while those of the center have no such reciprocal need to understand the colonial periphery.
At least so it seems, and even for American art, which has no real incidence on international art history until America, or New York at least, became part of the center with the postwar explosion of Abstract Expressionism. On the face of it, regional art is primarily of interest to the inhabitants of the region in question. And yet many such regional traditions, including that of Australia, have been extensively written about, especially in the last half-century, with the growth of an academic industry that demands the constant production of discussion, commentary and speculation that is called research in the humanities, even if it frequently adds little of substance to our knowledge of its subject.
Looking at the field of Australian art and at the vast amount of writing surveyed in Molly Duggins’ impressive bibliographic study in this volume, an outsider could be tempted to conclude that this was a rather modest subject crushed by a disproportionate weight of discourse, much of it dull and much ideological, too often engaging in ultimately sterile discussion with other regional academics rather than addressing a broader public of cultivated lay people, the ultimate audience for the art itself. And there would be some truth in this perception: writing about art in Australia reflects the general problems of humanities scholarship in universities today, burdened on the one hand by the ineffectual ideologies of a post-political age and on the other by the mechanical imperatives of production.
This book sets out to avoid, as much as possible, the futility of ingrown academic discussion, and is put together with the aim of helping the intelligent non-specialist reader understand and enjoy the art of Australia. It has no intention of preaching or of attempting to impose any ideological reading of our history. It seeks to present a clear and unbiased account of events from the time of settlement and trusts that readers will be able to draw their own moral and other conclusions. The book’s aim, in other words, is to make the art of Australia more accessible to its readers, including through an awareness of the historical circumstances of its production, but never losing sight of the role of art as an organon of knowledge and consciousness.
For art, in all its manifestations, is not simply a set of artefacts, of material deposits left behind by historical processes; it is a way of thinking that long predates rational thought and self-conscious, theoretical reflection. These tools of the human mind are only some two and half millennia old, dating from the first beginnings of philosophical and theological thinking; literacy itself is only twice as old as that, and alphabetic writing, which immensely amplified the power and range of literacy, is much more recent, only five centuries or so older than the beginnings of philosophy. But for thousands of years before literacy and the rise of rational thinking, art in its various forms, as stories, songs and pictures, was a vehicle for the human mind to represent the world to itself and assign meaning and shape to it.
And because the questions that concern human beings are much more obscure and subtle than can be fully dealt with by rational discourse, art was not made obsolete by the rise of philosophy and later of science. It has continued to be a way of thinking about qualities of experience that are not amenable to logical analysis: an intuitive mode of thinking that is deeply rooted in the beliefs, assumptions and aspirations that make up its ambient culture – as well as the collective memory of its community.
Some art has the power to transcend its specific circumstances, to become foundational to its whole culture and to successive centuries or even millennia, and even to reach beyond the boundaries of its original cultural universe and to impress itself on the minds of people raised in different circumstances. By far the greatest proportion of artistic practice in any form or at any time is much less significant. Even most art of relatively high quality remains more or less bound to its time and place, so that it becomes of interest and even accessible only to those who take the trouble to become acquainted with the culture in which it originated.
Regional or colonial art is a particularly interesting case. Typically, and with occasional exceptions, especially as the colonial societies mature, they are influenced by the center, while, as already noted, the metropolitan center is barely influenced by its colonial offshoots. And this appears at first sight to be true of Australia 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
