well as depictions of Clermont, where he had been living.18 The handful of his drawings held in the RMOA collection present a selection of unpeopled landscapes around Emu Park, spanning coastal scenes, pasture, and wetlands. His pen-and-ink drawing Lagoon, Emu Park was likely produced in 1888, possibly coinciding with the opening of the Emu Park rail line that year. Immediately surrounding the lagoon to the left and right look to be mangroves, with large clumps of low-lying vegetation in the foreground. A standing dead tree close to the middle of the image draws the eye to the sloped patch of grassland that dominates the background, beginning at the water’s edge—a faint row of short vertical lines suggests this was fenced grazing land. In the century or more since Cranstone painted this scene, the lagoon has been a focus of local wetland revegetation projects that have addressed salt scalding in particular, as a result of vegetation loss and evaporation.19 Another of Cranstone’s pen and ink works, Night scene in a paddock, Emu Park 1885–1888, shows another Emu Park landscape transformed by extensive clearing, presumably for cattle, denuding the ridges and slopes, save for a treed gully that shades the animals’ water source.
The discovery of underground basins in the late nineteenth century encouraged further settlement and grazing in Central Queensland, despite the already noted impacts of drought and overgrazing. Incidentally, it was in search of water that gas was discovered through drilling at Roma in 1899.20 Development intensified following the soldier settler schemes of the mid-twentieth century, which coincided with extensive land clearing under the Brigalow Scheme using a range of methods and equipment, including tractors and chains, ringbarking, war machinery, burning, and aerial weedicides.21 Though initially the pastoral opportunities for Central Queensland were seen as limited to its use as a ‘sheep walk’, water was one of the driving reasons behind the switch from sheep to cattle from the 1860s onwards, after drought and overstocking caused the appearance of burr and spear grass.22 Images of the river contained in the collection add more detail to the story of how agriculture in Central Queensland came to be dominated by livestock. Lundager’s postcard Lakes Creek Works, near Rockhampton c. 1890s depicts the Central Queensland Meat-Preserving Company at Lakes Creek, which connects to the Fitzroy River. Providing the answer to the question of how to make Central Queensland’s growing pastoral industry more profitable, the meatworks purchased livestock from squatters and preserved them in tins, exporting products such as corned beef to London from 1880, and eventually to other European markets.23 They were early to establish a wharf, and chose their site for its proximity to the north bank of Fitzroy River, where most cattle stations were located prior to the construction of a bridge.24 Cattle were also transported from various properties to be fattened on stations before being processed at Lakes Creek, as were sheep from around Central and West Queensland—however, their wool and tallow tended to be more valuable than mutton meat.25
Georgina McDonald’s oil painting from the early part of the twentieth century titled Rowers in the Fitzroy River near the Lakes Creek Meatworks adds further information to Lundager’s photograph on the use of the creek. Unfortunately, not much has been recorded about this local female artist; however, around the time of this painting’s production, McDonald advertised private tuition and art classes at her own “school of drawing and painting” at William Street, Rockhampton.26 By the 1920s, she was living in the Bowen district, with newspapers reporting on her oil paintings skilfully depicting local scenes that she had donated for charity causes. In her painting of Lakes Creek, she chose to include an honest detail that undermines the serenity of the rowing scene: a trail of red. This makes conspicuous the blood drained out from the slaughter yard of the meat works and into the creek. What looks to be wool is piled up on the banks at far right of image, pointing to the possibility that water from the creek was used in many aspects of the operation. A large ship with a foreign flag alludes to the meatworks’ extensive export activities.27
Leaching Colour from the Landscape
The Mount Morgan gold mining settlement is a part of Central Queensland’s colonial water story that continues to play out today. The Dee River runs through the site, which is part of the Fitzroy River catchment. Copper, gold, and silver were mined at Mount Morgan, and its scale made it a significant site nationally and internationally. At one point, it was the largest and most productive gold mine in the world, generating a level of wealth that enabled one of the original mine syndicate members to go on to establish BP.28 It is perhaps therefore not so surprising that the mine is the subject of at least seven artworks in the RMOA collection. A postcard featuring a Jens Lundager photograph, No 5 Dam, Dee River, Mount Morgan c. 1911, is one such work. It documents one of seven dams constructed for the now abandoned mine at the turn of the twentieth century. Its immense scale is registered by the three men sitting cheerfully atop the levee. Less cheerful is the history of the nearby No. 7 dam, which is the largest dam connected to the Dee River, and has been the site of a number of documented cases of acid and heavy metal contamination. The most recent incident, which caused irreversible damage to the river, took place in 2013 when, following heavy rains accompanying ex-Tropical Cyclone Oswald, the dam overflowed into the river, poisoning fish and birds some 55 kilometres downstream.29
