Australian Art
Bryan Robertson
Australian films like My Brilliant Career, Gallipoli, Sunday Too Far Away or Newsfront have been grabbing us all lately but it is not generally know that an inventive film industry flourished in Australia in the early years of the century, long before Hollywood began. You don't hear much about Australian painting these days; it is two decades since five or six years of interest in Australian art in England, the work of Nolan, Boyd, Whiteley, Daws, Blackman and others from the late Fifties on, with attendant publicity, came to a close when the artists themselves dispersed to the Continent, to America or back to Australia. Big shows at Whitechapel and the Tate, and a series of spectacular one- man exhibitions at the Matthiessen Gallery had their effect, but the flare-up had no historical momentum and nobody realised that Australian painting, like American art, also produced extraordinary figures back in the 19th century. We know about Charles Conder — or do we? — but those superb artists Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts who both worked in England are not familiar to us, let alone Fred McCubbin back in the late Victorian era or Elioth Gruner or Rupert Bunny nearer our own time, both painters of rare distinction.
Nobody here talks about Ian Fair- weather, an English Slade-trained painter who more or less settled in Australia in the Thirties after years in Shanghai and Bali, who lived as a recluse on an island off the Queensland coast and who, by the time he died in 1974, was generally recognised as the 'purest' artist of the past 50 years in Australia and an influence for younger painters. Fairweather is now the subject of a splendid monograph, but in general it is true to say that our awareness lately of Australian culture, apart from films and Patrick White's books, has been limited to Nolan's irridescent designs for Covent Garden's production of Samson and Delilah; recent and badly slanted shows at
were almost non-events.
Fred Williams, who died last month, added radically to the way in which Australians saw their own landscape just as Sutherland expanded our awareness 0.f English hedgerows. He had his first show la London two years ago, but although the show sold out Williams is not much of a name yet in critical circles here. I sometimes think that the English, with traditional sularity, only show interest in art from whichever country is fashionable as a source of influence. It used to be Paris, and then New York; now there is no acknowledged centre for ideas, but we seem slow to accept the notion that good art maY, come out of Australia which does not need the extra cultural ballast of an exotic con- text, rain forests or deserts, to be im- pressive, Williams was a radiantly beautiful and original painter. Maybe, after that wave of interest 20 years ago, we have reverted to our uninformed sense 01, Australia as a bit of a dull place, reinforce° by that lethal joke of Barry Humphries: `Living in Australia is like going to the most marvellous party of your whole life and dancing all night with your mother.' My experiences in Australia have been rather different. Where else in the world would you wake up on a hot morning to find two young dustmen advancing up the garden path dressed in plastic grass skirts and football boots? I avoid travellers' tales, but feel bound to report that in Perth 1 had a vision which confirmed all you hear about the surrealist nature of the Australian land; scape. Walking on to my balcony at dawn saw the city skyline of modest skyscraPets
spread out along the far bank of the spanned Swan river by ai
noble bridge. The dawn light everything opalescent but clear in deli& tion. A very long narrow cloud, motionless high above the river, had the entire image of the cityscape reflected on it with absolute clarity, bounced back by some optical trick from the reflection of skyscrapers in the glassy-still river. A city of towers hovering in space high above you is an awesome sight, not unlike a biblical vision. It is heartening to find issuing from this dazzlingly beautiful and sophisticated country such finely produced and 01" telligently edited art books as those under review here. There are no books on coin- temporary English painters at all corn" parable to the monographs on Ian Fairweather and Fred Williams (Angus Robertson £40 each). These are not coffee table books but serious treatises on remarkable painters. Murray Bail is a fitst- rate novelist and his long and detailed study of Ian Fairweather's strange life and career is sharply written, avoiding too mach weight on the 'Moon and Sixpence' aspects of Fairweather's retreat as if keen to ste press his novelist's gift in the interests of an, objective study of an artist who painted with the same abstract authority as, say' Mark Tobey. He succeeds perfectly and h,s text is reinforced by conspicuously goo reproductions; that is, reasonably convinc- ing approximations of the originals, Perfectly printed. _The same high praise is due for Patrick McCaughey's book, in the same format, on Fred Williams who managed through sheer artistry to combine an exact sense of loca- tion in his landscape paintings with a near- abstract celebration of paint and colour in their own right. The strange flora and geological strata of creeks, dried up river beds, deserts and scrubby or effulgent bush were wonderfully caught by Williams and translated into semi-abstract marks with their own characteristic eloquence. Mc- Caughey is a distinguished academic and writer on art and his text places Williams in a broad cultural context as well as honour- ing the local circumstances of his life and Work, Rebels and Precursors by Richard Haese (Allen Lane £25) is a solid and well- researched account of the arrival of Modernism in Australian art and the Political and social conditions and issues which lay behind much of the work of the 1940s, notably in Melbourne. The book g,ives, incidentally, a fascinating account of the Patronage enjoyed by Sidney Nolan and a few other artists in their early years and the author has been diligent in interviewing the survivors of the turbulent Forties who found their strongest forms in a kind of ex- pressionism. Haese's book is required reading for anyone seriously concerned with Australian art, but details of local Issues among contemporary art societies, Clashes of personality and so on, sometimes Cloud an otherwise toughly reasoned nar- rative which has a real intellectual thrust and perspective. It is a pleasure to report that many colour Plates of recent paintings in Sidney Nolan Australia (Angus & Robertson £25) show clearly that the old magician still has plenty 1_11 reserve. The choice of pictures is also fresh, extending back to the late Thirties Short including a lot of unfamiliar work. tort texts by the artist Elwyn Lynn, Alan Moorehead and other Nolan afficionados are mostly lively and informative, and it is Interesting to see the formal range of Nolan's work which deals specifically with Australian themes, as opposed to Greece, ItalY, Africa or Antarctica. Anyone who wants to test my enthusiasm for earlier Australian paintings should look at the 19th-century pictures reproduced among modern works in The Australian sosandscape and its Artists (Angus & Robert- tn £20). Elwyn Lynn, its author, is one of
lie true heroes of Australian art, a critic and painter with a real heart as well as a
()°d mind, whose enthusiasm and insights ave helped artists immeasurably. His book s essential for anyone who wants to see a token of the full range of landscape art in Australia; his notes on the artists and their vision are models of lucid infor- Tation. The Artist and the Desert by San- nra McGarth and John Olsen (Angus & Robertson bert son £25) is less surely focused on ex- cellence lence but has its own fascination, rather
better on earlier times than the present day. The theme is of a central if somewhat artificial importance for Australian artists who mostly live comfortably, drinking white wine and slapping down oysters, and only venture into the deserts nowadays with a lot of macho backslapping and play with the gear and the Landrovers, like a lot of younger Freya Starks, ie in high style. All of these books are worth buying and as we now seem in England to be living on the planet of the apes so far as foreign, social or economic policies are concerned, their prices for what they imaginatively offer seem modest.
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