Yvonne Boag, Westgate Bridge, lithograph, 1982
Summary
This lithograph by Yvonne Boag was acquired by the City of Melbourne following the ‘Melbourne Celebrates’ exhibition, held during May–June 1985, marking 150 years since Europeans arrived from Van Diemen’s to claim the Port Phillip District. When Boag depicted the bridge in 1982, it had been open for just four years, so it was still a reasonably new addition to the city’s infrastructure. But while it may have been worthy of lionising for grafting Melbourne’s greater west to the city, the bridge had a darker, abiding place the city’s then recent memory, having collapsed just two years into construction, in 1972, claiming the lives of 35 workers.
Boag’s lithograph brings a monumentality to the vehicle-less structure, which soars above the land and surrounding industrial buildings, cast in strange apposition to the aircraft-like cloud that hovers in the top right. This representational print contains a clear sense of the geometry that the artist continues to develop through her practice, expressed strongly in her later, colourful abstract artworks and those that clearly depict architecture and place.
