Ultimately, looking beyond Roberts’ personal connections with the working man and the shearing industry is his paramount desire to accurately depict in paintings this time of social strife in Australia’s history. He once said, “By making art the perfect expression of one time and one place, it becomes art for all time and all places” (qtd Smith 82). Roberts truly believed in the battle the working men and shearers were fighting, and he wanted to document and preserve their struggle. “Paint what you love,” he wrote, “and love what you paint…On that I have worked” (qtd Smith 102). It was through this viewpoint that Roberts’ work was able to transcend the simple image of “strong masculine labor” he was so famous for cultivating. As a result, it reached into an entirely different social dimension of Australian historical painting, giving us not nostalgia but genuine insight into an era long lost.
Image:
Conder, Charles. Sketch Portrait of Tom Roberts. 1889. Mrs. C. Roberts Collection.