Giant—ancient & historic trees

Giant—ancient and historic trees examined a dramatic aspect of natural history—the story of notable and significant trees—as seen through the lens of art history. Giant was concerned ultimately with the pictorial documentation and representation of ‘remarkable trees’ (exotics and natives) from an Australian perspective. While the prime motivation for Giant was the distinctive and spectacular character of Australia’s own phenomenal and ‘remarkable trees’, and their signal presence in Australian art from the colonial period to the present, our subject: is plainly not ‘the tree in Australian art’. This would be an unwieldy exercise given that landscape painting was the dominant stream in Australian art until the advent of modernism during the inter-war period of the twentieth century.