The Tasmanian painter and printmaker Bea Maddock’s (1934-2016) exploration of spatial experience had been key to her practice well before she began making formal landscapes. Curiously, her comments on qualities of place often belied how seriously she took spatial observation. Maddock described her book This Time (1967-69) as having ‘no real story, it’s just about me again wandering the streets and looking in shop windows’.[1] This humble practice of Maddock’s is reminiscent of Guy Debord’s ‘dérive’, wherein the participant ‘drop[s] their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there’.[2] Drifting through St. Kilda in 1964, Maddock’s notes record an alienated unease that reflects the book’s epigraph. This text, by the Soviet poet Yevtushenko states ‘Everyone is alone, / Everyone is alone, / Twentieth Century /. . . this city is raddled / and it is alone’.[3] This suggests Maddock was keenly aware of urban qualia: a theme she would eventually return to in a depiction of Melbourne on a much larger scale, TAURAI… but in the memory of time (1989).
Maddock’s landscape projects are still and austere, with a meditative quality of space that reconfigures geographic orthodoxy. TERRA SPIRITUS… with a darker shade of pale (1993-98), along with the five multi-panelled paintings made by Maddock from 1987 to 1992, sit together as the culmination of a career spent quietly observing and recording.[4] The first three large-scale landscapes produced by Maddock shared an overarching structure, comprising multiple panels, each divided into sections asserting conflicting temporalities. Each work also refers to Indigenous history and language, both in Tasmania and Victoria. Perhaps the most personal (and complex) of these, and the work most clearly related to Maddock’s practice as a diarist, is TAURAI… but in the memory of time. Maddock was known for her meticulous note-taking and research, and her notebooks provide an invaluable insight into the formation and evolution of each large-scale landscape. TAURAI is unusual in the series as alongside ‘mainland’ (i.e. non-Tasmanian) Indigenous language, it also incorporates Maddock’s personal notes, including a collage made from pages of the artist’s diary and references to other notebooks. The work takes the form of a panorama of Melbourne and its surroundings, reflecting not only Maddock’s long association with the city, but also the deep history and ongoing custodianship of the five tribes of the Kulin Nation.
While much literature on psychogeography relates to urban space and movement through the city, the term in its truest sense relates to ‘the precise effects of geographical setting… acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual.’[5] The relationship between landscape and text is central to TAURAI, and to Maddock’s highly personal geographical observations. In 1989, Maddock described the process for creating the central strip that runs through the triptych. While the work as a whole was intended to be read as a meta-landscape concerned with both space and time — future/sky, present/surface and past/underground — the ‘surface’ layer is the only element of the work depicting a true figurative landscape. This was created as a collage from Maddock’s journal: through ‘recycling the colour sketches a new mini landscape emerges, much more authentic than the original’.[6] This ‘mini landscape’ is further framed with Maddock’s writing: her notes on the progression of her sketches, different viewpoints and walks through the city and its suburbs, obscured in characteristic Maddock fashion with a layer of encaustic wax. The text of the ‘mini-landscape’ describes the twenty-four day painting process and Maddock’s passage through the city. ‘The work progresses, the view of the city is good with much the same aspect as Keilor only closer.' reads a sentence of the central panel.[7] The presentation of the ephemeral image augmented with text is a deeply personal offering; recording not only her passage through, and reflections of this alienated space, but contrasting with the weight (both visual and historical) of the grounding lower third of the work and the immense space of the upper third.
