A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
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and coming to terms with a new land; and art history probably offers the most accessible entry into this narrative.
Art historians, especially in the world of the modern university, can easily forget that art belongs to the people of a nation, not to a group of specialists who use it as raw material for their own academic productions. The temptation for academics in writing about the art of the past is to turn away from the work itself to discuss the hypotheses and models proposed by earlier historians. There is clearly a place for such debates, especially if we believe an earlier model was ineffective or misleading in its interpretation of the material. But we must proceed with tact, trying always to keep the art itself in the foreground, and striving to ensure that everything we say about it helps the reader to approach and engage with its inherent meanings, multiple and complex as they may be. We must always remember that art is, in Harold Rosenberg’s words, a special way of thinking, and the task of critics and historians is to open up an access to this concrete and intuitive thinking, not to block it with an avalanche of theory and ideology.
Sympathy and historical imagination, as much as a critical perspective, are the tools that bring the art of the past to life. Theoretical models and perspectives can be useful as well, but we should bear in mind the etymology of theory in a Greek verb meaning to watch. Theory, in other words, should be an aid to seeing: bad theory can obfuscate, but good theory makes its objects clearer and more lucid.
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If the content of this book is designed as much as possible to help the reader encounter the art of Australia in its various periods and manifestations, its structure is intended to make the relevant information as easy as possible to find and to use. I have adopted an essentially pragmatic combination of chronological and thematic chapters, because while the main narrative may seem to flow through a sequence of painters of whom some have already been mentioned, that is only part of the story. In the first place, the most prominent painters have usually worked in or been associated with the capital cities of the two most populous states in the Commonwealth – Sydney in New South Wales and Melbourne in Victoria. But other states and their capital cities also had more or less significant developments, which are all part of the broader story of art in Australia.
These individual regional stories needed to be recognized, especially in the century before Federation when their developments were more truly distinct and comparatively independent. If they had been incorporated in a single chronological narrative, however, they would have made the story too complicated, disrupting the main flow and either being overshadowed or treated as mere parentheses. So for the nineteenth century, most of the significant regional traditions are dealt with in separate chapters.
The other parts of the history which deserved to be treated in separate chapters were those that concerned specific subjects such as photography and sculpture, or the genre of portraiture, often ignored or underrated in a tradition dominated, for a variety of historical reasons, by landscape painting. Once again, any attempt to incorporate these into a single chronological narrative would have been confusing and would have made it hard to appreciate the thematic and narrative themes proper to each of these subjects.
I – Introduction and Historiography
The book thus begins with a thorough survey of the historiography of Australian art by Molly Duggins, who provides not only a critical overview of what has become, as already mentioned, a dense field of scholarship, but many indications of directions for further reading in areas of particular interest. This chapter is followed by Gerard Vaughan’s survey of the history of art museums in Australia, the earliest of which were founded surprisingly soon after their models in Britain, and with similar didactic and cultural aims. The story of the formation of collections and of the changing structures and purposes of museums over the last century and a half clearly reflects evolving ideas about Australia as a nation and about the nature of Australian art, so that these two chapters in tandem constitute an introduction to the way that art has been both thought about and exhibited since the beginning of colonization.
II – Dwelling in Australia
The second section of the book deals with the period leading up to Federation in 1901. Australia was, until that point, made up of separate colonies, each emerging at different periods and evolving at different rates, and all gradually becoming self-governing entities that liked to think of themselves as distinct nations until they were eventually persuaded to become states within a federal nation, the Commonwealth of Australia. Both because of the separate histories of the colonies and because of their own view of themselves as autonomous centers, it is logical, as already mentioned, to discuss the development of each in a separate chapter.
The first of these chapters, by Richard Neville, is accordingly devoted to Sydney, the earliest colony established in Australia in 1788, the year before the French Revolution, and a time when the nearest outpost of European civilization was the Dutch city of Batavia, far to the north. The next chapter, by David Hansen, examines the second colonial center, established soon after Sydney, at Hobart in Tasmania, and Tasmania more generally; between them, these two cities have the oldest European heritage in Australia, with numerous buildings that date back to the Georgian period, and a culture marked by memories of the convict period. Convict transportation was, on the whole, a more humanitarian alternative to the death penalty, and ended up being a largely successful experiment in social rehabilitation; but it also had many darker aspects in the shorter term. Thus New South Wales and Tasmania are also the places most notably marked, especially in the case of Tasmania, by early and often bloody conflict between largely ex-convict settlers and the indigenous population.
The story of Melbourne, discussed in a chapter by Ruth Pullin which focuses particularly on the career of Eugene von Guerard, was a very different one: the city was founded several generations after Sydney, in the later 1830s and 1840s, and was almost immediately supercharged by the vast wealth of the Gold Rush, so that in the second half of the century Melbourne grew far bigger and richer than Sydney – setting the scene for a rivalry between the two main cities of the continent that has never abated since. One of the forgotten aspects of Melbourne’s history was the preponderance of German immigrants among its mid-nineteenth century intelligentsia; with the outbreak of the Great War, German Australians were interned and many subsequently left. In the climate of anti-German feeling then and later, their contribution to the history of the colony was played down or deliberately overlooked.
Adelaide’s story, told in Jane Hylton’s chapter, is different again. It was neither a convict city like Sydney nor a Gold Rush boomtown like Melbourne, but a carefully planned colony designed for free settlers who arrived with a minimum of capital to invest in its building. Adelaide remains the only important city in Australia never to have had a convict population – Perth, in Western Australia, was also founded as a free city but was subsequently forced to ask for shipments of convicts because of a shortage of labor.
Like Victoria, Queensland, discussed in a chapter by Glenn Cooke, was formed by separation from the originally vast territories of New South Wales. Queensland consists largely of an enormously long coastal strip of settlements running from Brisbane in the sub-tropical south of the state up into the Tropic of Capricorn, together with a largely arid and barely-inhabited hinterland. Brisbane has never rivalled Sydney or Melbourne as a cultural center in Australia, partly because so many Queenslanders with intellectual or cultural interests have, in the past, moved to one or other of the bigger cities. But Brisbane began to assert itself more effectively towards the end of last century, aided by the growing importance of Australian connections with Asia, to which it is closer than the southern capitals.
The next chapter in this section is thematic rather than strictly chronological and is not limited to any one colony: the portrait is an important genre in British art in general, and within the Australian nineteenth century is closely related to the colonial experience and to the growth of the colonial cities and their societies, but in general histories of Australian art it tends to be eclipsed by the more prominent genre of landscape. Mark de Vitis’ chapter is thus an opportunity to review a number of important themes in the colonial history of Australia from the particular perspective of portraiture.
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