[4] The image depicted in the painting shows the inside of an active, timber, open-aired shearing shed in Newstead New South Wales.

[5] The scene is crowded and busy, capturing the typical working day inside the shearing station, with the timber floors covered in shorn wool and sheep being held in various positions.

"[9] However, there was opposition from key members in the gallery and it therefore was sold to a local stock agent named Edmund Trenchard who offered to buy it privately for 350 guineas.

It was in the year 1893 that he first visited the woolshed owned by his friend Duncan Anderson, the Newstead North Station, in northern New South Wales near Inverell.

[13] The owner and manager of the shed, Duncan Anderson, is also included in the painting, he is the non-labouring figure standing to the far left wearing a suit and a hat that shadows over his face.

The exact circumstances surrounding the changing of the name are unclear, however it is generally acknowledged that Dunkin Anderson, the owner of the sheep station, was the one who suggested the new title in reference to the ancient Greek myth of Jason and the quest for the Golden Fleece.

[16] This name was granted to Australia in reference to the significance of the Australian sheep and wool industry and its gross contribution the country's economic state.

Australia is often expressed as being ‘built on’ or as ‘riding on a sheep’s back’ in allusion to the fact that wool was the source of the countries national prosperity throughout the later centuries.

[18] The Golden Fleece was well received by newspapers and critics at the time of its exhibition, and in 1895 it was named “the picture of the year” by the Sydney Morning Herald.

"[20] Art researcher N. Lendon notes the artistic talent displayed by Roberts in The Golden Fleece by comparing the effect of his work to photography, he writes “Clearly the artist illustrator fulfilled a need for the imaginative, evocative, dramatic and even more romantic image which the photographer was unable to provide.”[21] The three sheep pictures show maleness and manual labour and celebrate the Australia that once 'rode on the sheep's back"