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 business and other relations 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
