Abstract painting came very late to Australia. Non geometric pure abstraction has been particularly late to develop here. Even now, almost all Australian abstract painters continue to refer to their work in relationship to landscape, light or nature, as if abstract painting is merely a reduction from, or an extension of, a motif from Nature. Such an approach is related to the kind of 19th and 20th century Symbolist practices from which abstraction initially arose, but such practices are quite distinct from those of the abstract painter.