A nationwide push-to-the-bush is on as regional tourism flourishes in Covid’s-wake. Poetically titled and politically correcting, She-Oak and Sunlight won’t hurt the rural idyll as its elemental splendour touches a latent longing to get out among the gum trees – or the casuarinas, now in rust-red flower as in Robert’s eponymous oil sketch. It was like that too in the 1880s as Melbourne (and Sydney’s) populations boomed and white men remembered their psyche-origin-myth was in the scrub: outback and pastoral labour beckoned as heroic subjects to parry with the hip-plein-air Impressionism sweeping the globe.

Or that is part of the story: lest we forget, we can’t change the past, only rearrange its objects. Arranging a show of such scale and baggage is where the curator’s form is tested. Anne Gray’s method is neither radical nor wildly original, placing now-iconic-sites-by-room, location trails and signposts: Buvelot opens, Streeton closes. Still, it works: gliding through the show there are pleasing vistas and intimate fraternal colloquies: A summer morning tiff and Lost, Roberts’ Coming south and Manet’s The ship’s deck salute to transnational currents: so too Whistler’s Thames-grey due, in contrast to Russell’s (and a mono-Monet) aqua-Mediterranean and (Russell again), proto-Fauve-icon, A clearing in the forest. Also fleshing out the continental links, Mr and Mrs Fox, sans Bunny.

Ox-blood walls = exhibitionary cliché, but they gesture to genealogies and warm the contrapuntal hang of ‘9x5s’ now so-fetishized. Boxed in solid timber frames in geometric frieze, they gain several inches. Sun aside, it rained too: wet cities, tonal interiors and symbolist nocturnes offset the golden (ultramarine) summers. Portraits and photos deliver a democratic salon of the entire cast. But it’s Roberts’ Louis Abrahams that gives Sunshine its bluest note: the sitter’s deep despairing depression, long before Beyond Blue. The artist, friend and patron who shared his cigar-box lids and modeled for masterworks (including McCubbin’s Down on his luck) took his own life in 1903.

Fem-artist’s place in this uber-celebrated 19th century history have been well-reclaimed in previous shows – and they are legion (Australian Impressionist shows, not women): since 1985, no stone unturned and chiefly fem-curators and fem-art historians leading the horse. Now drink: She-Oak’s catalogue has all fem-writers. Less straightforward to render-visible are the first maternal bloodlines of the land. Placing Wurundjeri and Heidelberg contemporary William Barak’s drawings adjacent to Impressionist’s big-guns (in grand-finale tradition) will be considered token by some in Naarm, and poor period-style by others, but it is a way of expanding historic ripples and rhythms. Clapping boomerangs in Barak’s ceremonies in tempo with clicking shears in Robert’s shed, arabesque figures performing ritual and labour. Remember, together.