La fuga in massa!

Roberts painted this in 1891 at Corowa, on the New South Wales bank of the Murray River, during one of the droughts that regularly cracked the inland dry. Australia's wealth then was said to ride on the sheep's back, and here is the hard underside of that saying: a mob maddened by thirst breaking for a dam, ready to trample and drown themselves to reach the water. A lone stockman spurs along the flank, stretched out of his saddle, trying to swing the leaders around before the whole flock pours in. He made the picture as a severe drought bit and an economic depression closed in on the colonies, and it entered the Adelaide gallery in 1899 through the bequest of the pastoralist Thomas Elder.