Tom Roberts

When the six Australian colonies joined into one nation in 1901, the job of painting the moment fell to Tom Roberts. The opening of the first federal Parliament became his Big Picture, a huge canvas crammed with some 250 portrait likenesses. It took him well over a year, wrecked his eyesight and his nerves, and by most accounts his work never fully recovered.

Before that he had helped invent a way of painting Australia. With friends from art school, among them Frederick McCubbin, Roberts set up painting camps in the bush outside Melbourne, near Heidelberg, working outdoors in the hard local light. The group became known as the Heidelberg School, Australia's own Impressionism.

His best-loved canvas came from those years. Shearing the Rams, from 1890, shows men at work in a timber shearing shed, sleeves rolled, wool coming off under the long afternoon light. He had gone looking for a subject that felt truly Australian, and found it in the wool sheds that much of the country's wealth was built on.