In 1952, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail commissioned Sidney Nolan to document one of the country’s worst droughts. From June to July, he traversed regions in outback Queensland and the Northern Territory and, in December, resumed his journey along the Birdsville Track, capturing the natural disaster’s catastrophic effects.

More than a documentary record, Nolan’s photographs are an artistic response to the devastation of drought. In their distorted forms, the desiccated carcasses of livestock take on sculptural qualities, and in many instances were arranged by the artist as macabre still lifes. In this respect, they recall the plaster casts of people and animals recovered from the ruins of Pompeii, which Nolan had seen in 1951 at the Naples Museum of Archaeology and in an accompanying guidebook.  

The newspaper deemed Nolan’s photographs too graphic for its readership, publishing a series of his drawings instead. The iconography would later recur in paintings such as Animal c.1953–55, and in Nolan’s ‘Dust’ series of etchings, published in 1971.