Gordon Bennett’s artworks often dissect images that speak to Australia’s colonial history. In Landscape painting 1988 he creates a scene reminiscent of Hans Heysen’s Red gums of the far north 1931. One of the country’s most influential landscape painters, Heysen is celebrated for his watercolours of gum trees in rural settings. Here, Bennett strips Heysen’s scene of its colour, causing the landscape to appear as a ghostly remnant of its former self. In doing so, Bennett emphasises a sense of absence in Heysen’s iconic scenes – which seldom show First Australians – to reveal that these nationally celebrated images of the Australian landscape are founded on the dispossession and removal of First Nations peoples.

On the right, Bennett paints a series of orthogonal (or right-angled) lines converging on a central vanishing point. Used for the technique of linear perspective, this diagram is often credited as a key achievement of the European Renaissance painting tradition. Bennett uses the perspective diagram, which is a system of representation privileging a certain viewpoint, as a metaphor for representations of the Australian landscape – and the history of the country – from the position of the coloniser. The artist has said: ‘In its positioning of the viewer . . . perspective may be seen as symbolic of a certain kind of power structure relating to a particular European worldview’.