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 ways of thinking about 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
