particular interest. This chapter is followed by Gerard Vaughan’s survey of the history of art museums in Australia, the earliest of which were founded surprisingly soon after their models in Britain, and with similar didactic and cultural aims. The story of the formation of collections and of the changing structures and purposes of museums over the last century and a half clearly reflects evolving ideas about Australia as a nation and about the nature of Australian art, so that these two chapters in tandem constitute an introduction to the way that art has been both thought about and exhibited since the beginning of colonization.
II – Dwelling in Australia
The second section of the book deals with the period leading up to Federation in 1901. Australia was, until that point, made up of separate colonies, each emerging at different periods and evolving at different rates, and all gradually becoming self-governing entities that liked to think of themselves as distinct nations until they were eventually persuaded to become states within a federal nation, the Commonwealth of Australia. Both because of the separate histories of the colonies and because of their own view of themselves as autonomous centers, it is logical, as already mentioned, to discuss the development of each in a separate chapter.
The first of these chapters, by Richard Neville, is accordingly devoted to Sydney, the earliest colony established in Australia in 1788, the year before the French Revolution, and a time when the nearest outpost of European civilization was the Dutch city of Batavia, far to the north. The next chapter, by David Hansen, examines the second colonial center, established soon after Sydney, at Hobart in Tasmania, and Tasmania more generally; between them, these two cities have the oldest European heritage in Australia, with numerous buildings that date back to the Georgian period, and a culture marked by memories of the convict period. Convict transportation was, on the whole, a more humanitarian alternative to the death penalty, and ended up being a largely successful experiment in social rehabilitation; but it also had many darker aspects in the shorter term. Thus New South Wales and Tasmania are also the places most notably marked, especially in the case of Tasmania, by early and often bloody conflict between largely ex-convict settlers and the indigenous population.
The story of Melbourne, discussed in a chapter by Ruth Pullin which focuses particularly on the career of Eugene von Guerard, was a very different one: the city was founded several generations after Sydney, in the later 1830s and 1840s, and was almost immediately supercharged by the vast wealth of the Gold Rush, so that in the second half of the century Melbourne grew far bigger and richer than Sydney – setting the scene for a rivalry between the two main cities of the continent that has never abated since. One of the forgotten aspects of Melbourne’s history was the preponderance of German immigrants among its mid-nineteenth century intelligentsia; with the outbreak of the Great War, German Australians were interned and many subsequently left. In the climate of anti-German feeling then and later, their contribution to the history of the colony was played down or deliberately overlooked.
Adelaide’s story, told in Jane Hylton’s chapter, is different again. It was neither a convict city like Sydney nor a Gold Rush boomtown like Melbourne, but a carefully planned colony designed for free settlers who arrived with a minimum of capital to invest in its building. Adelaide remains the only important city in Australia never to have had a convict population – Perth, in Western Australia, was also founded as a free city but was subsequently forced to ask for shipments of convicts because of a shortage of labor.
Like Victoria, Queensland, discussed in a chapter by Glenn Cooke, was formed by separation from the originally vast territories of New South Wales. Queensland consists largely of an enormously long coastal strip of settlements running from Brisbane in the sub-tropical south of the state up into the Tropic of Capricorn, together with a largely arid and barely-inhabited hinterland. Brisbane has never rivalled Sydney or Melbourne as a cultural center in Australia, partly because so many Queenslanders with intellectual or cultural interests have, in the past, moved to one or other of the bigger cities. But Brisbane began to assert itself more effectively towards the end of last century, aided by the growing importance of Australian connections with Asia, to which it is closer than the southern capitals.
The next chapter in this section is thematic rather than strictly chronological and is not limited to any one colony: the portrait is an important genre in British art in general, and within the Australian nineteenth century is closely related to the colonial experience and to the growth of the colonial cities and their societies, but in general histories of Australian art it tends to be eclipsed by the more prominent genre of landscape. Mark de Vitis’ chapter is thus an opportunity to review a number of important themes in the colonial history of Australia from the particular perspective of portraiture.
The final chapter in this section is devoted to the first self-conscious art movement in Australia, and the one that marks the end of the colonial period and the transition to Federation and the twentieth century. If the earlier colonial phases of art in this country were explorations of a new and unfamiliar environment, the Heidelberg movement for the first time asserts a confident sense of inhabiting this land as a permanent home. Georgina Cole’s chapter introduces us to the most important figures of this movement, such as Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, as well as the themes of an art that looks forward to a new Australian nation.
III – Dwelling in the World
Hardly had the art of Australia begun to define this sense of belonging, when a new and perhaps surprising phase of expatriation began at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. As we see in Barry Pearce’s essay on the period, this was partly motivated by particular commissions that required or even expressly stipulated travel to England, such as Roberts’ commission for a vast painting commemorating the opening of Australia’s first Parliament, and partly by a desire to make a mark in London, the great metropolis at the heart of the Empire. Anna Gray’s chapter on the Edwardian period completes the picture of this period before the Great War, including those artists who remained in Australia.
With Denise Mimmochi’s chapter we enter the period between the two World Wars, when modernism first appeared in Australia, though often on a rather modest scale and in a decorative manner; the new art was closely aligned to fashion, advertising, interior decoration and the smart lives of a new urban middle class. By the end of the 1930s, throughout the war and in its immediate aftermath, as we see in Jacqui Strecker’s chapter, the tone grew far more intense and even urgent with the artists collectively referred to as the Angry Penguins, from the title of an avant-garde magazine associated with the movement.
In contrast to the polemical tone of culture during the war, the postwar period was initially less antagonistic, and a number of modernist artists rose above controversy to be broadly recognized in Australia and to a lesser extent in Britain: Sasha Grishin introduces this period when Drysdale, Nolan and Boyd were widely accepted as contemporary cultural stars. Mary Eagle offers an introduction to the cultural and aesthetic debates of this time and their place in an international context, while Christopher Heathcote chronicles the rise of the modern art market and the emergence of the dealer galleries that managed the careers of the principal figures of the time.
Richard Haese, finally, deals with the rise of a new avant-garde from the 1960s and 1970s, which brought with it renewed and sometime bitter polemics, both about style and the aesthetic direction of art and about its role in social and political life.
IV – Artforms and Themes
This final section covers a further three important subjects that require separate discussion. The first of these is the history of Australian sculpture. Michael Hill introduces this complex subject, which weaves in and out of the story of art in Australia in the course of the last two centuries, but is hard to account for in narratives that are mainly focused on painting. Early sculpture is principally concerned with monuments and portraits, and both the choice of individuals or events who are
