A WOMAN in a striking white haik, worn by females in Northern Africa, speaks back to one of the most well-known and loved paintings on show in Art Gallery of Ballarat.
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A Summer Morning Tiff, but Anne Zahalka's interpretation of the Tom Roberts' classic, is designed to question how we all fit into what has become a mythologised, quintessential Australian landscape.
Art Gallery of Ballarat's latest exhibition Beating About the Bush deliberately challenges the gallery's celebrated Australian Impressionist collection with contemporary Australian female photographers to question our history and identity as a nation.
This has been a process spanning a couple of years now with Art Gallery of Ballarat director and exhibition curator Louise Tegart determined to tell a more "fullsome story" of Australia.
Of the 174 works on show in Beating About the Bush, 153 are from the gallery's collection underpinned by the Heidelberg School greats in Roberts, Walter Withers, Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin.
Ms Tegart doubted other galleries outside state galleries would attempt an exhibition like this.
"For me as a trained art historian and curator, not an expert on Australian impressionists, that's what I think of when I think of images of Australia," Ms Tegart said. "Why are the Big Four held up as superstars when so many artists were working and forgotten.
"...Artwork is coloured with personal values and people left out. What contemporary art has done has put those people back in, like Indigenous peoples."
Privileged, bourgeois and typically urbanised "outsiders on the edge of the bush" is how Sydney-based Anne Zahalka has found most of the celebrated Australian impressionists.
Most spaces the Heidelberg School exports worked in were fast becoming filled with houses in Melbourne in the 1880s, yet this continued to be selectively overlooked or left out in paintings.
Zahalka has been working in such a space for decades but returned to disrupting the subject matter in 2017 amid a resurgence in widespread nationalism.
She recast characters in landscapes to offer a more inclusive and compassionate look at Australia, such as the Muslim woman replacing a Roberts' depiction of Polly McCubbin in late 19th century fashion in what was rural Box Hill.
What Zahalka found powerful in the Ballarat exhibition was firming a spotlight on female photographers challenging Australian narratives and being able to see this en masse.
"It's affirming a place for women's art and their special ways of telling our stories and trying to understand," Zahalka said. "[Art Gallery of Ballarat] has pulled out works that weren't collected works of artists from Heidelberg School that perpetuated the mythology of the Australian landscape.
"...These artists are on the edge of the bush but are so revered within our culture. I think it's important to challenge some stereotypes. Nationalism grew out of that and totally negated the existence of some people like Aboriginal people."
Zahalka said it was important to understand the importance of missing voices and figures within historical narratives. Her parents were European Jewish refugees who arrived in Australia in the 1950s.
One of Zahalka's works carefully transports photos of her parents, including herself as a baby in a stroller, into an Australian bush landscape. She has carefully carved them into existence and hand painted colour into the images before re-photographing them.
Similarly, another work features a Greek woman relaxing with a picnic basket in a bush landscape with a Sydney skyline subtly in the background.
"She's a long way from her original home but where is home?" Zahalka said. "And, how do you find oneself in the landscape."
Zahalka said Australian impressionism has long been viewed as a source of meaning for Australians. The works in Beating About the Bush were another way of considering gender, discrimination and a sense of place in conversation with the classic paintings.
Beating About the Bush looks at the same landscapes with different eyes, putting Australia's missing people back into the frame and challenging how we see ourselves.
The exhibition opened at the weekend and is free to enter at Art Gallery of Ballarat until February 19.
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