From Heidelberg to Hermannsburg: Vanguard Women Artists and their New Vision for Central Australia, 1925–38

Up until the first decades of the twentieth century, settler Australians were predominantly an outward-looking people, physically and culturally orientated toward the coastal fringes of the continent. Meanwhile, the ‘unsettled’ arid interior remained problematic within the settler geographical imaginary. Yet from the 1920s, a movement of settler women artists travelled northwards from the southern urban metropoles through the inland to conceive of a new vision for Central Australia. What these women found was not a barren wilderness but a strikingly colourful landscape and compelling travel destination for the modern woman. On their return, they exhibited their desert images and developed a rhetoric around the notion of a ‘paintable’, modern, and visitable inland, ripe for inclusion within the articulation of a national cultural identity. This article explores why settler women were in the vanguard of painters who explored Central Australia, setting out the foundations that underpinned their vision.