George Morant - An Australian Original

George MORANT

Morant was born in 1934 during the Great Depression. Given up by his parents he was raised by relatives and left home at fourteen for a life on the road.

As an Itinerant worker, Morant travelled widely throughout Australia working on wheat and sheep properties in the Riverina and prospecting for tin and gold in the Northern Territory. He also took on work as a forestry labourer, crocodile shooter along Australia’s northern coast and worked on Snowy River Hydroelectric Scheme and NSW Railways. He spent his life in remote, tough frontier Australia, where the landscape was vast, isolated and sometimes cruel.

In the 1960’s, during his 35 years as an opal miner and dealer at Lightning Ridge and Western Queensland, he took up painting. Opals fascinated him from the time he unearthed his first one – and gave him a real appreciation of colour. With no formal training his first paintings were protests against the Vietnam War. “I started painting broken, bleeding flowers in the jungle – they were awful, but it got me going. I found painting was a way of talking to myself, having a little scream to myself.”

As time went by Morant’s paintings improved but continued as a cry of protest, as he painted critiques of War and Religion protesting against the evil and cruelty of the human race. He is a savage critic of political, economic and social systems.
 
In 1973 he gave up full time opal mining and began painting seriously, holding his first exhibition in 1975 at Russell Davis Gallery in Melbourne followed by the 1977 exhibition at the Warehouse Gallery, Melbourne. He held 17 solo shows and his work is represented in private and corporate collections in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Japan and (former) Yugoslavian nations.

Morant is represented in public collections through the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, and the Perc Tucker Regional Gallery.

The subject he returned to over and over is the thing that affected him most during his wanderings around Australia: the impact of white settlement on the land and its indigenous inhabitants. Morant’s take on this history is invariably savage: his paintings depict miners, clergy, troopers and trackers wreaking havoc on the land and on the Aborigines.

George passed away in 2020.