Bailey’s Matilda

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1980s Polaroids of small-town a rare take on the country’s landscape and people from David Bailey David Bailey’s (born 1938) love letter to Australia, Bailey’s Matilda is no rosy portrait of “the lucky country,” but a gritty yet affectionate vision of rural and small-town Australia in the early 1980 black-and-white images of a dead cockatoo, kangaroo and sheep, of painted advertising for Queensland’s beloved XXXX beer, of a gravestone and dead tree trunks against a lead sky. His human subjects are the Indigenous people of Australia, not the descendants of its white colonists. Bailey embraces all the flaws and accidents of his prints―their blurrings, smudges and stains―and enhances them with his own scribbles and crops, creating painterly results. In his own words it’s all about “This book should have been washed up in a bottle on the sea shore.”