attempts to synthesize the history of Australian art were published beginning with Christopher Allen’s Art in Australia: From Colonization to Postmodernism (1997). Allen proposes an adaptive process of habitation and displacement, tracing the shifting relationships between the production of art and Australia’s unique physical, social, and political environment. The first comprehensive survey of Australian art written since the 1960s, Art in Australia was driven by the author’s search for an alternative narrative to the model of Australian art history as a series of footnotes to what was happening in overseas metropolitan centers or as a nationalist evolution of the recognition of the unique qualities of the landscape (Allen 1997, 10). While the scope of his book deals predominantly with art made by Europeans in Australia (the World of Art collection already included a volume on Aboriginal Art by Wally Caruana, published in 1993) Allen continuously explores the Aboriginal presence in Australian art. Aboriginal art is more of a focal point in Andrew Sayers’ Australian Art (2001), which is founded on the principle of co-terminous Indigenous and non-Indigenous art production (Sayers 2001, 1). The first to afford Aboriginal art such a significant place in Australian art history through a duality model of parallel yet intertwined narratives, Sayers’ survey also differed from earlier histories in its broad embrace of sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, and the decorative arts. Rather than proposing a connecting idea behind Australian art, he offers the concept of “journeying through” as a methodology, emphasizing art’s continuous engagement and negotiation with the Australian natural world (Sayers 2001, 4, 6).
Other syntheses coinciding with this centenary include the fourth edition of Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting (2001) with a final chapter by Christopher Heathcote on the “embattled medium” of painting during the 1990s. Heathcote praises graffiti art for revitalizing painting in an art world continuously dominated by ephemeral and multimedia works, while advocating the necessity of a moral starting point for artists amidst ubiquitous commercial pressures, citing the influence of environmentalism on the landscape tradition as an example. He also highlights the potential of postcolonial strategies to supersede old relations between centers and peripheries and move beyond a colonial outlook in Australia. Published the following year, Terry Smith’s Transformations in Australian Art (2002), a two-volume collection of essays, explores the relationships between landscape, colony, and nation in the nineteenth century and the theme of modernism and Aboriginality in the twentieth century. The first in a projected three-volume history, John McDonald’s Art of Australia. Volume I: Exploration to Federation (2008), offers a sustained analysis on artists such as Eugene von Guérard, S.T. Gill, and Arthur Loureiro, who are glossed over in previous surveys (McDonald 2008, 11). Organized as a series of interlocking biographies woven into a narrative of development, McDonald’s history, particularly his reassessment of itinerant artists such as the Portguese-born Loureiro, paints a picture of Australia not as it has been traditionally viewed as a remote destination, but as a well-traversed stopping-off point in a network of regional artistic routes traversing the globe (Anderson 2009). McDonald cites an over-emphasis on the rise of the plein-air painting movement in Australia as the major impetus behind previously skewed accounts of colonial art, and a driving theme behind his survey is the desire to “disprove the myth of the Heidelberg School as the first painters to actually ‘see’ the Australian landscape, while also recognizing the overwhelming importance of the movement” (McDonald 2008, 11).
More recent histories have foregone the survey genre, suggesting its increasing inadequacy in contemporary art historical discourse. Rather than providing a systematic overview of the field, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art (2011), edited by Jaynie Anderson, features a number of interconnecting essays on colonial, modernist, contemporary and Indigenous aspects of Australian art.
Sasha Grishin in Australian Art: A History (2013) discounts the role of a national narrative in contemporary Australian art. For Grishin, the distinctive nature of Australian art lies in its “multiculturalism, hybridity and the constant dialectic that exists between Indigenous and non-Indigenous art” (Grishin 2013, 513). The publication of Grishin’s history coincided with the first large-scale survey exhibition of Australian art in Britain in around 50 years, Australia, held at London’s Royal Academy of the Arts in 2013.
British reviewers tended to emphasize the derivative or mediocre nature of much of the work, both European and Aboriginal. Responding to this ill-fated show, Patrick McCaughey’s survey of Australian painting, Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters (2014), attempts to demonstrate, as the title suggests, “that Australian art matters in the same way that British, American, Japanese or Chinese art matters beyond their national frontiers” (McCaughey 2014, 8). However, his emphasis on the period from 1940 to 1970, with the work of Sidney Nolan, Russell Drysdale, John Brack, Albert Tucker, and especially Fred Williams prioritized, discounts the richness and complexity of earlier eras critical to the development of Australian painting, while undervaluing the historical and social contextual depth necessary to unravel its distinctive thematic strands. Within this structure, which in many ways serves to underscore the blinkered perspective governing the Australia exhibition, McCaughey’s affirmation that the significance of Australian art should extend beyond its borders remains unconvincing. What then to make of Australia’s evolving art histories and their relationship to a culture of world art? Art historians and curators continue to deconstruct and challenge the underlying association between the place and space of Australia and Australian identity, drawing attention to the limitations of this ideological framework and proposing more heterogeneous and multicultural alternative pathways of inquiry.
Reassessments of Colonial Art
The reassessment of colonial art has focused on retrieving the wealth and diversity of colonial visual culture and the careers of individual artists before the 1880s, often dismissed in previous histories such as Robert Hughes’ The Art of Australia. One of the earliest and most significant reassessments, Bernard Smith’s edited anthology, Documents on Art and Taste in Australia: The Colonial Period, 1770–1914 (1975), provides a seminal reference point for such revisionism. It codifies a number of key themes including the formation of aesthetic views about nature, the development of art collections and education, and the rise of nationalism (Smith 1975, ix). Focusing more specifically on the evolution of landscape painting in Australia, Tim Bonyhady’s Images in Opposition: Australian Landscape Painting, 1801–1890 (1985) represents another foundational reevaluation of colonial art. Organized around the framework of a dialectic, Bonyhady examines the construction of the colonial landscape through contrasting aspects of Australian scenery – an antipodean arcadia untouched by European settlement, a pastoral arcadia inhabited by squatters, and a sublime wilderness not yet conquered – which, “far from simply chronicling the progress of European settlement,” only had an “approximate relation to changes in land use in the colonies” (Bonyhady 1985, xii). Later, in The Colonial Earth (2000), Bonyhady challenges the standard view that the destruction of the Australian landscape was an inevitable part of the process of settlement, demonstrating that, while many colonists were alienated by their new environment, there were others who delighted in it, from the ubiquitous gum tree to the continent’s giant tree ferns and its picturesque and sublime scenery of fern gullies, waterfalls, and mountains, and campaigned for its conservation predating later environmentalist movements (Bonyhady 2000, 2–3).8
Other nuanced readings of colonial art employed broader cultural frameworks such as Robert Dixon’s The Course of Empire: Neo-Classical Culture in New South Wales 1788–1860, which demonstrates how early colonial artists like Joseph Lycett grafted neoclassical ideals of the progress of civilization onto their landscapes through literary principles of associationism appealing to the emotions of taste (Dixon 1985, 56–58). In The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (1987), cultural historian Paul Carter locates the Australian landscape as an active object of desire subject to the colonists’ exploratory urge. Indebted to Smith’s European Vision, the open-endedness of Carter’s spatial history revolves around the mobile act of journeying in and through the landscape in which explorers and settlers constantly found what they were looking for,
