The most popular painting in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection is R. Godfrey Rivers Under the jacaranda 1903. The blaze of the tree's mauve so dominates the canvas that the figures of Rivers and his fiancée taking tea under its shade appear quite secondary. It is, in essence, a portrait of the tree. The scale of this painting is quite exceptional but during the twentieth century the striking colour of the jacaranda inspired a number of artists, Charles Lancaster in particular. The striking cone-shaped canopy of the bunya pine is as commanding in its formality as the jacaranda is in its colour, yet where are the equivalent paintings of this tree? They are scarce indeed.

Eight kilometres south-east of Ipswich, along the banks of Deebing Creek, lies the site of a former Aboriginal mission reserve which, from 1892 to 1915, accommodated Aboriginal people from across Queensland, displaced from their lands by encroaching white settlement and government intervention. Some came from faraway places – Normanton, Burketown, Cooktown, Townsville, Barcaldine, St George, Alpha, Mitchell, Cunnamulla, Roma, and even New South Wales. Others were from regions adjacent to the mission such as Logan, Beaudesert and Boonah and from nearby Ipswich, Purga and Deebing Creek itself.