In 1904 the Australian artist Frederick McCubbin painted his triptych ‘The Pioneer’. McCubbin hired models and painted the work near Mount Macedon in the state of Victoria.  The triptych illustrated land owned by his friend, William Peter McGregor, the second chairman of the mining company BHP.

While McCubbin was always non-committal about the narrative within his work, ‘The Pioneer’ presents a romanticized image of its white subjects, who ruthlessly cleared the land so that it could be used for the mass cultivation of imported livestock.  The impact of the cloven hooves of these animals upon the newly cleared land fundamentally changed the composition of the soil.

Dedicated to the European ‘pioneers’ who settled Australia, the triptych overlooks the thousands of years of nurturing land management by the Aboriginal communities which they displaced.  It offers an unintentionally prophetic vision of the continuing Anglo dominance of Australian popular culture, the extractive nature of the country’s economy, and the terrible damage which is still being done to Australia's natural environment.