Jude Rae, Pre-dawn sky over Port Botany container terminal, 2025, oil on linen, 204.00 x 150.40 cm, TCG23707

winner The 2022 Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

‘When I wake before dawn, as the sky is starting to show the first flush of deep blue, this is what I see from my bedroom windows in Redfern. Port Botany container terminal: logistics operating 24/7. Australia, trading nation: still doing what it must despite US tariffs; still in the business of transportation.’

For three-time Wynne finalist Jude Rae, this view towards Sydney’s Botany Bay, or Kamay, is laden with its history as the birthplace of colonial Australia. Her sightline from the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern to the site of Captain Cook’s first landing in Australia, a place deemed terra nullius (no man’s land) by the British, was also a traditional corridor used by Aboriginal people to access the bay.

Rae devotes her canvas to an immense sky underlaid with the rust reds of impending sunrise. ‘There is something compelling about the constantly flashing gantry lights and the floodlights blasting away in those hours just before dawn,’ she says, ‘all rendered puny under the heavenly expanse of that vast southern sky.’