These images have a quiet and raw immediacy. The subject of the central watercolour Tina Loot gazes downwards and folds her arms into each other as she smokes her pipe. Is it ‘Tina’ we see again in the other images, or was this olive-green dress standard issue on Alpha Station? The young woman by a smoking fire also seems pensive, held in her own reflections, she wears a similar dress pulled down to cover her feet.

The country around Alpha suffered from severe drought over these years, as Neville-Rolfe remarks upon in the notes on [Women] from the verandah of the quarters, Alpha* 1884. Blankets such as those in the foreground of this painting are recorded as being distributed annually, in honour of the distant British monarch’s birthday.

*Text in parentheses replaces derogatory language