A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
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as well. Few Australian artists have had any influence on the mainstream of art in the last two centuries; some have made reasonable careers abroad or even been appreciated for their distinctive vision, as was the case with Sidney Nolan, Russell Drysdale and Arthur Boyd in the postwar years. But none has made any perceptible difference to the course of western art.
However we may be inclined to temper such a brutal assessment, it is a useful starting-point, mainly in order to be quite clear that the interest of Australian art has nothing to do with its significance or influence outside this country. Its primary value, especially in the first century or more, lies in the way that it speaks of the experience of settlement in a new and strange land. Then the experience that it articulates becomes more complex, pondering the relative importance of local culture and belonging to an international world of modernism; but even in the last half-century, a wider reflection on the evolving ethnic composition of our population and a greater awareness of the prior occupation and the current plight of the Aboriginal people have constantly brought us back to the dialogue of a colonial, if increasingly cosmopolitan society with the land in which it has established itself.
When I first wrote about Australian art over 20 years ago, I was struck by the many fallacies about the subject, and in subsequent years of lecturing, I was astonished to find that these fallacies were extremely hard to weed out, even when I had explicitly refuted them in the course of teaching. One of these was the habit of seeing every style or movement in Australian art as a late and pale copy of something done earlier in the metropolitan center. This was probably a habit of mind born in the postwar years, especially the 1960s and 1970s, when for a time Australian artists became neurotically obsessed with imitating the art fashions of New York. But such imitation was not at all the rule in the first century and half of Australian art.
The second and even more stubborn fallacy was that the colonial artists who came to Australia throughout the nineteenth century brought with them inflexible routines of seeing and painting the world, and lazily repeated these in the new continent, with the result that they could not see what our country was really like. It was not until the Heidelberg School painters, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and others, that Australian artists finally opened their eyes and saw the brightness of the light and the distinctive forms of the eucalyptus trees. This was clearly the view of the Heidelberg painters themselves, who only recognized Abram Louis Buvelot as a true precursor, and when they were subsequently canonized as the founders of the Australian school, the insignificance of the work of those who had come before them became axiomatic.
The demolition of this second fallacy has been a long and slow process, and although it has probably by now been recognized by Australian art historians and anyone seriously interested in the subject, it will probably survive for generations in the popular mind. The case of Eugene von Guerard, the greatest of the colonial artists, is exemplary. He was barely taken seriously even by the doyen of Australian art history, Bernard Smith, in his Australian Painting (1962), summarily dismissed in Robert Hughes’ youthful and rather impulsive The Art of Australia (1966) and all but ignored in the first edition of McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art (1968). The process of revaluation began in the decades that followed, especially in the work of Tim Bonyhady, and Von Guerard was finally presented as an Australian painter of the first rank in Ruth Pullin’s Eugene von Guerard: Nature Revealed exhibition (2012), followed by her recent The Artist as Traveller (2018) devoted to his notebooks.
When we look at all carefully at the art of the colonial period, it is not lazy habits of seeing the world that strike us, but on the contrary curiosity and openness to a land that was full of new and unfamiliar phenomena. From the Port Jackson painter to Augustus Earle, John Glover, Conrad Martens, Von Guerard himself, Buvelot and others, we realize that these artists are not only alive to the many impressions around them, but also attuned to the collective experience of the community into which they have arrived. Coming as they did from England, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, and via travels that had taken them to places as different as Naples and Brazil, the colonial artists soon adapted to speaking of a new land and for those who were making a new life there.
For Australians, these early pictures of our country are part of a collective memory, part of the process of imaginative inhabitation of our continent. In the work of the colonial artists we can sense the alternation of curiosity and excitement with loneliness and nostalgia, and even moral doubts and melancholy about the dispossession and persecution of the native inhabitants: Aborigines are pervasive figures in colonial art, and almost invisible in the work of the Heidelberg period, reflecting a principle I suggested many years ago, that indigenous figures tend to disappear from Australian art in periods of confidence and return in times of doubt or existential anxiety. These works are part of our memory and our experience, in the same way that the lives of our colonial forebears are part of us. For more recent immigrants to the continent – for Australia is a land of migrants – the art of the nineteenth century helps to explain the deeper history of the land and the ethos to which they too have become heirs.
But the history of Australian art can be of interest even to readers who have no personal stake in the question of being Australian. For the cosmopolitan and traveling artists who came to Australia and so quickly became responsive to both the land and the settler community, tell us much about colonial art in general, and perhaps even more about the role of artists within the society they inhabit: artists are not only influenced by the culture that surrounds them, but respond to and speak for it in an active dialogue. They listen, as it were, to the community within which they find themselves, and then articulate and in turn help to shape the incipient feelings and intuitions of that community.
This is in fact simply a colonial manifestation of a more general principle that we can see at work in artists from Giotto to Picasso. Another principle is more particular to the case of Australia, and it reminds us of the important differences between Australia and America, in spite of the many parallels that were only too apparent to the colonists themselves, as well as to the authorities in London, who duly made sure they granted local self-government at the appropriate time and before there was anything like a unilateral declaration of independence.
In the first place, America was discovered by Columbus entirely by chance. The map on which he was relying, essentially corresponding to the Behaim Globe in Nuremberg (1492), shows a distance more or less equivalent to the width of the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and the China coast. The difficulty of accurately calculating longitude before the chronometers of the eighteenth century allowed the cartographers of the time to come up with a seemingly plausible globe that actually omitted not only the Americas but the whole vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
In contrast, Australia’s existence had been foreseen, postulated by ancient geographers who reasoned that the globe must have continental masses in the southern hemisphere capable of balancing those in the northern. The very name of our continent long predates any European contact: Terra Australis, the southern land. When Dutch mariners first came upon the coast of our continent in the early seventeenth century, there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that this was indeed the anticipated land mass, though Cook’s exploration of the east coast on his first voyage (1768–1771) revealed that it was somewhat smaller than expected; his subsequent voyage (1772–1775) had as a specific aim to ensure that there was no other considerable continent in the south Pacific.
There are other very important differences between the American and the Australian continents, and therefore between the experiences of the settlers in each case. In the first place, the natural environment that the American settlers encountered, in spite of its new plant and animal species, would not have struck a settler from the British Isles as fundamentally alien; the name New England, given to the northeastern part of the new country, is evidence of this. In Australia, on the other hand, the natural environment was extremely foreign, with poor soil, erratic rainfall patterns, and distinctly strange flora and fauna. Farming was initially hard, and unlike the Americas, Australia was not blessed with an abundance of edible native plants: macadamia nuts, in fact, are the only contribution that Australia has made to the diet of the modern world.
In addition to its strangeness, Australia was far more distant from Europe than the east coast of America. Colonists in the Americas could maintain