Another artwork depicting the mine site and its dams is by artist William Bustard, a resident of South East Queensland who had migrated from Yorkshire in the early 1920s.30 Through his work, he maintained connections to Rockhampton in the mid-twentieth century, including providing instruction to a group ‘expedition’ planned by the Rockhampton Art Fellowship, of which he was patron, alongside local painter Charles Haywood.31 Two paintings in the RMOA collection represent some time Bustard spent in the region in 1948.32
Known for his glass works as well as his paintings, Bustard’s Mount Morgan Gold Mining Company’s mine brings a sensitive appreciation of colour and light to this geologically rich site. His depiction of the mine’s dam is an excellent example of this. More than an ordinary reflection of the open cut mine behind it, the colours he has selected to paint the water is something more like a composition of pure mineral pigments leached from the disturbed rock. The sulphide yellows of acid mine drainage intermingle with the blues and greens of copper minerals—azurite, malachite, and turquoise—which form a distinct film floating between the deep reds, purples, and greys of iron ore. Through his colour choices, the artist is able to accentuate the material continuity between the rock and water. This motif is extended to the smokestacks; grey billows that exhale from the mine works meld with the clouds above, distinct in tone but not in form.
An earlier gouache painting on paper by Daryl Lindsay depicts a distinct phase of the Mount Morgan Gold Mine, just two years before it was redeveloped as an open-cut site. The dulled colours of Lindsay’s scene are in obvious contrast to Bustard’s. Piles of timber in the foreground suggest continual development, possibly for fuel, or extension of the rail line, while the background is partially obscured by the haze of the smokestacks. From a similar period of the mine’s development, and awash with the same smoky tones, is another postcard by Jens Lundager Mount Morgan from Mundic Creek c. 1909, where only buildings and plants are clearly picked out in his hand colouring.
Colour is returned to Mount Morgan many decades later in Melbourne-born, Central Queensland–based artist William Yaxley’s oil painting Mt. Morgan 2011. Using his intuitive style, Yaxley’s bending, inconsistent, aerial perspective presents what looks like a map painted from memory. Lines that represent roads, rail tracks, rows of trees, and the path of water, appear to connect places, not according to scale, but rather, to his subjective emphasis of importance. The central focus is the connection between the dam, the open-cut mine site, and the Dee River. The networks of roads that immediately surround the mine, as well as those of the neighbouring town, appear to split and meander like streams, at times terminating in what looks like green waterholes, but are more likely to be grassed ovals or parks. There are some resonances with the way Bustard uses colour as mineral pigment leached from the landscape. The reds and yellows of the mine site in Yaxley’s work appear to bleed out over the road and into the river. The full length of the river is traced with an acid yellow. Both artists seem to use colour as a way to convey their sympathies and care for the changed landscape, making visible through their representation what is easily frequently overlooked.
Holding the Water in Place
Held in the RMOA collection, Judy Watson’s painting on unstretched canvas Rainbow guardian 1990 invokes the water guardian of the artist’s Waanyi country in north-west Queensland. Originally produced alongside another work fossil 1992–93, now held in the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, the eyelet-suspended work was commissioned by Marcia Langton for exhibition in the windows of Queensland Aboriginal Creations, part of a move to culturally reinvigorate a space for Aboriginal art that previously had a narrow commercial focus.33 Waanyi country is the junction of a number of water passages—channels and gorges—and interconnected Dreaming paths stretching to other parts of the continent in all directions, including to the waters of Central Queensland.34 It is the permanent inland water home of Boodjamulla (Lawn Hill Gorge)—Rainbow Serpent country—an important place of limestone gorges, rivers, creeks, waterholes, and springs. Cultural representations of the Rainbow Serpent, such as in rock art, oversee these water-holding landscapes. Watson has previously observed how ‘permanent’ water is not presumed in Aboriginal cosmogony: the giver of water has the power to take it away again.35 Her own family’s oral history attests to this: in the mid-twentieth century, her grandmother Grace Isaacson asked her mother Mabel Daley about why the water no longer flowed at Lilydale Spring. This formerly perennial water source is fed by the sandstone spring known in Waanyi language as Jingari, where their largest Rainbow Serpent painting at Boodjamulla resides. Daley responded that the “Rainbow had dried it up”.36 Surrounded by pastoral and mining leases, there had been reports of a private landowner having dynamited his property near the spring.
