Arthur Evan Read’s distinctive vision of north Queensland achieved prominence in 1954 when he was awarded the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Wynne Prize for Cooktown 1954. Born in Melbourne, Read studied at the National Gallery School in the mid-1930s and, around this time, first visited north Queensland.

Read spent 1949 in Musgrave (now Flying Fish Point), near Innisfail, and stayed there again from 1950 to 1956, working as a canecutter, housepainter and storekeeper before moving to Brisbane. These experiences would translate into his atmospheric paintings of the north. Art critic Gertrude Langer noted these qualities in her 1955 review of Read’s exhibition at the Johnstone Gallery, remarking on ‘the painter’s humility in front of the subject in trying not to impose his own mood but in grasping the mood of the place’.

In 1955, Read won the Queensland National Art Gallery’s HC Richards Memorial Prize for The cane town 1955. Despite its generic title, the Photoplay Cinema depicted next to the pub, and the cane train and tracks in the centre of the composition, locate the scene in Mill Street, Mossman.