The intruder

As an expatriate artist living in Italy in the mid-1950s, Albert Tucker began to explore the ideas and imagery of the Australian landscape and mythology. ‘I was having nostalgic memories of Australia. I was remembering the dryness and gum tree trunks… I had that sense of dried out cratered form which were also volcanic landscapes, and they could also be wounds and gashes.’ 1 This nostalgia for the harsh Australian landscape was explored in works such as 'Antipodean head II' 1959, with its bark-like head. With distance from his home country and the passage of time, Tucker’s work began to move away from the religious imagery which had surrounded him in Europe – ‘the Saint Sebastians, the Christs, the Martyrs and Crosses and Virgins’ to explorers, such as Burke and Wills, masked intruders, fauns and the Ned Kelly myth, which gave his work a new focus. A double-headed axe Tucker had viewed in the Etruscan Museum, combined with the shape of Ned Kelly’s famous armour led to t