The Golden Fleece

Roberts spent about four months in the shearing shed at Newstead station in early 1894, watching men strip the wool from the sheep in the raking light between the boards. He first called it simply Shearing at Newstead, then renamed it The Golden Fleece, reaching for the Greek myth of the Argonauts to cast the Australian shearer as a kind of hero. That was very much the mood of the 1890s, a decade when a young, still-separate group of colonies was building a picture of itself as a land of honest pastoral labour. The Art Gallery of New South Wales bought it the same year it was finished, and it has hung there ever since.