Elder Wing of Australian Art: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 8 of 15

Tom Roberts’ painting A break away! Is one of the Art Gallery’s most celebrated works of Australian art. This iconic painting is a masterpiece of light and motion. Its brown and yellow landscape, shadeless under a bright blue sky, articulates the harsh intensity of the Australian environment, in which drought-thirsty sheep stampede downhill in a cloud of dust towards a scarce supply of water. At the centre of the drama is a stockman on horseback, physically stretching himself to his limit from the saddle as he struggles to prevent his precious stock from being drowned in their frenzied dash for water.

Tom Roberts was one of the leading members of Australia’s first distinctive school of painting, the Australian Impressionists, sometimes known as the ‘Heidelberg school’. Often painting or sketching outdoors, these artists regularly presented Australian themes bathed with the atmospheric qualities of Australia’s space and light. Their paintings, created in the 1880s and ’90s, expressed and reinforced a rising feeling of national pride and self-determination as the Australian colonies moved towards nationhood in 1901. They established the landscape painting as a touchstone of Australian national sentiment – which, to a large degree, it remains today.

Roberts painted A break away! during a severe drought in southern New South Wales in 1891, in a period when Australia’s economy was said to ‘ride on the sheep’s back’. Here, in the figure of a stockman, Roberts suggests an Australian archetype – rural, hardy and solitary – the worker on the land as national hero, if you will. Some 130 years after Roberts painted it, A break away! endures as a popular symbol of national pride and resilience.