1 Modernism’s Empire: Australia and the Cultural Imperialism of Style Bill Ashcroft and John Salter From Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby (eds.) Modernism and Empire Manchester and New York: Manchester U. P., 2000: 292-323. In 1997 a Constitutional Convention was held in Canberra to decide the terms of a referendum on an Australian Republic.1 Nearly a hundred years after federation it seemed that finally Australia was to become independent. Unresolved at the time of that convention, however, and still unresolved today, is the status of Aboriginal land. Some years after the Mabo and Wik cases, which overturned the official legitimation of colonial occupation and the alienation of aboriginal land, the results for indigenous owners have been negligible.2 More than two centuries after its colonization Australia remains locked in a peculiarly post-colonial predicament, a predicament revolving around the definition of Australia, the relationship of Australians to place and the heterogeneous provenance, if not the very identity of Australian culture. This irresolution, encapsulated in the image of a reluctant republic and its reluctant reconciliation, signifies the persistent ambivalence of a white post-colonial culture whose very terms of reference are both unstable and under constant negotiation. The filiative dynamic of a settler culture ensures that ‘imperial’ cultural discourse appears seamlessly transported to the colonized society. But that appearance obscures a ceaseless and unresolved struggle over representation. One of the more perennial arguments in post-colonial studies centres on the post-coloniality of settler colonies. The advanced character of their economies and political structures leads to the misapprehension that the cultures are ‘first world’ and therefore indistinguishable from the European model. However we find in these cultures the most complex and ambivalent struggles over strategies of cultural self-determination and selfrepresentation. The problem of place and identity which Australia faces two hundred years after white settlement, is one for which the question of Australian modernity remains a highly indicative example. The unresolved problem of Aboriginal land is not simply a problem of racial and cultural exclusion; it is a failure of inherited discourses of spatiality to adequately conceive the nature of Australian place. This predicament 2 emerges directly from the unreflective use of Eurocentric and imperial discourse to describe and define the energies of a post-colonial culture. Australia was settled at the climax of the Enlightenment, it became a federation when European modernism began to overturn many of the values of that Enlightenment. Yet understanding Australian cultural development in these terms, with reference points firmly embedded in European history, misapprehends the peculiar cultural dynamic generated in a colonized society from the moment of colonization. The significance of Empire in Australian modernism lies less in the historical and cultural influences of this European cultural movement, than in the very employment of Eurocentric discourse to understand post-colonial cultural reality. This has seemed uncontroversial to generations of Australians who saw themselves as British. But for the heterogeneous and dislocated (as well as invaded) populations of Australian cultural life, such discourse has not only proved unhelpful, but has hindered understanding of how Australian reality could be represented. The lingering assumption that Australian culture is a transported version of the British model has led directly to the political and cultural irresolution which plagues Australia today. The High Cultural discourse of modernism, with its imposition of a set of largely uncontested parameters upon a non-European cultural reality, may be seen to be metonymic of the operation of imperial domination. Modernity and modernism are rooted in empire. But the dissemination of ‘modernism’ as a cultural category throughout the dominions, and particularly in Australia during the first half of the century, consolidated the circulation of Eurocentric cultural power. The use of the category ‘modernism’ in Australia ensured that cultural production in the first decades of the century which used features of the stylistic innovation prevalent in Europe, were seen to ‘inherit,’ ‘mimic,’ ‘copy,’ or ‘follow’ European cultural fashion. On the contrary, however, the imposition of the term ‘modernism’ effectively submerged the specific energies of that cultural activity. The disparate collection of practices in art, literature and architecture which were regarded as ‘modern,’ were engaged in the project of Australian artists and writers to discover a way of constituting their postcolonial reality, particularly their relationship with place, and to discover a creative articulation of Australian difference. Modernity and modernism are, of course very different things. But they are both, in different ways, dominated by historicism. To be ‘modern’ is to have a certain purchase on history. To be modern is to be ‘civilized’, ground breaking, forward looking. Both modernity and modernism are evidence, both discursively and historically, of the profound cultural power of European civilization. Modernity is both an epoch and a discourse. As an epoch it coincides with those great shifts in European history, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the discovery of the New World, which heralded the rise of Europe to world cultural and political prominence. Europe constructed itself as ‘modern’ and constructed the non-European colonized cultures as ‘traditional,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘pre-modern’. As a discourse, modernity identifies those major discontinuities separating modern social institutions from traditional social orders, such the pace of change, the scope of change, and the nature of modern institutions. The advent of various technologies inititated an ever accelerating pace of change, and the scope of this change came to effect the whole globe.3 But above all the discourse of modernity gave rise to those strategies which enabled European society to consolidate its position as ‘civilized’ and culturally dominant. 3 Modernism, on the other hand, represents the contemporary paradox of modernity. For the re-discovery of the ‘primitive,’ around the turn of the century, in exhibitions of those artifacts plundered from colonized societies, stimulated artists and writers to reject nineteenth century traditions of naturalism, of consensus between author and reader, to disengage from bourgeois values and adopt complex and difficult styles which both dismantled and critiqued traditional forms of representation. Such ‘primitive’ images seemed to release European artists and writers from those very principles of enlightenment rationality and representation which lay at the heart of modernity itself. This re-circulation of the primitive representations of the colonized back to the heart of empire -- as modernism -- is a key paradox of European cultural dominance at the height of imperial power. In Australia, where the ‘barbaric’ and ‘primitive’ were precisely what civilization and Culture were designed to resist, this created confusion over the ways in which Australian difference could be represented.4 But such recirculation shows modernism to be a feature of what Pratt calls “transculturation.”5 Modernism is a discourse of the contact zone. In its culturally and politically disruptive dynamic we see one of the clearest examples of the ambivalent nature of colonial discourse. This transcultural paradox becomes compounded however, when High Cultural modernism recirculates back into the Empire as a culturally dominant discourse. Here we discover that the hybridity of the contact zone is traversed by relations of power which cannot be accommodated by notions of cultural heterogeneity. Habermas has pointed out that the term ‘modern’ arises at historical junctures at which the relationship with the past and with tradition comes under review.6 ‘Modern’ describes an epoch’s consciousness of its link to the past and a simultaneous difference, or break, or transition from it. The established modern itself becomes, in its turn, the object of renewal and replacement. But replacement is not simply a question of outmoded styles. As T. S. Eliot explains, the placement of the “really new” work in the tradition may be a ‘new planting’ that reorders the existing order of the (metaphorical) garden of culture.7 The modern never indicates a fixed historical reference point. ‘Modernism’ is above all, a way of talking rather than a way of being or doing. This identity as a language game is of profound significance to post-colonial societies, because it is language above all within which representation of all kinds is grounded. Wittgenstein’s term “language-game” is somewhat more useful than the term ‘discourse’ because language-game suggests the relative unboundedness and interrelatedness of speaking positions and practices involved in ‘modernism.’8 Like any category, ‘modernism’ is like a rope made up of many overlapping and intertwining speaking practices, but there is no essential thread, no essential quality which is present in all the practices described by the term. In discursive terms, the range of diverse practices which meets the rules of inclusion into the ‘modern’ is vast, and modernism itself a huge and baggy monster. Modernism is most often defined in terms of what it is not rather than what it is. As T.S. Eliot wrote, in his 1923 review of Ulysses, “the ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not accord with the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”9 In literature the distinctions may become relatively specific. In their attempt to throw off the burden of the realist novel, says Barth, modernist writers adopted “the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character.”10 However the tendency for the modernism language game to 4 become a universalist, essentialist, inclusivist