Threads
‘I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own.’ Montaigne. This present essay traces the threads that bind the lives of six figures from Australia’s past: Eliza Fraser, David Bracewell and Ludwig Leichhardt in the nineteenth century, and Sunday Reed, Sidney Nolan and Patrick White in the twentieth; who if not all national icons, have nevertheless left their mark in legend, culture, art and literature. They make an unlikely sextet: the earlier trio steeped in adventure, one willingly, the others less so, all treading new paths across a hostile land; the later trio steeped in art and literature, each in their own way also treading new paths across the artistic landscape of that same continent.
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