In this breathtakingly beautiful episode, art enthusiast Rachel Griffiths visits the Hawkesbury River to locate the precise location where Arthur Streeton painted The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might, his masterpiece from 1896.
Along the way, Rachel Griffiths interrupts a masterclass of modern-day Streeton-ites, and armed with paint brushes and an easel, she channels her inner Streeton in the Victorian Artists Society room where the young artist worked his magic alongside fellow Impressionists Fredrick McCubbin and Tom Roberts.
She visits the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and learns how one curator spent his lockdown restoring the painting to its former glory after 100 years of “cigar smoke”!
In Sydney, she visits Bradley’s Head, where she discovers that Streeton was an early environmentalist who painted a protest painting, Cremorne Pastoral, in 1895 to prevent a coal mine from being built on Sydney Harbour.
Then it’s off to the Hawkesbury, where Rachel meets a flood victim whose love affair with the river is coming to an end.
She then boards a tinny to discover how the First Nations Darug people have co-existed with the river’s waterways for millennia, how early settlers were warned about floods, and how the river’s traditional name, Dyarubbin, is making a long-overdue comeback.
Rachel approaches the lookout on horseback, as Streeton did during the summer of 1896, eventually arriving at X marks the spot.
Production credit: A Mint Pictures production in association with Magdalene Media. Principal production investment from Screen Australia and the ABC. In association with Screen NSW. Series Director Ariel White. Field Producer Kirrilly Brentall. Series Producer Dan Goldberg. Executive Producers Adam Kay, Rachel Griffiths & Ariel White. ABC Commissioning Editor Julia Hanna. Acting Head of Factual and Culture Richard Huddleston.
