The fatal shore 2000

In the narrative style of Bose’s late period, The fatal shore combines photocopy, collage, text and painted elements, applied in several layers. A newsprint photograph of a nostalgic Australian beach scene is overlaid with fantastical hand-painted elements, including a brightly coloured tropical fish and a grass-skirted mermaid, as well as pasted panels of cursive Dutch and French text describing the sea life encountered on an historical voyage. Collaged images of tall ships loom on the horizon in the painting’s blue upper section, as an advance party of demonic figures rows into shore. In the centre of this blue strip is a sky-blue aniline dye label, which features a European hunter training his gun on a proud, sphinx-like figure.

This visual pun resonates with Bose’s persistent critique of colonialism as expressed across his oeuvre, a connection underlined by the painting’s title, which borrows from Robert Hughes’s classic account of the white settlement of Australia — one of the many works of Australian literature that Bose read avidly in the 1990s.