The landscape painter Sir Hans Heysen’s life-long preoccupation was with the Australian interior. This watercolour represents Brachina Gorge in the Flinders Ranges National Park, around three hundred miles north of Adelaide. Heysen’s watercolour technique is wonderfully expressive of the massive forms of the gum trees, and of the intense light of the Australian bush. Queen Elizabeth, as Patron of the Adelaide Festival of Arts, was presented with Brachina Gorge when she opened an exhibition in Adelaide in 1966.