I have started reading Patrick McCaughey's 1969 book  Australian Abstract Art. He says that  there is no absolute distinction between abstract and representational art, that much Australian abstraction keeps in close contact with the physical world, and its aim is not to give an illusion of the physical world  but to provide us with an experience of it (p.3).   

 McCaughey argued that the Sydney modernists (eg., Ralph Batson, Grace Cowley)  in the 1950s embraced a constructivist  interpretation of abstraction as a new order different from the natural order: ie.,  a new vision appropriate to the 20th century. This is linked by McCaughey to Moholy-Nagy's book The New Vision.  The  new vision was  rooted in the technological culture of the twentieth century.   

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This is an abstraction of a piece of driftwood lying on the Esplanade Beach at Victor Harbor.

I came across it on a recent  early morning  poodlewalk  with Kayla. 

What appears to be permanent is really impermanent: 

The forms in the sand and the soft light in the littoral zone during  the summer-time are ephemeral. They exist for a moment in  time.