A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
with their families on the other side of the Atlantic. Those who set off for Australia, especially in the first half-century or even the first century – especially if they were poor – might well never see their homeland again, and were most often bidding a last farewell to grandparents and even parents when they sailed away from England. Even news took weeks to travel between England and the new colony of Sydney Town, as Charles Lamb ponders in his essay “Distant correspondents” (1823), composed in the form of a letter to his friend Barron Field, who had arrived in Sydney as judge of the Supreme Court in 1817.
Distance had many effects on the development of Australian culture, which have been pondered by historians and sociologists, most famously in a book by Geoffrey Blayney which added an expression to our language: The Tyranny of Distance (1966). But the most important of these effects has been to develop a certain independence and self-reliance in the Australian character, even though this quality can be undercut by a vein of self-doubt and a kind of inferiority complex which was first named by A.A. Phillips in his essay “On the cultural cringe,” in the periodical Meanjin in 1950. The alternation of brash assertiveness and diffidence, even a fundamental lack of self-confidence and subservience to the dictates of fashions from abroad remains an element of the Australian character and of cultural discourse in this country.
Validation by the metropolitan center, as I have already suggested, became a more urgent preoccupation in the postwar years, and especially in relation to the fascination with New York as the epicenter of a new wave of modernism. It is to some extent present from the time that Australian artists first begin to travel back to the center, which is around the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, but the terms of the opposition were not as clearly defined at first, for even after Federation in 1901, which united the self-governing colonies into a new Commonwealth, independent in most respects of the British state, there was a tendency to regard Britain as home: to be an Australian artist was still be a British artist in the colonies, and a number of leading Australian artists, like Tom Roberts himself, had been born in Britain. There was still some sense of Australian art as a natural extension of British art in the time of Nolan and Drysdale, and as late as the end of the twentieth century, Peter Fuller regarded Arthur Boyd essentially as a great modern British artist.
Leaving aside such anxieties, however, the fact remains that Australian artists in the nineteenth century were working in a new and strange land at a very great distance from what they considered the home of their traditions. And this fact seems to have contributed to the rapidity of their adaptation to their new physical and socio-cultural environment. They were not looking over their shoulders at what was being done in London or Paris, but concentrating on what was around them. John Glover did indeed continue to exhibit in England after his move to Tasmania, but his was a special case, for he was the only colonial artist to arrive here with an established reputation and market in England. Few, if any, other Australian artists of the nineteenth century attempted to exhibit their works in London or Paris, until the “Exodus”, as Bernard Smith famously titled a chapter of his Australian Painting (1962), in which so many Australian artists returned to Europe to build careers there with varying degrees of success.
The clearest illustration of the difference that distance made to Australian art can be seen in the contrast between the American impressionist painters at the end of the nineteenth century and the artists of the Heidelberg School, who are today often, but I believe misleadingly, called Australian Impressionists. This appellation, ostensibly intended to bring the Heidelberg artists into the common narrative of art history in the last quarter of the century, has the perverse effect of distracting us from their originality. Although they did adopt the word “Impressions” in the title of their famous exhibition in 1889, they had little interest in fleeting effects of light and weather, or in any kind of optical reduction. They were more concerned with establishing an intimate connection to the new land, partly through confronting the extremes of Australian light and heat, and partly through depicting themes of labor and leisure.
Above all, though, they focused on the land around them, and were barely even aware of the work of Monet and the other French Impressionists. Their own direct inspiration came from French Realism and the Barbizon movement, as well as elements of modern tonal realism and the work of James McNeill Whistler. Their situation was completely unlike that of the American Impressionists, who, for both geographical and other reasons, were close to Paris, if not resident there, and who, in consequence, were ultimately imitators of the French rather than particularly original artists. The point can be confirmed from Australian art history too, since a painter like Emmanuel Phillips Fox, who was in Europe during the very years (1887–1892) that the Heidelberg artists were finding their own voice, remained for the same reasons an essentially second-rate imitator of French fashion.
Even in later periods, the best of our artists have always been closely attuned to the Australian environment and to the social and moral questions of inhabiting this land. Nolan, Tucker, Boyd, Drysdale and others assimilated a variety of ideas and forms from the common stock of contemporary and historical art, but in the end they became original by drawing on their circumstances in Australia, and even on elements of earlier Australian art. Nolan is an interesting case, for he specifically writes of drifting away from generic models of modernism and finding his roots in the Australian bush – which also coincides with finding roots in the still very short Australian art history: his image of Kelly, as I have argued elsewhere, is a kind of symbolic inversion of the industrious settler of Heidelberg.
Still later artists, such as Fred Williams, similarly return from a period abroad to discover their unique style in a connection with the land and experience of Australia. It was his encounter with the mysterious, elusive landscape of the You Yangs in Victoria that led Williams to articulate a distinctive poetic vision, inseparable from and embodied in his particular approach to painting and printmaking. Still later, in the following generation, Imants Tillers, the most significant postmodern artist in Australia, has evolved an art out of the most complex dialogue with Australia’s art history that we have seen until now.
Thus the interest of the art of Australia is not grounded in any influence it has had on the wider course of art history or of modern culture in general. If this story has a claim on the attention of any non-Australian, it is primarily because of the rather special circumstances of the colonial history and culture of Australia, compared to those of America in particular, but also to other centers of European expansion. Anyone interested in the history of colonialism, of colonial culture and of the emergence of a nation from its colonial roots – unlike in other countries where the colonists later withdrew, as in India or Algeria, or were outnumbered by the indigenous population, as in South Africa – will certainly find in Australia a rich case study.
But the greatest interest of Australian art, as I have already suggested, is for Australians. Just as the individual past is integral to personal identity, so is the history of a nation to its collective social and cultural life, its values and aspirations. That history can be known in many ways, but art, like literature or music, offers us a particularly living and intuitive access to the mind of another time, including its own uncertainties and ambivalences. To cite only a few artists already mentioned, Von Guerard, Streeton, Nolan, and Williams all offer us ways of seeing our land and of conceiving our relation to it that are quite distinct, belonging to successive phases of our history and sometimes seemingly incompatible, but ultimately cumulative in forming a sophisticated Australian cultural self-awareness.
What I have just referred to as Australian cultural self-awareness, of course, is not some figment of a nationalist delusion. The Australian mind, if we can call it that for the sake of brevity, remains a subset of the western mind more generally; it is a common and long-standing fallacy to call Australia a young country, since our memory and our tradition go back as far as those of any European nation. It is only our separate existence which is young, and our separateness is only relative, since we have continued to be in constant contact with Britain, Europe and America, as well as increasingly with the cultures of Asia, and the hyperconnectedness of the contemporary world has brought about a relative convergence in all cultures. The mix of what makes up the Australian mind has also been importantly modified and continues to evolve with our expanding migrant population. Nonetheless, anyone coming to Australia joins a specific local discourse or narrative which can offer