Simpson and the Donkey

John Simpson Kirkpatrick was a water-carrier at Gallipoli whose war service is now that of Australian legend; his efforts to rescue wounded soldiers with a donkey catapulted him to national hero status. Nolan's composition, however, does not depict Simspon as a hero. "Nolan gives us instead the donkey, as it were, riding the soldier. It must have been Nolan's instinctive subversiveness that made him reverse the roles of beast and man. Given Nolan's attraction to heroic failure and his acute antennae for patriotic bombast and spurious myth-making, one cannot doubt Nolan's satirical intent." (T.G. Rosenthal, 'Sidney Nolan', Thames & Hudson, United Kingdom, 2002, pp.157-158). The idea of Gallipoli first struck Nolan while he was living on the Greek island of Hydra in 1955-56. He read widely about the Gallipoli campaign, researched the photography collection at the Imperial War Museum and drew on his experience of growing up in post-war Melbourne.

Sidney Nolan (1917–1992) was one of Australia’s most complex, innovative, and prolific artists. This work is part of a large series of paintings on the subject of Gallipoli, mostly depictions of soldiers and landscapes, completed over a 20-year period. In 1978 Nolan presented 252 works to the Australian War Memorial. They were donated in memory of his younger brother Raymond, who accidentally drowned in Queensland while awaiting demoblisation at the end of the Second World War.