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Sidney Nolan : Such is life, a biography

by Brian Adams

Summary: A biography tracing the long and colourful road to artistic fame and achievement undertaken by the most celebrated artist of his generation, Sidney Nolan.

Accession 9780091573607 ISBN 9780091573607 Publisher Hutchinson of Australia

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binding_type: Hard Back
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spine_text: Sidney Nolan SUCH IS LIFE A BIOGRAPHY BY BRIAN ADAMS B F 759. 994 ADA Hutchinson Australia

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Topics and Themes

1. **Australian Identity & National Mythology**
Sidney Nolan's work is deeply entangled with the construction of an Australian national identity — his paintings of outlaws, landscapes, and historical figures function as visual myths that define how Australians see themselves. The biography explores how an artist can become a vessel for a nation's collective self-image.

The book's central tension is: what does it mean to forge a distinctly Australian art, and can one artist's vision come to represent an entire culture's mythology?

Connect to books about: Australian cultural identity, postcolonial nationalism, national myth-making, settler histories.

2. **The Artist's Creative Process & Inner Life**
Rather than offering a critic's retrospective analysis, the biography lets Nolan speak directly about his own inspirations and motivations, revealing the interior world behind the finished work — the doubts, breakthroughs, and obsessions that drive a painter's career.

The book asks: how does an artist's lived experience translate into visual language, and what is lost or gained when we try to explain that process?

Connect to books about: artistic creativity, artist memoirs, the philosophy of art-making, studio practice.

3. **Ned Kelly & the Outlaw as Cultural Symbol**
Nolan's iconic Kelly series — a helmet-clad outlaw rendered in bold, flattened forms — is one of the most recognisable bodies of work in Australian art. The biography unpacks how a historical bushranger became a potent symbol of rebellion, class struggle, and anti-authoritarian sentiment.

The deeper question is: how do societies transform criminals into folk heroes, and what does that transformation reveal about power and injustice?

Connect to books about: bushranging history, folk heroism, social banditry, Australian colonial law.

4. **Landscape, Place & Belonging**
The vast, harsh Australian interior is not merely a backdrop in Nolan's paintings — it is a psychological force. The biography traces how land shaped his artistic sensibility and how the experience of place became inseparable from questions of identity and belonging.

The book's underlying tension is: can an artist who leaves their homeland still claim it as their creative foundation?

Connect to books about: landscape and art, sense of place, environmental aesthetics, geographical imagination.

5. **Expatriatism & the Artist Between Worlds**
Nolan's life was a constant movement between Australia, Britain, Ireland, and Hong Kong. The biography charts how living between cultures — belonging fully to none — both enriched and complicated his artistic vision and personal sense of self.

This theme asks: what happens to artistic identity when the artist is perpetually in exile, and how does distance from home sharpen or distort one's vision of it?

Connect to books about: expatriate artists and writers, diaspora identity, cultural displacement, artistic exile.

6. **Myth, History & Artistic Reinterpretation**
Nolan repeatedly returned to Australian historical events — the Kelly gang, Burke and Wills, Mrs Fraser — not to document them faithfully but to reimagine them as myth. The biography explores the tension between historical record and artistic reinvention.

The central dialectic is: does art illuminate history, or does it inevitably distort it in the service of a compelling story?

Connect to books about: history and memory, myth in art, historical fiction, the ethics of representation.

7. **The Artist & Public Life: Fame, Legacy & the Art World**
As Nolan's reputation grew internationally — with exhibitions in London and Hong Kong and commissions for major institutions like the Royal Opera House — the biography examines how fame reshapes an artist's relationship to their own work and the broader art establishment.

This theme probes: how does an artist negotiate the demands of public recognition while maintaining creative integrity?

Connect to books about: the art market, celebrity and artistic identity, cultural institutions, patronage and power.

8. **Biography as a Form: Intimacy, Access & Portraiture**
Adams's long personal association with Nolan gave him unusual access, resulting in a biography built substantially from direct conversation rather than archival distance. This raises questions about what a biography can and cannot reveal about a life.

The book implicitly asks: what is the difference between a life as lived and a life as told, and how does the relationship between subject and biographer shape what gets recorded?

Connect to books about: life writing, biographical theory, oral history, artist portraiture and documentation.

Sidney Nolan : Such is life, a biography

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