Sidney Nolan painted twenty-seven Ned Kelly panels in 1946–47 at Heide, using Ripolin — a commercial household enamel that dries fast, flat and slightly glossy. The paint decides the look: unmodulated fields, no blending, brush drag caught at the edge of each band, hardboard grain showing through the thin passages.

Kelly is not a man with a beard and a rifle. He is a plain black box with a horizontal slit, a shape that swallows all light while the ochre plain and the pale sky stay sharply sunlit. One dark form, a lot of empty ground, a horizon line — that is the whole grammar.