Some Waanyi rock art depicting the Rainbow Serpent has been interpreted as having human attributes and, in one instance, female attributes.37 Standing prominently on the left side of Rainbow guardian is a semi-opaque silhouette bounded by a dotted line, possibly referencing this composite form, as well the artist’s use of the female form to acknowledge her matrilineal cultural heritage. To the right, four concentric lines, one dotted, form an elongated arc that appears to continue a Waanyi visual language of the Rainbow Serpent as bands or arcs of pigment. In a potent dual symbolism, the lines also mark out the ceremonial use of rock shelters as burial chambers.38 A base layer of blue inky marks that seem to well beneath a stratum of deep reds, purples, and grey register the way water dissolves and imprints itself in the limestone of the region, soaking into the groundwater. It is not the gorge-forming rush of the Serpent that the artist has described in relation to another unstretched canvas work from this same decade, Canyon 1997, but more subtle watermarks—water as a patient but powerful solvent.
Navigating the Waters of Change Just as weathered rock recalls the passage of water, so water itself has a memory. There is the memory of equilibrium (water always finds its own level), the memory of continuity (water connects to other water), the memory of journey (water will always find its way). Landscapes affect the flow of water, and the movement of water affects landscapes; their change is continuous and bound together. Artworks in the RMOA collection provide a lens through which we can see the way patterns of water in the landscape have changed over time, both as a result of natural cycles and of dramatic human interventions. In these works, we can observe another profound pattern of change: those of people and their shifting sensibilities towards the lands and waters of Central Queensland. As the museum begins a new chapter in a new location on the Fitzroy River, we might look to the future and ask: what will artworks in the collection fifty years from now reveal about how we relate to water in the landscape?
February 2022
1 Locating and maintaining a reliable supply of water is not just the project of the early colonial settlement, but also the ongoing puzzle of engineering attempted by development and agriculture in Central Queensland. It is at the heart of countless recent schemes devised by politicians to allocate and licence—rather than conserve and preserve—water. For example, the Fairbairn Dam operated by SunWater to supply irrigation for cotton, among other uses; the current Fitzroy Basin Emerald Channel Scheme (see https://www.dnrme.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/1448610/emerald-channel-scheme-operations-manual.pdf); the 2006 Central Queensland Regional Water Supply Strategy, which forecasts declining rainfall trends and increasing water demand in the region and proposes the Nathan Dam (approved in 2017 and operated by SunWater for industrial and mining development, not agricultural use—which would threaten to pollute the Great Barrier Reef), along with major new pipelines and weirs (https://www.gawb.qld.gov.au/documents/40241572/40254757/CQRWSS%20Report.pdf); and the recent political resurrection of the long abandoned 1930s’ Bradfield Scheme imagined to irrigate and ‘drought-proof’ inland Australia.
2 Fitzroy Basin Association, “The Fitzroy River with Billy Mann,” YouTube video, 2:11, posted 30 April 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00ELbpIUa_Y.
3 Raymond Garrett, Rockhampton Discovery Artworks Design Development, 2017, 15.
4 Ibid.
5 Barbara Webster, n.d., A Timeline of Change on the Fitzroy River, 1855 to 1965, Focusing on the Port of Rockhampton, Coastal CRC/CQU Rockhampton, last accessed 11 November 2021, https://library-resources.cqu.edu.au/cqu5178/timeline/timeline/timeline.pdf.
6 Archer Park Rail Museum, Rockhampton's Ports (Rockhampton: Archer Park Rail Museum, 2009).
7 Heather Goodall, “Riding the Tide: Indigenous Knowledge, History and Water in a Changing Australia,” Environment and History 14, no. 3 (2008): 357, https://doi.org/10.3197/096734008X333563.
