Dimboola

Nine similar Dimboola sketches are part of the Nolan gift to the NGV in 1983: 'Writing back to Sunday Reed on the first night in Dimboola [May 1942], Nolan attempted to convey the effect of the experience and above all the flatness of a landscape that he had never seen before: 'It was alright while we [were] in sight of the Grampians and then suddenly [there] was ... nothing of the earth except a thin line. And while I was thinking about these things it came simply that if you imagined the land going vertically into the sky it would work.' ... The nine chalk sketches ... torn from the pages of Nolan's sketchbook, were produced between June and August at a time when he was unable, due to the demands of army service, to undertake anything more ambitious. Their freshness and immediacy suggests that most were done, as opposed to the paintings, directly from the subject. ... In all there are over a hundred sketches, a number of which were included in Nolan's second one-man exhibition displayed in the window of Sheffield's newsagency in Heidelberg in July 1942, and in the third one-man exhibition in 1943. (R. Haese, Sidney Nolan, The City and the Plain (NGV exhibition catalogue), Melbourne, 1983, pp.9-11)