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Description: Oil on canvas
Signed and dated '82 lower right; inscribed with title on the reverse

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Dimensions: 153 by 168 cm

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Exhibited: John Olsen, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 19-31 July 1982, cat. 5

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Notes: Many of Olsen's major paintings from the early 1980s embody his deep understanding of the landscape as 'a living, pulsing organism suggestive of animalistic shapes and biological forms; of landscape not as a static factor but as process, not only seen but felt' (Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, rev. edn 2000, p. 153). In 1981 he had moved to the hamlet of Clarendon in South Australia, about 30 km from Adelaide, and he soon explored further along the coast as well as into the hinterland: to the Fleurieu Peninsula, Goolwa and Lake Alexandrina where the Murray River meets the sea.
As well as the rapid sketches made during his travels, he sometimes made drawings from the air, combining this raw material back in his studio into oil paintings such as River & Wattle. This painting has also been called by the artist 'Meandering Murray'. Its dramatic and highly inventive composition presents a map-like bird's-eye-view of the dark river, cutting a swathe across the red outback plain towards the far right-hand section of the canvas filled with vibrant, blossoming, buzzing wattle. Here, where the twisting riverbanks are well-watered, verdant new life springs forth in green foliage sprinkled all over with golden blooms. Wading birds, honey-eaters and frogs are all discernible in the calligraphic detail. The very air seems alive with pollen and small insects and the warmth of the Australian sun. As Olsen himself explained to Deborah Hart in 1985, 'One thing that really strikes you in the environments I was working in is the abundance and generosity of life and life forces. The urge for life is a staggering thing and we just ought to take notice' (op. cit., p. 123).