Tarred Nets

A plaque on the back of the work reads: "Presented by Mrs. Hilda Morley, of Cairns, in honour of two distinguished women: Dr. Frances Kelsey, who prevented the sale of a dangerous drug in the United States of America; and Dame Hilda Lloyd, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Birmingham. September, 1962. October 21, 1962 Purchased for 25 guineas."

Dr Frances Kelsey was a Canadian pharmacologist and physician who, as a reviewer for the US Food and Drug Administration in 1960, refused to authorise thalidomide for marketing because of her concerns about its safety.

Born in Lismore in 1923, Margaret Olley was one of Australia's most respected interior and still life painters. Demonstrating a fierce disregard for trends and fashions, Olley's arrangements of flowers, fruit and objects are characterised by both technical virtuosity and inherent grace and elegance, and complexities of space and light are rendered with consummate skill. Olley's subjects were almost always from her own home – itself famous as a work of art. She first came to public attention as the subject of Sir William Dobell's winning Archibald portrait in 1948. In 1997, her work was the subject of a major retrospective organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.