The Canberry Paintings: What We Know So Far

I want to start working through Gray’s exhibitions one by one, and Canberry Paintings feels like the right place to begin.

Partly that’s personal. I grew up in Canberra and, like Gray and Joan when they began work on this series, I knew very little about the city’s pioneering history. Canberra can feel young, especially in the 1960s. These paintings push hard against that idea.

They’re also beautiful examples of narrative painting. I’ll say more about that in another post, because it one of my career interests.

But most importantly, this post is about getting down what I’ve discovered so far about the exhibition itself. As always, I’m keen to hear about anything I’ve missed or got wrong.

Where and when

The Canberry Paintings exhibition was held at the Theatre Centre Gallery between 8 and 13 November 1966.

The gallery sat inside the building we now know as the Playhouse, part of the Canberra Theatre Centre. The theatre centre had opened only the year before, on 24 June 1965.¹ At the time, the ACT had a population of just under 100,000 people, making Canberra a relatively small place.² In a city that size, places like the theatre centre had to do more than one job. It wasn’t just a theatre. It was a community hub.

Back then, the Playhouse which connected to the main theatre via a covered walkway, housed a 614-seat theatre, a gallery, meeting rooms, and a restaurant.³ The exhibition had real visibility.

The show was sponsored by the Arts Council of Australia, Canberra division, which gave it significant institutional weight.

Opening the show

The exhibition was opened by Mrs Margaret Carnegie, a well-known art collector⁴ and a strong supporter of Gray’s work.⁵

Toss Gascoigne, who helped organise an earlier group exhibition that included Gray’s work at the ANU Chifley Library in 1965, later told me a story that still makes me smile. That exhibition included works by Nolan, Boyd, Perceval and others. Toss said he drove out to Margaret Carnegie’s place near Albury to collect the artworks. He was amazed she was happy to hand them over to a first-year student.⁶ That detail says a lot about her trust, and about how informally art was handled at the time.

Why Canberry Paintings?

Gray and Joan told the press that the immediate trigger for the series was the destruction of Captain Faunce’s cottage in Queanbeyan, the home of the region’s first police magistrate. They were angry that so much of Canberra’s early history was being lost.⁷

That explanation is true, but it’s not the whole story.

From Joan’s papers, it’s clear she was already working on Canberra’s history before November 1965, when The Canberra Times announced the impending destruction of Faunce’s 1838 cottage.⁸ The research was underway. The concern about loss had been building for some time.

Coming off the Outback exhibition

Canberry Paintings followed directly from the success of Gray’s Outback series in 1965, his first significant solo exhibition in Canberra. Outback sold well and was well received, and it was a real confidence booster for Gray.⁹

How the exhibition was received

Contemporary reviews treated the Canberry paintings as narrative works grounded in serious historical research rather than nostalgic illustration.

Writing in The Australian, Noel Pratt emphasised Gray’s year-long immersion in diaries, letters, newspapers and local histories. He described the paintings as a way of restoring Canberra’s first hundred years to view, and challenged the idea of the city as a place without a past.¹⁰

Local critics focused closely on how history was handled on canvas, and on the significant role Joan played in researching the series.¹¹ The Canberra Times described the 34 large enamel panels as sympathetic and lightly handled, noting Gray’s use of high colour and his attention to everyday labour, mishaps and moral ambiguity rather than heroic myth.

Individual works were singled out for their interpretive choices, particularly Gray’s portrayal of Ben Hall as a young, clean-faced man rather than a stock bushranger figure. Reviewers also noted his repeated return to domestic and agricultural labour as historically significant acts.

The fact that ANU Press would later use eight of the paintings in Samuel Shumack’s 1967 publication (see below) was seen as further confirmation of the series’ documentary and cultural value.¹²

Sales and afterlife

The Canberry series didn’t sell as strongly as Outback.

Joan recorded what happened to each painting on a set of handwritten index cards, which we still have. Of the 35 paintings, 18 sold, 16 did not, and one was swapped for another painting. Just over half the works sold.

Several of the unsold paintings later travelled to Paris and the UK for two exhibitions with Arthur Wicks.¹³ In the list below, I’ve noted which works are now in public collections.

The missing catalogue

One thing I haven’t yet seen is the exhibition catalogue for Canberry Paintings. I’m planning to spend time in the Heide archive and hope to find a copy there. If you have one, or know where one is, I’d love to hear from you.

The research behind the paintings

Joan and Gray did an extraordinary amount of research to uncover the stories behind these paintings. I’m still tracking down all the references Joan would have used, and I have a detailed bibliography that I’ve yet to properly dig into.

Three sources stand out. The last one almost certainly inspired the exhibition’s title.

• Shumack, Samuel. 1967. An Autobiography or Tales and Legends of Canberra Pioneers. Edited by Samuel Shumack and J. E. Shumack. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
• Gale, John. 1927. Canberra: History of and Legends Relating to the Federal Capital Territory of the Commonwealth of Australia. Queanbeyan: A. M. Fallick & Sons.
• Robinson, Fredk. W. 1927. Canberra’s First Hundred Years and After. Second ed. Sydney: W. C. Penfold & Co.

The Shumack paintings

Eight of Gray’s Canberry Paintings were included in ANU Press’s 1967 publication An Autobiography or Tales and Legends of Canberra Pioneers by Samuel Shumack. Some were renamed in Shumack’s book. I’ve listed the original exhibition titles in brackets where they differ.

• Alan Cunningham (Alan Cunningham – Botanist). Allan Cunningham’s name is misspelt as “Alan” in Shumack’s publication and on Gray’s painting.
• Stockyards at Acton (Stockyards at Actin)
• The Galloping Parson, the Rev. Thomas Hassall (The Galloping Parson)
• The Shepherds’ Rations (10, 10, 2 & ¼ – No Fat)
• William Farrer’s Experiments (William Farrer)
• St John’s Struck by Lightning
• The New Recruit
• The Flooding of ‘The Harp of Erin’ (Harp of Erin Inn Flood)

Alan Cunningham

Allan Cunningham was the government botanist and explorer who arrived on the Limestone Plains in 1824.

One journal entry describes “fearless” emus mating in an area that roughly aligns with today’s Northbourne Avenue in central Canberra.