The golden fleece

Tom Roberts's 'The Golden Fleece' (1894) depicts a team of shearers at work on a New South Wales sheep station — sunlight flooding through the corrugated-iron shed onto dust, shearers, and fleeces. A foundational image of Australian Impressionism, the painting helped forge the 'bush ethos' of late-colonial Australia and is one of the treasures of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.