The Spirit of Endurance

This photograph of an aged river red gum in Wilpena, taken by Harold Cazneaux in May 1937, has become one of Australia’s most iconic photographs. New Zealand-born Cazneaux migrated to South Australia with his family as a teenager and, although he moved to Sydney in 1904, he returned to South Australia three times in the 1930s to take photographs in the Flinders Ranges.

This photograph was taken at a low angle to reveal the root system and imposing trunk of the eucalypt. Cazneaux exhibited this image under the title A Giant of the Arid North at the London Salon of Photography just three months after his Flinders trip. In 1941 the photograph was retitled after Cazneaux’s son was killed during the Second World War. With this name change, Cazneaux presented the gnarled gum as a particularly Australian symbol of death and suffering during war.

The river red gum is still standing at Wilpena in the Flinders Ranges and is known affectionately as ‘Cazneaux’s tree’.

Alice Clanachan, Assistant Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs