The big picture
Rachel Griffiths explores Australia’s most iconic landscape paintings and the artists behind them in Great Southern Landscapes. The actress and art lover tells Siobhan Duck what she discovered
SOURDOUGH baking. Jammaking. And even a spot of knitting and painting. The pandemic saw people all over the world finding all sorts of new and creative ways to escape the monotony and the boredom of lockdowns. And Rachel Griffiths was no exception, with the acclaimed actress quite literally adding a new string to her bow while locked inside her Melbourne house with her husband and three children.
“There’s a generation of kids down south who got really serious about baking and my girls can make amazing cakes and biscuits now,” she says.
“There was comfort in that. I know a lot of people that took up musical instruments too just to kill some of those late-night hours.
“I went back to a violin for like a year and was doing online lessons with a violin teacher who had lost all her work.
“And I know quite a few people who started painting, having started with those colouring-in books and then going ‘F--- the lines, I’m putting the colouring book to the left. I’m going to start with a blank page.’
“So, I do think we all realised that the arts are what nourishes the soul.”
Staring at the same four walls for months at a time understandably made most people long for new horizons. And with borders still largely closed to overseas travel, many instead scratched that itch for adventure on the open road right here at home.
Griffiths says her family made a wish list of places they wanted to travel once restrictions eased, which included Alice Springs – “because I love that country so much” – and Monkey Mia, a west coast beach famous for its dolphin visitors.
“We’ve all been looking at walls in Melbourne for two years,” she laughs.
“So, I think the idea of kind entering the painting on your wall and going through and actually ending up there [would appeal to a lot of people].”
It was this renewed respect for the arts and of the beauty of our own country that has provided the perfect canvas for Griffiths’ latest series, Great Southern Landscapes.
“The show kind of developed during last year’s lockdown for me, of just wanting to travel so badly but not actually wanting to travel overseas because overseas had become a kind of scary place and we might get stuck there and they might lose our bags and we might get COVID on the plane,” she says.
“And I think what you saw on people’s Instagrams, whether it’s the young families, who, 24 hours before a lockdown, would pack up this vintage caravan and just head out [or other holidaymakers]. You saw Australians appreciating how much of this country most Australians have not seen.”
Great Southern Landscapes comes on the back of the success of last year’s Finding the Archibald, which traced the history of portraiture in Australia.
“I got a lot of DMs [direct messages] as well as people in the street coming up to me saying:
‘Oh my god, I loved the Archibald, what will you do next?’,” she says.
“That was the first time I was in that role of presenter, so it’s been a big learning curve for me.
“And I would say to people: ‘What, what would you like to see?’ And so many people would say that they loved landscape painting.”
For Griffiths, investigating landscapes became the natural progression for the art history series given our country’s vastly diverse terrain and the ways in which it has been captured over time. But it is also a subject closer to her heart, because her husband of 20 years, painter and printmaker Andrew Taylor, “mostly paints abstract landscapes and botanicals.”
She also believes that landscapes, much like the Archibald Prize paintings, are artistic subjects that a
I WOULD SAY TO PEOPLE: ‘WHAT, WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO
SEE?’ AND SO MANY PEOPLE WOULD SAY THAT THEY LOVED LANDSCAPE PAINTING
wide range of people could relate to.
“Art can be very alienating for people, even though literally millions of Australians will go once a year – at the very least – to their state or national gallery or to take their kids to a fantastic, interactive art room or to see a blockbuster exhibition,” she explains.
“The Archibald [series] really tapped into an easy entry way to talk about art, meet with artists and understand how people think (and how they come up with something) but through a really accessible medium.
“And I think landscape actually is just as accessible. And obviously some of the world’s most beloved pictures, whether it’s the Monets [waterlilies] whether it’s our iconic works here or Turner’s landscapes. And a lot of the reproductions that people will have on their walls are landscapes.”
While filming this series, Griffiths travelled Australia. She treated the experience as something of a location scout for a long-overdue family holiday, which she hopes to set off on sometime in the future.
The series took her to far-flung locations across the country where famous artworks have been captured by colonial artists, impressionists and, of course, our First Nations people.
It was essential to Griffiths that the impact and importance of Indigenous artwork wasn’t glossed over, but spotlighted with sensitivity.
“I’m of that generation that grew up with a kind of terra nullius idea of it [our art history],” she reflects.
“We had a shadow world of who was here before that we were taught quickly wasn’t here and was replaced by something better. So, it’s about kind of unlearning that history and being open to replacing it with a deeper understanding of what happened through colonialism.
“And I think we should always know whose country we’re on. And who was here before, because our history in this continent is 60,000 years old, and it’s kind of crazy that our history begins, for so many older white Australians, in 1788.”
Great Southern Landscapes, Tuesday, 8pm, ABC TV and streaming, ABC iview