This exhibition celebrates the 1901 novel My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin. The novel was a sensation at the time of its publication and attracted attention again in the 1970s with the making of the iconic Australian film of the same name, directed by Gillian Armstrong and staring Judy Davies and Sam Neill. Currently Netflix has a new re-telling of the story in a six-part series.  The strength of the novel is the bold and passionate voice of the main character 'Sybylla', as she describes her thoughts on the limitations of men and marriage and her ambitions to became a writer. Her story is set in the late 1890s against a background of the swift downward spiral of her family into poverty and debt. These were years of depression, devastating drought and considerable social tension in Australia.

The paintings are arranged in an attempt to convey something of the plot alongside quotations from the text. Sometimes the works align well with the extracts and sometimes it will require a considerable imaginative leap for the viewer to reconcile image and text.  Often the words will uncut an apparently bucolic scene or conventional portrait in ways which are undeniably at odds with the work's title or the artist's original intention. Hopefully this has the effect of slowing down the bemused viewer and encouraging them to spend more time looking at each work in detail.

 Stella Miles Franklin's name lives on in two of our most prestigious literary awards, The Miles Franklin Award and the Stella Award. Her life was filled with activism and writing but none of her later novels rivalled the success of her first published work: the boisterous and exuberant tale of My Brilliant Career.

Image: George Lambert The dark horse 1926, oil on canvas, Castlemaine Art Museum