The National Gallery of Victoria’s expansive Vincent van Gogh exhibition, Seasons, begins for me out the front of the building, where a shivering worker is up to his armpits in the fountain, floundering amid rotting leaves that have fallen from foreign deciduous trees.

It brings to mind that longstanding western conflict between nature and industrial landscapes, which are maintained by the struggling peasantry in an endless economic battle with land and weather.

These ideas follow me through the front doors; with them, I also carry an Indigenous orientation to place and time, and an Indigenous understanding of the seasons themselves.

Van Gogh at the National Gallery of Victoria – in pictures Read more

Back home up on Cape York – where Van Gogh’s countrymen, on a voyage of discovery, were repelled in the 1600s by Wik warriors – the dry season has commenced. This is the prelude to a season of yams, native honey and plenty, signalled by messmate flowers and tall grasses blown flat by the wind, which are circled by hawks and crows in the smoke of bushfires lit by traditional owners to regenerate growth. The brolgas are feasting there now; they have fled from the cold down south in Victoria.

The four seasons are relatively recent industrial calendar divisions, which originated from the northern hemisphere and were inverted and imposed upon Australia. But Australia actually has up to twice the number of seasons and a greater range of biodiversity abundant in each than up north. In the Kulin nation for instance, where the Van Gogh exhibition takes place, it is wombat season, with the mating call of lyrebirds telling us it is time to collect the starchy sweet cores of ferns – at least in the few places not yet scabbed over with concrete and mono-crop agriculture.

But in this marvellously curated exhibit at the NGV, we see Van Gogh’s seasons of nature as an economic cycle, rather than a natural one; four utilitarian divisions of time based on what can be extracted from domesticated plants and animals by peasants, to meet the requirements of distant land owners. In a European worldview, the seasons are determined by cycles of reaping and sowing. Even the word “season” itself comes from the Latin word for sowing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We see Van Gogh’s seasons of nature as an economic cycle, rather than a natural one’: Planting Potatoes by Vincent Van Gogh. Photograph: Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal

There is something desolate and unfulfilling in a view of nature that separates us from it, leaving us to plunder it for food products, minerals and even light and colour for art. There is a kind of desperate longing for connection and meaning through country that I see in the works of Van Gogh, who was outside of the land, looking in.



Untamed animals and plants are excluded from his work, and the weather is viewed as an imposition, a force to facilitate or impede the extraction of resources. When crows are depicted, they are not part of the landscape but marauding outsiders picking at the carcass of a tilled earth murdered by winter. The only other wild things are swifts, who we know fly close to the ground when rain is coming. They fly high in one painting while in the next they are absent. In his accompanying commentary, the painter explained that he was rushing to complete his agricultural snapshot before a looming rainstorm “ruins” his orchard flowers. He misses the opportunity to commune with both birds and blooms about the weather.

Van Gogh paints cypresses, which he describes as “Egyptian obelisks” – but, in his quest to “discover” nature, he fails here too. The cypresses aren’t natural but planted as windbreaks to shut out nature, to protect the summer wheat crop from the ravages of warm breezes. Rather than observing naturally flattened grasses as a seasonal indicator, he obsesses over these golden crops. He declares the sower and the sheaf to be symbols of eternity but cannot paint the sower in this summer season, only the reaper – some poor scythe-wielding peasant. That reaper came for him in the end, in one of those wheat fields.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wheatfield (1888) by Vincent van Gogh. Photograph: Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii

What if, instead of the fields of golden wheat that engrossed him for two weeks in 1888, Van Gogh sought out the badgers, hares, squirrels and hedgehogs? What if he followed the adder that emerges in spring time, or listened to whispers of long-removed wolves and bears and aurochs, to find a truer connection with the land?

Van Gogh at the NGV: 'He wasn't easy to get on with, but that doesn't make him mad' Read more

Instead, his missionary training and religious lens filters his springtime experience, through altarpiece diptych frames. His artistic journey is turned into pilgrimage and martyrdom, even as he abandoned monotheism for pantheism. The bohemian lens of the Parisian middle class would also remain – a disingenuous identification with the peasantry from the privileged Van Gogh who, like many artists of the age, plundered their folklore and customs for authenticity.

He could never observe the peasantry’s connection with nature but only their connection to labour, a servitude he praised as the “northern work ethic”. (A western imperial lens would further confound Van Gogh’s mission to discover the natural world, as he looted the east for Japanese woodblock prints and Shinto animism.)

There is a glorious pathos in the growth-based economic view of nature and eternity exemplified by Van Gogh’s seasonal works, similar to what you feel reading Shelley’s poem Ozymandias. It brings to mind the western mythical symbol of the snake eating its tail as a representation of eternity; a Dreaming that is anything but infinite, as this poor serpent ultimately can only consume and obliterate itself.

Filtered through the smooth tones of David Wenham in a film at the start of the journey, Van Gogh says of the cycle of seasons, “This has always been so, and always will be.” In this, he has indeed found an echo of a land-based truth: always was, always will be.

• Van Gogh’s Seasons is open at the National Gallery of Victoria until 9 July