I love a sunburnt country: The Boyds of Murrumbeena

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror -

The wide brown land for me!

Dorothea Mackellar

Second stanza, My Country, circa 1908

Australia at the turn of the 20th century was a sparsely populated, mostly barren, self-governing colony of the British Empire. This vast, sweeping land was home to distinctive flora and fauna, an island continent geographically isolated by the daunting distance between it and its nearest neighbor, let alone from the shores of England and Europe where the majority of its immigrant population hailed from.

Melbourne, on Australia’s southeastern tip, was growing rapidly and encroaching steadily into the untamed Australian bushland that surrounded it. On the face of it, the modest, ramshackle home in the suburb of Murrumbeena on the city’s outskirts would not have been an obvious setting for the intellectual and artistic hub that would inspire and nurture Australia’s most famous artistic dynasty – the Boyds – and their extended family.

In the exhibition at the Glen Eira City