8 Michael J. Morwood and Luke Godwin, “Archaeology of the Gyranda Region, Dawson River, Central Queensland,” Queensland Archaeological Research 4 (1987): 96–114.
9 Ibid.
10 Michael J. Rowland and Sean Ulm, “Indigenous Fish Traps and Weirs of Queensland,” Queensland Archaeological Research 14 (2011): 22–34.
11 Paul Humphries, “Historical Indigenous Use of Aquatic Resources in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, and Its Implications for River Management,” Ecological Management and Restoration 8, no. 2 (2007): 106–113. A number of organisations have been established to improve management of the Fitzroy River watershed and
others in Central Queensland. The Fitzroy Basin Elders Committee has been dedicated to the region’s water and land management, alongside the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal people, in Central Queensland since it was established in 2000. Their conservation activities have included a Gundanoo Junior Rangers program.
12 Goodall, “Riding the Tide,” 366.
13 Jon Bok, Non-Indigenous Cultural Heritage Assessment, Santos GLNG Gas Field Development Project, Central and Southern Queensland (Brisbane: Converge Heritage + Community, 2014), 17.
14 Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia, rev. ed. (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006), 216–219.
15Anthony Scott, Water Erosion in the Murray-Darling Basin: Learning from the Past (Canberra: CSIRO Land and Water, 2001).
16 Ibid. There was documented evidence of extensive land degradation and removal of topsoil; loss of perennial grasses with their soil-binding root systems, such as kangaroo grass, as well as woody shrubs; both the planned and unintended drainage of numerous inland swamps and chains of ponds; and the alarming appearance of deep incisions and collapses in the landscape, seemingly out of nowhere.
17 Donald L. Smith, Lefevre James Cranstone: His Life and Art (Richmond: Brandylane Publishers, 2004).
18 Ibid., 138.
19 Capricorn Coast Landcare Envirolink Centre, “Emu Park Bushcare,” 2020, http://www.emuparkbushcare.org.au.
20 Bok, Non-Indigenous Cultural Heritage Assessment, 33.
21 Ibid., 26.
22 Ibid., 17.
23 Centre for the Government of Queensland, “Queensland Places: Lakes Creek and Koongal,” 2018, https://queenslandplaces.com.au/lakes-creek-and-koongal.
24 Rockhampton Bulletin and Central Queensland Advertiser, 15 October 1870, 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article51580345.
25 Centre for the Government of Queensland, “Queensland Places.”
26 “Advertising,” Morning Bulletin, 18 February 1910, 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article53131981.
27 The colours of the flag are curious: they look to be those of the Yugoslavian flag post-World War I, or a Dutch flag upside-down. Alternatively, the flag may be some kind of maritime flag, or something of the artist’s invention.
28 “Mount Morgan Mine,” Wikipedia, last updated 18 October 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Morgan_Mine.
29 Ian Townsend, “Queensland's Toxic Dee River Reveals National Mine Waste Problem,” ABC Radio National, 2013, https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/toxic-mine-water/4518922.
30 Raoul Mellish, “Bustard, William (1894–1973),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1979).
31 “Rockhampton Art Fellowship,” Morning Bulletin, 23 July 1949, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article56911665.
Haywood, who was chair of the Rockhampton branch of the Royal Queensland Art Society, and was involved in exhibiting the city’s art collection at Town Hall before the Rockhampton Art Gallery was established, also depicted the Fitzroy River and surrounding creeks in a number of works held in the RMOA collection. These include S.S. Time at Rockhampton Wharf (1949), Building the Fitzroy Bridge (1950), Powerhouse and Alexander Bridge, Rockhampton (1950), and Moore's Creek and bridge (1950).
32 The second work, not discussed here, is Customs House, Rockhampton 1948.
33 Watson, personal communication with the author, 22 July 2020.
34 Paul S. C. Taçon, "Rainbow Colour and Power among the Waanyi of Northwest Queensland," Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18, no. 2 (2008): 167, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774308000231.
35 National Gallery of Australia, “Judy Watson ‘Canyon’,” YouTube video, 7:37, 18 February 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEyppf3D_HM.
36 Watson, personal communication with the author, 22 July 2020.
37 Taçon, "Rainbow Colour and Power,” 168.
38 Watson, personal communication with the author, 22 July 2020.