Summary

This item is one of our 50 Treasures: Celebrating 50 years of James Cook University.

Ross Searle answers the question 'Why is this significant?'

In 1962, Ray Crooke set off with fellow artist and adventurer, Percy Trezise, to the remote settlements of Normanton and Croydon. Normanton was established as a port for the Gulf of Carpentaria pastoral industry and grew in importance with the discovery of gold at Croydon in 1885. Normanton and its ramshackle townscape would become a recurring motif inspiring a series of paintings including, Last Light, Normanton. The eerie white light of the approaching night and the dark shadows of the looming streetscape at dusk held particular fascination for him. Ray Crooke had a special affinity with the Indigenous people of remote northern Australia and when situated in his paintings, as they do in the foreground of Last Light, Normanton they have a calm almost classical gravity.

Ray Crooke first came to north Queensland during World War II when his AIF unit moved first to Townsville and then, via the Atherton Tablelands, to the tip of Cape York. In a 1997 conversation with Gavin Wilson, Crooke vividly recalled the journey by troop truck from Townsville to Cape York: "At first, I was confronted by the majesty of the coastal rainforests and then the virtually isolated interior plains, with the occasional dream-like mine settlements like Chillagoe and Maytown." After a brief posting on Thursday Island he was sent to Borneo and while there, waiting for his discharge, he began to consider his future in civilian life and the possibility of a career as an artist.

In 1946 he resumed his studies at Swinburne Technical College in Melbourne. Army service in north Queensland and the islands of the Torres Strait and Borneo helped to extend his fields of observation and experience. It also provided his first contact with Indigenous village life. All of this had a tremendous influence on Crooke and propelled his artistic curiosity in two distinct paths. Perhaps the best known are the island subjects of the Torres Strait and Pacific Islands but equally significant are the works that reference the sparse, dry interior of the continent. Mental images from his journey through the Cape York interior during army service were to lay dormant until he made his first attempts to paint these experiences in the early 1960s.

While often compared to Gauguin, Ray Crooke's craft and vision had a closer affinity to early Italian painting, containing a quality 'that for the art historian James Gleeson only began to transform once one discovered the stillness and the silence that lay at its heart.'