Geoffrey Dyer Dr Bob Brown (environmentalist)

This portrait by Geoffrey Dyer of environmentalist, politician and medical doctor Bob Brown (born 1944) is now in the collection of the Burnie Regional Art Gallery, Tasmania under the title Bob Brown.

Brown helped establish the Wilderness Society and was instrumental in the 1982 campaign that prevented the damming of Tasmania’s Franklin River. When this portrait was painted, Brown had just resigned from state parliament and his leadership of the Tasmanian Greens. In 1996, he entered federal parliament as the first Australian Greens senator, becoming an outspoken leader of the national debate on climate change.

Like his subject, Dyer was a lifelong activist for the environment (he passed away in 2020). He is primarily known for his elegiac expressionist landscapes, depicting his beloved Tasmania. His training at Hobart’s Tasmanian School of Art under the influential Jack Carington Smith – who was the first Tasmanian artist to win the Archibald in 1963 – was strengthened through close study of the Romantic landscapes of English artists John Constable and JMW Turner.

In Dyer’s 1993 Archibald work, landscape and portrait coalesce as Brown gazes defiantly out from the canvas, arms crossed, sleeves rolled up, framed by the majestic scenery of the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park – now part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.