Deutscher and Hackett

William Robinson's farm constructions tug at our childhood memories of the family 'farm visit' so common to growing up in Australia. With its central character being the urinating cow, this painting channels the sheer joy and amusement this everyday bovine act evinces in the child. The commotion of the chooks attempting to take flight and the geese gaggling, amidst Rosie's great release, contrasts with her steadfast inhibition as she stares dolefully at the audience, caught in the act. Other delightful Robinson cameos are also present such as the prized spotted bantam outside of its makeshift hutch and the benign white goat, head peaking out to observe all the fuss.

The irreverence and humour in the Robinson farmyard is further accentuated by the titles of this series being 'Farmyard Constructions'. Far from being ordered, constructed home paddocks, this series shows all the chaos and drama of the classic hobby farm, replete with ad hoc assemblages eschewing a wide variety of bushcraft. Pieces of old corrugated iron roofing are now hutches, and old tyre tubes become landscaping devices. Furthermore, the absence of any sense of the horizon line brings the chaos into sharp relief and turns the tables on the theme of the Australian heroic landscape. Indeed, it is in stark contrast to the perfection enshrined in that other Australian pastoral idiom, the colonial 'homestead' portrait. Here there are no cosseted rows of English shrubs and flowers and Rosie is no prize blue ribbon show piece, despite expressing all the self assurance of a much-loved cow.

As is well-documented, Robinson's farm yards are a playful assimilation of his own farm at Birkdale, where the family moved in 1970 and where many a city bushman's mishap occurred. Robinson himself described the Birkdale family farm in these terms, 'It wasn't a racehorse stud or anything, it was a disaster.'¹ Zoning in on a slice of the farmyard antics, the artist makes a quotidian celebration of all god's creatures in much the same way that Albrecht Durer found a nobility in the simplicity of a simple rabbit amongst the blades of grass. There is also a joy and love embedded as though Robinson in all his wit has irreverently captured a portrait of his favourite cow in an intimate moment. The cow often enjoys a privileged position in these works, afforded a sacred spot in the hierarchy of the Robinson farmyard.

1. Robinson quoted in Fink, H., 'Light Years - William Robinson and the Creation Story', in Seear, L. (ed.), Darkness and Light: The Art of William Robinson, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2001, p. 26

LARA NICHOLLS