Searching for hells gate
"Far North Queensland is a place of legends. From ancient dreamtime stories to tales told during the push to colonise Cape York, there is one place where ancient and colonial legends meet. That place is known as Hells Gate.1"
In 1969 the painters Percy Trezise, Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey, Ray Crooke and amateur anthropologist Frank Woolston undertook an expedition to Cape York to relocate Hells Gate, a natural pass through the Great Dividing Range. This pass was used to access the Palmer River goldfields from Cooktown during the gold rush of the mid-1870’s. The name Hells Gate reflects the bloody confrontations that took place between Indigenous inhabitants and explorers and gold prospectors who were pushing their way through the country in pursuit of adventure and wealth. The collection of paintings in Searching for Hells Gate, curated by Cairns Regional Gallery Exhibitions Manager Justin Bishop, illustrates how the three artists each expressed their relationship to the landscape and history of the area.
The paintings, created over a forty-three year period (the most recent being a triple portrait of Woolston, Roughsey and Trezise by Crooke painted in 2013), illustrate the landscape of the area, the ill-fated Kennedy expedition story of 1848, ‘which Percy and Dick became involved with between searches for Hells Gate’,2 the 1969 expedition and depictions of ceremonial and everyday life of Indigenous inhabitants as they lived before the impact of exploration and mining altered the character of their society forever. Still photographs contextualise the history of the area and most importantly show the artists, triumphant and exhausted, at the pass.
Both the earlier (1970s) and later (1980s) works by Crooke in this exhibition depict dry, rocky escarpments
Ray Crooke, Quinkan Country, Laura, 1989. Oil on board, 120 x 75cm. Gift of the Cairns Regional Gallery Foundation to the Cairns Regional Gallery Collection.
