A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов

1 Introduction

      Christopher Allen

      Art in the Australian continent has two very different stories, which have become intertwined in recent times, but can never be reduced to a single narrative. The first of these, of course, is the story of the art produced by the original inhabitants of the land, who came here tens of thousands of years before the Neolithic Revolution and the beginning of urban life in the northern hemisphere, and whose way of life seems to have remained remarkably stable, all but untouched by the history of the rest of humanity, until the beginning of British settlement at the end of the eighteenth century. First contact with the Europeans, in fact, was much earlier, at the beginning of the seventeenth, but this encounter and others that followed had virtually no effect on the lives of the Aborigines until the colony of Sydney was established in 1788.

      Aboriginal art before settlement is a complex and specialized subject, the study of archaeologists and anthropologists, who work with necessarily limited resources, since the indigenous people left no architecture and had no writing; their cultural artefacts were almost all perishable and discarded after their use in ceremonies, and the earliest samples of such material that we possess today were collected by explorers and missionaries from the late eighteenth century onwards. The most significant permanent monuments of past Aboriginal culture are in remarkable sets of cave paintings and stone engravings, but their significance is not always clear today. Traditional culture was entirely oral, and such a culture requires a constant line of transmission: when people are displaced from their ancestral lands and lose their local languages, such transmission is inevitably compromised.

The study of the ancient culture of the Aboriginal people, including their beliefs, their art and their languages, represents therefore a vast field, or a series of fields of research, but it is not the subject of this book. The Aborigines are constantly present to varying degrees in the art and the consciousness of European Australians throughout the history of modern Australia, and so appear in many of the chapters of this book. Aboriginal artists appear in the story too, as they begin to take part in the European practice of art. And an outstanding chapter by Philip Jones deals with the emergence of a new Aboriginal art and its embrace by the art market in the last decades of the twentieth century.

      The second story, which is the main focus of this book, is that of the European settlers in Australia which, if we start with the art of Captain Cook’s voyages, is now some 250 years old. This story is, from one point of view, and like all colonial art histories, that of a branch of a much older tradition, or perhaps a better metaphor is a cutting transplanted and finding its own growth and development in a new soil. This image gives a better sense of the level of adaptation to the new environment, sometimes underestimated by careless observers who see only the rehearsal of imported customs and habits of seeing.

      Nonetheless, if we compare what was achieved here with the great movements of Neo-classicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and the various phases of modernism that succeeded each other during the same two and a half centuries, Australian art will inevitably look like a very small corner of art history. Like all colonial traditions, it suffers from the asymmetry of center and periphery: the inhabitants of the periphery cannot understand themselves or their own history without reference to the metropolitan center from which they

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