Ferntree Gully Dandenong Ranges, Victoria.

Rare and important lithograph of Ferntree by one of the most famous and important Australian colonial  artists. Von Guerard is said to have painted the work ‘at the entrance to Dobson’s Gully in the Dandenong’s‘. Dobson’s Gully was the popular name for this area, where in 1854, Thomas Dobson Snr. made his home and established a timber camp. Dobson called the area ‘Lightwood Gully‘, the original name for the township of Ferntree Gully.

His remarkable image of a fern-tree gully in the Dandenong Ranges, some 40 kilometres east of Melbourne, conveys a sense of the landscape as a spiritual sanctuary. In this painting von Guérard showed the landscape as a rejuvenating life force, untainted by human interference. When he first visited the Dandenong Ranges the area was a dense bushland of temperate rainforests and cool fern gullies. We know from sketchbooks held in the collection of the Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, that von Guérard visited the region twice between 1855 and 1857 and again in 1858.1 The pages of these books contain a number of drawings which document the lush and largely unexplored forests. This natural resource of high-quality timber was rapidly logged for the growing industries and settlement in Victoria.

Painted on return to the artist’s Melbourne studio, Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges is a work that combines von Guérard’s meticulous observation of local plant species with his artistic interest in compositional arrangement and the creation of a ‘mood’ particular to this environment. In this case we are privy to the magical world of a bower – an enclosed gully of natural foliage created by towering tree ferns. A pool of light on the forest floor leads us to two male lyrebirds cast in shadow, one with its characteristic tail feathers raised – a natural mimic of the arch of the fern fronds. The theatrical activities of the lyrebird were one of the early drawcards for tourists to the area, who hoped to witness the singing and dancing of the male bird. Tim Bonyhady, Australian colonial paintings in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1986, p. 171. for the oil for this lithograph which was originally bought by F.G. Dalgety, founder of Dalgety & Co.

From Guerard’s, Eugene von Guerard’s Australian Landscapes.

Collections:
National Gallery Victoria: Accession Number 651-5
National Library Canberra: Accession no NGA 83.1276