An early idea for TAURAI replicated the figurative base boxes of the first work in the landscape series, We live in the meanings we are able to discern (1987). In that painting, film transparencies taken on Heard Island contrasted with a multipanelled panoramic depiction of the same landscape above. Through these proposed base boxes in TAURAI, Maddock sought to define the inwardness of the city in a more immediate fashion, as opposed to the grand historical landscape of the central panel.[8] It would have also referred back to the urban vignettes of This Time, the brief snapshots of activity forming the character of the vast network of lanes and avenues that split from Hoddle’s grid.[9] On the streets, Maddock made twenty-eight sketches over her twenty-four days in Melbourne, each with a focus so close that the urban subject is almost unrecognisable. While the artist’s historical interests eventually triumphed in the work’s base, she ultimately conceded to the interiority of the city’s composition in the form of strips of lead framing the work’s central layer, imprinted with a roll-call of suburb names — CARLTON MELBOURNE RICHMOND COLLINGWOOD FITZROY CLIFTON HILL NORTHCOTE — separate past, present and future, a mantra of suburban nomenclature cast in sharp contrast with the ephemerality of the collaged landscape and the canvas above.
The Australian artist Ian Burn described the landscape genre as having become ‘not something you look at but something you look through' during the course of postmodernity. [10] While Burn and Maddock approach the combination of text and image in a landscape in almost diametrically opposite fashion, Burn’s maxim that ‘the text assumes the blindness of a picture’ remains largely true in the context of Taurai.[11] It is thus Maddock’s constant, persistent reiteration of the signifiers of Melbourne’s precolonial history that enables the viewer to move beyond the ‘blindness’ of the assumed landscape.
Each of Maddock’s panoramic landscapes make use of Indigenous languages, displayed in continuous lines of text that augment the subtlety of the marked landscape. The first two landscapes relate to the artist’s home of Tasmania, and to the languages of the nine Tasmanian First Nations. Maddock’s journals for TAURAI reveal a similar preoccupation with Indigenous culture in the country around Melbourne, copying out notes from Australian anthropologist Norman Tindale on the five Kulin tribes, including references to the creator spirit Bunjil.[12] Maddock’s research was always meticulous, however her reliance on the work of figures like Tindale and George Augustus Robinson comes across as anachronistic to the modern viewer. Tindale’s definition of the word ‘taurai’ as ‘conveying the idea of territorial possession and an aura of meanings surrounding that idea’ is somewhat apocryphal today.[13] Despite this, the inclusion of Language in these landscape works is arguably revolutionary for its time: Maddock’s use of these figures’ research turned it away from the colonial-objective and towards a radical, active commentary on sovereignty. Maddock marked the lower third of the triptych with ochre and ash, creating a grounding layer that suggests, in one of Maddock’s typical aphorisms and an early title for the work, that ‘if you dig down deep enough to the real bones there are no monuments’.[14] If Maddock’s text in the central layer of TAURAI is hard to read, the letters in each square of the basal layer are almost completely occluded. In the place of the proposed urban vignettes, each box contains a letter that ultimately spells out Tindale’s names for the tribes of the Kulin nation: ‘TAUNGURONG WURUNDJERIE BUNURONG WATHAURUNG KURUNG’[15]. These squares form a subtle but potent counterpoint to the ‘suburban’ lead bars and cement the emphatically postcolonial message of Maddock’s work.
Much of the support Maddock garnered during her lifetime was due to the work of public gallery curators and directors, including Anne Kirker at the QAG, Roger Butler at the NGA, Daniel Thomas at QVMAG and Irena Zdanowicz at the NGV. Zdanowicz has been compiling the second part of Maddock’s Catalogue Raisonné since 2008 and is due to complete it soon.[16] Even though the artist’s work has found the support of a younger generation of curators and writers in recent years (including Victoria Perin and Elspeth Pitt), the revival and reappraisal of Maddock’s deserved status as one of the most incisive, radical and thoughtful Australian artists of the twentieth century is ongoing.
