Shearing the Rams

At the centre of Tom Roberts's Shearing the Rams, one small figure looks directly back at the viewer. That figure is the tar boy, whose job was to daub hot tar onto the razor cuts the shearers accidentally made on the sheep. The tar boy in this painting was not a boy. She was Susan Bourne, a nine-year-old girl from a nearby farm. Roberts spent three summers at Brocklesby Station near Corowa, sketching the shearers by name from inside the shed. He paid Susan and her sister sixpence apiece to kick up the dust so the shed would look properly full of shearing weather. Susan Bourne lived until 1979. Now at National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne @ngvmelbourne