The present painting is part of a series of oils exhibited at Rudy Komon's Gallery in Sydney which marked a turning point in Williams's work in 1974: 'This exhibition showed his two contrasting but concurrent series of works of 1974, and graphically illustrated the idea of Williams's 'dialogue of series', for the Forest Pond works - cool, closed, and intimate with a simple monolithic image contrasted with the open hot dry landscapes such as Landscape with Acacias (1974) and Landscape with Geese (1974). Both series of paintings, however, employ intense pure colours, and both, reacting against the refinement and reductive control of the (...) paintings of the early 1970s, are crude, aggressive and spontaneous in their paintwork, with thick slabs and gestures of paint.' (R. Lindsay and I. Zdanowicz, Fred Williams: Works in the National Gallery of Victoria, Paintings - Gouaches - Prints, Melbourne, 1980, p. 35)

Williams is in effect taking refreshment from an old source: 'A monumental calm stills the turbulent bush and the fiercly regenerative quality deepens into a more inwardly possessed idea of the Forest Pond as the source of renewal - meditative and restorative. What gives additional credence to the idea of the Forest Pond paintings as a landscape of renewal is that they mark Williams's return to the Sherbrooke Forest. The pond discovered on the floor of the forest had been an earlier theme and produced some of his most remarkable paintings. Among the most successful and fully resolved works of 1974, the Forest Pond paintings are the culmination of the growing explicitness of Williams's imagery during the 1970s.' (P. MacCaughey, Fred Williams 1927-1982, Sydney, 1987, p. 267)