(Eastward from Bathurst Head)

Joe Rootsey began making art to pass the time while confined for two years to a Cairns hospital bed following his diagnosis with tuberculosis in 1954. He sketched the landscapes of north Queensland, working from his memories of the area around Cooktown and Barrow Point, where he was born of the Amu Wuringu people.

Encouraged by a visiting medical social worker, Rootsey began painting in watercolour and held a solo exhibition following his release from hospital. His work attracted considerable attention from the press and he was offered formal artistic training at Brisbane’s Central Technical College. In Brisbane, separated from his wife and children and possibly homesick, he continued to paint images of his own country.

In the watercolour (Eastward from Bathurst Head), a lone woman looks across several jagged points along the shore of the east Cape, presumably towards the area of Cape Melville, 150 kilometres north of Rootsey’s hometown of Cooktown. Dark outlines indicate the depth of the rolling landscape and its features. This also has the effect of altering the perspective of the picture’s surface — the hills and valleys farthest away have become tilted towards the viewer. This watercolour is closely related to a segment of another work, (Four landscape sketches), an image divided into four detailed and rich watercolours, as though looking through a vast window onto the Australian landscape.

Comparisons were often made with Australia’s first widely-recognised Indigenous artist, Albert Namatjira and, in 1957, the North Australian Monthly described Rootsey as ‘Queensland’s Own Namatjira’. Like Namatjira, Rootsey made use of the European medium of watercolour to capture the vitality of his country. For Rootsey — as for Namatjira — European artistic conventions were of less importance than the affirmation of his strong personal connection with the places he depicted.

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See also . . .

Learn more about the artist Joe Rootsey.
Learn more about Barrow Point.