SIDNEY NOLAN

Nolan always loved the beach. His memories of earliest childhood in Pakington Street, St Kilda, were of the beach. Later, living not far from Luna Park, he spent most of his summers at the beach and the local sea baths: ‘it was university, gymnasium, everything combined’.¹ His father was a volunteer lifesaver in those days.

The Beach at Aspendale, although dated stylistically to 1943-44, has much of the dreamlike quality of memory seen in his ‘St Kilda Bathers’ series. The motif of colourful flags is seen in several of his ‘Bathers’ paintings (mostly now at Heide and in the National Gallery of Victoria) and also in some of the important larger wartime street scenes such as Robe Street, St Kilda of 1945 (private collection). Nolan frequently painted from memory: from images imprinted in his imagination, from photographs and from vivid jottings in his notebooks. Some of the St Kilda Bathers paintings were executed while he was far away from Melbourne: stationed in the Wimmera during 1942-3. As he once explained, ‘Memory is I am sure one of the main factors in my particular way of looking at things. In some ways it seems to sharpen the magic in a way that cannot be achieved by direct means’.²

Although Nolan had no particular personal connection with Aspendale Beach at that time, he would have cycled along the Nepean Highway through Mordialloc and Aspendale when he was racing as a member of the Gardenvale Amateurs before the war. It was also on the route to Sorrento, where he sometimes stayed with the Reeds (later, in the 1960s, the Reeds and Mirka and Georges Mora had beach houses at Aspendale). Perhaps this evocative, atmospheric view – possibly looking back towards Mordialloc – was just one momentary glimpse stored away in Nolan's memory. It is certainly not topographically accurate. It is reminiscent of the extraordinarily haunting Horse rolling on a beach, c. 1945 (private collection), which originated in what Albert Tucker called Nolan’s ‘blink vision’ – in that case, a fleeting glimpse of police horses rolling on the sand as the two artists passed in a bayside tram.³ Curiously, but not altogether improbably given the range of Nolan’s visual sources, it also calls to mind historic newspaper photographs of the great Melbourne flood of December 1934 when buildings near Aspendale beach were largely submerged and telegraph poles seemed to carry their wires out to sea.⁴

To enjoy the quiet delights of the present painting – and the comparable Wimmera landscapes of this date – it is necessary to put to one side Nolan’s Ned Kelly, Mrs Fraser or Burke and Wills. The inventive power of the artist’s mythic imagery is so engrossing that his other gifts can sometimes be forgotten, especially as a painter of the natural world in moments of lyrical beauty. The Beach at Aspendale epitomizes the power of his vision at its most subtle, with its soft greens, blues and mauves, the aqueous atmosphere making sea and sky seem one.

1. Interview, ‘Down Under on a visit’, Queen, London, 15 May 1962; quoted in Clark, J., Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and legends 1937-1987, ICCA and Cambridge University Press, Sydney, 1987, p. 61.
2. Quoted in Anderson, J., ‘The early work of Sidney Nolan 1939-49’, Meanjin, 3, 1967, p. 317.
3. See The Estate of Sir Sidney Nolan, Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 2001, p. 59.
4. One such photograph, in fact looking inland towards Carrum Swamp, can be seen on the City of Kingston’s historical website at http://localhistory.kingston.vic.gov.au/htm/article/212.htm (originally in The Sun News-Pictorial, 3 December 1934). We are most grateful to Dr Graham Whitehead, Kingston City Historian, for additional information about Aspendale.