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I began writing poetry about the notion of being 'unhelmeted' after I read an article by an academic regarding the paintings of Sidney Nolan. The writer suggested that "Nolan's Ned Kelly" is never seen outside his helmet. I knew I'd seen the face of Ned Kelly in Nolan's work. But the disembodied Kellys were so tantalising. I started writing poetry about these amazingly evocative images – both the strange men I'd seen floating out of Nolan's paintings and the empty helmets. I find the 4 Kelly faces I've found (I'm sure there are more) all the more tantalising because there are so many instances of Nolan's Helmeted Kellys.

Patrick White's writing often intersects with Nolan's oeuvre. White said that he'd only ever visited the Australian outback via Nolan's canvases. But there are other more bizarre intertexts available to those who know how to read across and through
  and around ...
in the spaces where
   paint can merge
with thoughts
    and words
and something else ... (see below)

Diane Caney

These images are reproduced for the purposes of criticism and review only. Please note that any further reproduction of these images without permission is a violation of copyright.

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[unhelmeted framed] Ned Kelly, 1946, ripolin enamel on hardboard, 74.5 x 61.5 cm, Australian National Gallery, page 74 of Jane Clark, ed. Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, Cambridge U P, 1987. [unhelmeted] Kelly Head,1947, ripolin enamel on pulpboard, 75.6 x 63.5cm, plate 5, Jane Clark, ed. Nolan: Myths, Landscapes and Portraits, 1942 - 1964, Melbourne: Lauraine Diggins Gallery, 1987.
[unhelmeted] Kelly and Scanlan, 1946, ripolin on strawboard, 73.4 x 76.1 cm, Nolan Gallery, Lanyon, page 15 of Maggie Gilchrist, ed. Nolan at Lanyon, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1985. . Death of a Poet,1953, ripolin enamel on hardboard, 91.5 x 122cm, The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, page120 of Jane Clark, ed. Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, Cambridge U P, 1987. 

    
    I have chosen not to assemble this project
  as a traditional essay 
 because my own ways of traversing 
this art-text mix have been intertextual.
The ways in which artists' 
 works intersect are dependent 
upon creative readerly interventions,
  both my own and yours.
  
   Unhelmeted is a series of poems 
  I wrote which  centre 
   around Ned Kelly's face: 
  as both absence and presence 
 inside his metal helmet,
 as vulnerable and exposed 
  human being in only 3 images 
  of the live hero outside his helmet
 and as departed poet when Kelly's 
 death mask is depicted by Nolan, 
floating in fragments of sky and bush.

Kelly is an Australian bushranger
  who has become a national icon
   within Sidney Nolan's oeuvre.
  
   
     
  
  Nolan's Kelly, however, interests me
  because of the ways in which it eludes
   its viewers on almost every level.
     I see Nolan's Kelly      
    as enmeshing 
      with another Australian character
     who is suspended in a tree ... Himmelfarb, 
         the Jew, 
     crucified by Blue in 
     Riders in the Chariot,
         Nobel-prize-winner 
     Patrick White's 1964 novel.
        Parts of the novel 
     appear in this sequence
        type-set as poems.

    There is also a personal 
    dimension to this work
      which visits spaces
        inhabited by myself 
          during my several lives.
             © Diane Caney, 2000