There are paintings one looks at, or perhaps into, and then there are paintings that one looks through—more like a window or portal. On my dining room wall there hangs such an artwork, a watercolour painted en plein air at Lake Pedder’s beach in the year before I was born. It takes me there, to the place in the dunes where Max Angus sat at his easel and mixed on his palette the dusky mauves and pinks of that legendary sand, and prepared the tiny quantity of smoky blue needed to depict the band of lake water on the horizon. It takes me also to that day in 1971 when Max Angus was painting in the hope that capturing the beauty before him might somehow contribute to its salvation.

It didn’t. Or, at least, it hasn’t yet.