Fred Williams was a landmark painter and printmaker whose distinctive vision permanently altered how Australians envisage their landscape. Approaching the environment as a stimulus for formal invention, Williams strove to paint the underlying "bones" rather than the surface skin of the continent, drawing on a deep knowledge of Western art to connect local terrain to global modernism. This analytical rigor is exemplified in Landscape (at Lysterfield) (1966), created during a crucial period when the bushland east of Melbourne served as one of his primary outdoor laboratories. Working in gouache—a medium celebrated for its immediacy and fluid responsiveness—Williams stripped the native terrain down to its structural core. Rather than rendering a traditional, picturesque view, he tilted the spatial plane, transforming the earth into a tactile field of muted, earth-toned gouache washes. Across this paper ground, he applied a series of controlled, calligraphic dabs and rhythmic marks that suggest trees, foliage, and clearing without resorting to literal illustration. This mastery of spatial economy and calligraphic notation positioned his mid-1960s Lysterfield series among the most refined expressions of Australian optical abstraction.