For my return visit to the exhibition Fred Williams in the You Yangs at the Geelong Gallery, I decided to take the train instead of driving, as I usually do. Although the creeping suburban sprawl, especially around Melbourne, has narrowed the area without housing or industrial estates, there is still just enough left of the flat Wimmera volcanic plain, its monotonous succession of fenced paddocks, and its prominent outcrop of granite hills – the You Yangs – to appreciate the task that Fred Williams undertook when he first visited the place in the winter of 1962 to draw and paint gouaches.

Once before, in early 1957, Williams had observed the hills rising abruptly from the pancake flatness surrounding them. He was standing on board the ship that was bringing him home after five years spent in London. The sight intrigued him, but it was to be another five and half years before he was to go there, driven by his friend James Mollison.