In TAURAI, Maddock’s personal unease becomes symptomatic of the overarching alienation from landscape and negation of history inherent in the colonial state. Even after many years spent in Melbourne, Maddock still records an estrangement from the landscape in her preparation for TAURAI, present in the sketches and notes that made it into the final work, but also those which remain in the archive. However, it remains that Maddock’s emphasis of Kulin sovereignty in every part of the work is an undeniably reconciliatory gesture, an attempt to restore a sense of Melbourne’s First Nations’ past in a convention where it had become all but absent. TAURAI thus encapsulates Maddock’s late practice, signalling Maddock’s increasing exploration of space, revealing her methods for researching, sketching and notetaking, and unequivocally stating her profound wish for reconciliation.
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1. Bea Maddock quoted in Anne Kirker and Roger Butler, Being and Nothingness: Bea Maddock Queensland Art Gallery and Australian National Gallery, Brisbane and Canberra, 1992, p. 69
2. Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive,’ in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb, Bureau Of Public Secrets, 2006, Berkeley, California, p. 62.
3. Bea Maddock, This Time, artist's bound book (edition of 25), 1967-1969, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (ed. 3/25), n.p.
4. In chronological order, these works are We live in the meanings we are able to discern 1987 (NGA collection), Tromemanner – forgive us our trespass 1988-89 (QAGOMA), TAURAI… but in the memory of time 1989 (NGV), Trouwerner...the white ships came from the West and the Sea of Darkness 1992 – 93 (TMAG), Leaving a Mountain 1993 (Devonport Regional Gallery) and TERRA SPIRITUS… with a darker shade of pale 1993-98 (NGA, edn. 1/5, QVMAG, edn. 2/5, NGV edn. 3/5, TMAG edn. 4/5, QAGOMA edn. 5/5)
5. Internationale Situationniste #1, ‘Definitions,’ in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb Bureau Of Public Secrets, California, 2006, Berkeley, p. 52.
6. Bea Maddock, Journal, 29 September 1989. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/30905/ (accessed 27 September 2025).
7. Bea Maddock, TAURAI… but in the memory of time, 1989, paper, wax, ink, earth pigment, ash, lead and oil on canvas, 87.8 × 523.8 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
8. Bea Maddock, ‘The Makings of a Trilogy’, Art Bulletin of Victoria, no. 31, 18 June 2014, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/the-makings-of-a-trilogy/.
9. See Miles Lewis, Melbourne: The City’s History and Development, City of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 25–29. The grid was the standard form used to lay out new cities in the Australian colonies. While there were many earlier grid plans put in place (e.g. Lachlan Macquarie’s 1811 plan for Hobart), Robert Hoddle’s 1837 grid for Melbourne is perhaps the most notable example in Australia, forming the backbone to the city’s spatial identity.
10. Ian Burn, ‘A Landscape Is Not Something You Look at but Something You Look Through,’ Australian Journal of Art, vol. 12, no. 1, January 1994, pp. 21–30.
11. Ian Burn, Value Added Landscape No. 10, 1993, Oil and enamel on composite board with transparent synthetic polymer resin, 1993, Brisbane, QAGOMA.
12. Maddock, Journal, 8 July 1989.
13. Ibid. See, Diane E. Barwick, ‘Mapping the Past: An Atlas of Victorian Clans 1835-1904: Part 1.’ Aboriginal History vol. 8, no. ½, 1984, pp. 100–131. Much of Tindale’s work is now seen as apocryphal: for example, Diane Barwick identified as early as 1984 that the ‘Kurung’ people were a tribe of the Wurundjeri, rather than a discrete clan. Furthermore, Tindale posits Taurai as the root word of ‘Taungarong’ amongst other clan names. This has been disproven and it is uncertain whether Taurai as a word denoting territory was used in any of the Kulin languages.
14. Maddock, Journal, 14 June 1989.
15. Maddock, Journal, 8 July 1989.
16. Victoria Perin, Bea Maddock Catalogue Raisonné: Volume Two By Irena Zdanowicz,’ Art and Australia, 2024,https://artandaustralia.com/59_1/p208/bea-maddock-catalogue-raisonn-volume-two-by-irena-zdanowicz (accessed 27 September 2025).