“Flowering gum”

Don’t you love naif artists? Whoever else would draw a flowering gum looking like that? I guess the yellow bushes are wattles, but the Xmas tree shapes elude me. This charming scene is by Oswald Blair, Australian painter. He’s better on the birds. He’s got the rosellas pretty right, and there’s a couple of sulphur crested cockatoos in the foreground. But is that a croc they are perched on or a log? And I think those are emus at the back along with three xanthorrhoeas, but the four big blue birds beat me. Brolgas maybe?

July 2018

Answers to QQ9

(a) a jolly swagman (b) Monet (c) Popeye (d) Burke and Wills (e) Persephone (f) Barry Humphries (g) Moses