Art versus anti-authoritarianism
You can imagine my delight at last week's made-for-blog news that , reaching almost US$5m at auction.
How fitting that, in a country which prides itself on its anti-authoritarianism, art's richest price tag should be attached to a work featuring Australia's most celebrated anti-hero - a homicidal rogue who regularly defied the colonial authorities.
Much is made of how Australia can boast a Ned Kelly but not an Elliot Ness or Dixon of Dock Green, a national hero who enforces the law rather than breaks it. But as regular readers will know, your blogger does not really buy into this anti-authoritarian myth-making, and continues to be surprised at the meek adherence to a bewildering array of rules and regulations (see below).
So I tend to view the acquisition of First Class Marksman - which depicts the notorious outlaw walking through the Australian bush, his rifle at the ready, wearing his trademark body armour, with its iron helmet with a narrow, oblong eye slit - rather differently. It is not so much about the sanctification of Australian folk-lore as the celebration of high-brow Australian art. It is recognising the glorious talent of Sidney Nolan rather than the inglorious notoriety of Kelly - even if, as some of you may point out, Nolan's brilliant series of Kelly paintings did much to enshrine the myth.
Admittedly, my knowledge of Australian art is sketchy at best. Following on from our last blog, any discussion surely has to start with an acknowledgement of the cultural contribution of indigenous artists, who produced an extraordinary body of work both ancient and modern. Then it moves on to the European artists who arrived here after white settlement and made the mistake of representing Australia as if they were painting Europe. The light was all wrong. The trees were too neat and tidy. Landscapes tended to look like the Scottish highlands or the French Alps.
At the end of the 19th Century, artists from what became known as the Heidelberg school changed all that by painting their homeland with a more careful eye for local detail and a distinctly nationalistic brush. Australian art began to look like Australia.
Sidney Nolan came much later and painted in a different style, but his art was perhaps the apotheosis of that trend: it was emphatically and uniquely Australian, and could not have come from any other country.
Nolan was also fixated with Australian stories and idioms. The Ned Kelly series is perhaps his most popular work - and the most visited Australian art collection at the National Gallery in Canberra. But his work also focused on the adventures of the legendary explorers Burke and Wills, along with Gallipoli, which he viewed "as the great modern Australian legend, the nearest thing to a deeply-felt common religious experience". With good reason, art experts see Nolan as "Australia's premier iconographer". So how fitting that his work should command such a high price, the modern-day currency of cultural success. The hammer went down in celebration of Australian art not Australian anti-authoritarianism.
On that front that, there's this blast from Australia's great Formula One hope, Mark Webber. Following the Australian grand prix in Melbourne, Webber said he had spent his time "dodging the ridiculous speeding and parking [rules] and all the nanny-state country that we have down here in Australia" - a reference to .
"I think we've got to read an instruction book when we get out of bed - what we can do and what we can't do ... put a yellow vest on and all that sort of stuff," Webber went on. "It's certainly changed since I left here. It pisses me off coming back here, to be honest.
"It's a great country but we've got to be responsible for our actions and it's certainly a bloody nanny state when it comes to what we can do."
I'm 
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