The creek

A dry gully cuts through the middle of this 1890 painting by Arthur Streeton, where a shallow ribbon of water gleams among banks of rusty red and crumbling brown earth. Up on the golden hills behind it, cattle wander and graze under a soft blue sky dotted with clouds. A dead tree trunk, stripped bare and pale, rises from the eroded ground like a lonely post, a quiet reminder that this land can be tough on those who work it. Streeton was not trying to make the scene pretty or dramatic. He simply showed the countryside as it really was, dusty, warm, and worn by weather.

Streeton belonged to the Heidelberg School, a group of painters sometimes described as Australia's answer to the Impressionists. They shared the French habit of working outdoors and chasing the effects of sunlight, but their true aim was different. Instead of borrowing European moods, they wanted to capture the honest character of their own sunburnt continent. Streeton had a knack for painting heat and wide open space, and pictures like this shaped the way Australians pictured their own home. Its charm lies in that plainness, a tender and unhurried portrait of ordinary farmland.