and Eurocentric way of talking may be found by any random selection of commentaries of modernism. In Mapping Literary Modernism Ricardo Quinones asserts that: Not only in the central consciousness of Modernist works but in the total register of their sensibilities we find a new complexity at work. A whole new range of experience, with new objects, new attitudes and different stylistic levels, is thus able to be presented in Modern literature.11 Such assertions, of a ‘central consciousness,’ the existence of a ‘total register’ of modernist sensibilities, a ‘new complexity,’ are by no means unusual consequence of the assumption of an ontological specificity in modernist works, an assumption which dissolves under even the most cursory analysis. Although most critics would concede the heterogeneity of modernist practices, the term ‘modernism’ continually reasserts itself as a monolith in cultural discourse. The Myth of ‘Belatedness’ When this universalist and monolithic category is deployed outside Europe the hegemonic character of its use becomes more obvious. The very term ‘modernism’ categorises cultural production in set and even stereotype ways. The conventional interpretation of post-war modernism in Australia is dominated by the myth of ‘belatedness’. According to this theory, modernism did not really appear in Australia until after the First World War, when modernist styles in painting (and very little modernist literature) were adopted with only a superficial understanding of the political and aesthetic issues at stake in the modern revolution. Australians were isolated and provincial and “hardly any Australians, in the first decades of this century, understood what was at stake in modernism, or could conceive the enormous pressure under which immediately pre-war modern art was formed.”12 Thus modernism was either regarded as an ‘incomprehensible aberration’ or ‘superficially chic and exciting’. “This lack of access to the tradition from which the necessity of modern art arose meant that modernism tended to arrive in Australia as a style (in the modern sense) without content. It looked new and clever and it did not really matter that no one knew what it was for.”13 Consequently ‘modernism’ was soon popular in interior decoration and in popular culture. “Anything more substantial was inevitably decades late, so that artists struggled to understand movements that were already worn out and superseded by others”14 In short, the modernism of the twenties and thirties in Australia arrived late, was a superficial mimicry of the European cultural revolution which spawned it and was soon cowed and demoralised by a powerful conservative nationalism which preferred the Heidelberg landscape tradition in art and realism and narrative in writing. A contrary, though similarly historicist view of Australian modernism offered by Andrew Milner, suggests that in fact Australia was modern before modernity, and now postmodern before postmodernity.15 This is not a modernity characterised by the sophistication of its high culture, its radical or avant-garde intelligentsia. Rather it is the absence of these things, the emphasis on the precultural social environment determined by its nature and landscape which establishes Australia’s radical modernity. It is perhaps not too reductive to say that this view defines Australian modernity in terms of the ‘primitive’ from which European modernism drew its inspiration. Australian modernism is embedded in that primitivism which remains the source energy of modernism’s break with bourgeois values and traditional expressive forms. 5 David Carter, attempting to uncover the prehistory of Milner’s claim, is intrigued by the very excess of the arguments in cultural commentary which turn “to metropolitan modernism in order to define Australian distinctiveness.”16 Rather than a view of Australian belatedness “in which modernity comes to be associated with an alwayslacking cultural maturity: we were not yet quite modern, we had not yet grown up” -the discourse of modernity itself allowed “the possibility of a radical originality in the peripheral culture in which the very absence of history makes modernity peculiarly its own.”17 This allows us to re-read Marcus Clarke’s description of the “weird melancholy” and “funereal gloom” of the Australian landscape, for instance, through its appropriation of Edgar Allan Poe, not in terms of Romantic gothic, or settler alienation, but as “the primeval discovered as the modern, and vice versa, the prehistoric as the unprecedented, ‘the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write.’”18 Consequently, critics such as A.A. Phillips, who coined the term ‘Cultural Cringe’ as the quintessential description of belatedness, can be seen to define a progressively modernising realism which “defines both the original and originary modernity of Australian culture and its continuing modernity (its anti-belatedness).”19 The generation of New Criticism trained critics of the 1960s, such as Harry Heseltine, repeat this rejection of belatedness, claiming that the qualities which “define the very modernity of the modern also define the very ‘Australianness of Australian writing’: that peculiarly modern element in modern literature which. . . Australian literature so early laid hold on.’ From the beginning Australian literature has known nihilism, nothingness, the ‘horror of primal experience’, ‘the terror at the basis of being’; and these are it recurrent concern, from Marcus Clarke to Lawson to A.D. Hope and Patrick White.”20 These directly opposed arguments about Australian modernism demonstrate very clearly how a language game can generate conflicting hermeneutic possibilities. For what is absent from either consideration of Australian cultural life is any problematising of the term ‘modernism,’ or even the ‘modern’ itself. The argument about Australian modernity circulates entirely within a discourse which itself remains unquestioned. The beginning of a deconstruction of the modernist discourse in Australia is the question ‘what does it mean to be modern, to whom is this important?’ The Milner argument about Australia’s modernity attempts a radical shift in our understanding of cultural dominance and cultural description. The Carter elaboration demonstrates how Milner’s argument lies on a trajectory, even a tradition, of Australian cultural commentary. But what is most significant to any view of the link between cultural discourse and imperial power lies precisely in what is left out of these arguments. These arguments about the pre-modern emergence of Australian modernity are at base arguments about the irrelevance and inapplicability of imported cultural categories to post-colonial practices. This is, of course, a regular point of contention in postcolonial theory, because dominant discourses, from language itself to disciplines and cultural practices of all kinds, may be transformed into culturally relevant tools by a process of appropriation and interpolation. But universalist categories such as modernism have shown themselves to be very resistant to appropriation because they identify sites of social and political controversy as well as modes of cultural practice. The view of modernism as a social phenomenon (despite the limitation of the term to a High Culture debate), sees the idea of the modern as the site of a struggle over the nature of Australian identity itself. ‘Modernism’ located a hotly contested battle 6 between sides which themselves had no clear idea about what the term entailed. Indeed so strong was the universalising force of the term as a social category that questions about artistic intention or content became virtually irrelevant. The ‘Quarantined’ Culture By 1913, the year Stravinsky performed The Rite of Spring, the year of the Armory exhibition in New York, a date often taken as a high point of modernist art, there was ample evidence in Australian society of a nation becoming ‘modern’. A highly urbanised, coastal and city-dwelling people had an increasing experience of mechanization and material modernization. But in terms of modernist artistic and literary developments, we find a country which John Williams has described as effectively ‘quarantined’. “By about 1921... an improvised, unstated but de facto cultural quarantine existed in Australia. It was propagated by an inchoate grouping of racial supremacists, anti-Semites, anti-bolshevists, protectionists, anti-industrialisers and the leaders of an élitist and conservative art-world establishment.”21 Australian high culture “which by default seems to have become almost synonymous with visual art”22 existed on a plane of its own, quite divorced from the relatively unselfconsciously modernizing urban culture. Even those most virulently opposed to ‘modernism’ took for granted the changes and benefits of modernization. This in itself alerts us to the elitist confinement of ‘modernist’ discourse. ‘Modernism’ became the focus of a battle over what it meant to be Australian and what it was about Australian culture that might be constituted as separate and different. On the one hand a conservative, imperial nationalism institutionalised the impressionism of the nineties as the indigenous Australian art and villified the modern as ‘French’ ‘unpatriotic, degenerate, superficial and even Jewish.23 On the other, according to this thesis, a demoralised, defensive avant garde in Australian art fought a losing battle to import modernist style into Australia until, like Roy de Maistre, they were driven out to seek refuge in London. According to Williams, the dominance of the nationalist agrarian school of Australian art, coincided with the election of the Bruce Page government in 1923, which “marked the last inflow of modern-ish art to Australia until the eve of the second world war.”24 That the nation was becoming a cultural desert at this time was confirmed, according to Williams, by the 1923 exhibition of Australian paintings held in London, “whose old-fashioned provincialism was praised as a virtue by Lionel Lindsay -- proof for him that Australians had preserved themselves from ‘the revolutionary manias of a rotted world.’”25 “The isolationist thinking that underwrote that exhibition came naturally enough to a nation remote from world centres; one whose most potent visual and verbal images often centred upon notions of the virtue of isolation.”26 If we analyse the language of the ‘quarantined culture” thesis, we see how comprehensively it recapitulates the language of imperial discourse. Modern art, like modernism itself, was exported to a nation which dwelt on the edge of the civilized world, a nation whose agrarian preferences sequestered it from the modern, which was by definition European. Whatever the events of the time -- and there is no doubt that a conservative government provided the background for a conservative resistance to modernist art -- the language of isolation, marginality, provincialism, backwardness is precisely the way in which the post-colonial society exists in the gaze of empire, what Lacan calls the gaze of the grande autre. What transpires in the elaboration of this thesis is a process of othering, and this process is driven by an absence of any 7 examination of the term ‘modernism’ itself. ‘Modern’ remains the signifier of European dominance and civilization, a term of transparent value and desirability. The concept of the modern retains the same imperial function it has had for five centuries -- a focus of ‘civilization’ and advancement, a shimmering object of desire and longing. The consequence of this cementing of signification into a centre/margin binary is the occlusion of any attempt to understand what other cultural trajectories and projects might have been engaged. The social controversy surrounding modernism, however, focused on two fronts, the Nietzschian vitalism of the Vision school and the institutionalisation of the Heidelberg tradition of landscape painting in the Australian Academy of Art. The Academy -proposed and supported by Robert Menzies, the Federal Attorney General who was to become Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister -- provided government support for the arts at the cost of cultural conformity; it would not only ‘set standards for the work’ but also ‘raise the standards of public taste by directing attention to good work’. In Menzies’ opinion, much of modernity ‘consisted in doing all the things that Rembrandt would not have done, and to be really original the artist had to paint a face in the form of cabbage and vice versa’. Menzies’ comments on modern art point out the extent to which both sides of the argument were deeply embedded in Eurocentric cultural values. Where modernism was widely held to mean the importation of a European paradigm shift, resistance to it in Australia were couched in terms of the timelessness and universalism of moral and artistic values best represented in the European Masters. In a letter to the Argus in 1937 Menzies wrote: I find nothing but absurdity in much so-called ‘modern art’, with its evasion of real problems and its cross-eyed drawing … I think that in art beauty is the condition of immortality -- a conclusion strengthened by an examination of the works of the great European Masters -- and that the language of beauty ought to be understood by reasonably cultivated people who are not themselves artists. 27 Menzies’ Eurocentrism reached the status of a virtual manifesto in his maintenance of Britishness, but the Eurocentrism of the vitalist school represented by Lionel Lindsay, was more complex. For Lindsay, Australia’s provincialism -- an art that Somerset Maugham called ‘old fashioned’ on seeing the 1923 British Academy exhibition -was something Australia could offer the world. Yet, paradoxically, that ‘difference’ was something Australia inherited from a long tradition of European art. In his catalogue essay for that exhibition he replied that “if to be alive is to be one of the Red Army of art that has trampled upon the great tradition we inherit from the Greeks, then I am thankful for the appellation, and find in Mr Maugham’s implication of provincialism a delicate compliment.”28 Provincialism offered ‘escape from all the revolutionary manias of a rotted world’ and left Australia ‘unaffected by the stunt art that has ravaged the older civilizations.29 The use of the term ‘modernism’ as the site of a social and cultural controversy in Australia, has made it difficult to dislodge from cultural discourse. Although the contest over the social phenomenon of modernism is limited to the domain of high culture it is nevertheless invested with the often bitterly fought cultural political agendas of the time and epitomizes the struggles over Australian identity which preoccupied various cultural élites. The conventional narrative of Australian modernism, its belatedness, its rearguard action fought in the quarantined culture, sees it as principally an issue of the inheritance of European style, in most cases an 8 inheritance devoid of any sophisticated understanding. Australian modernism is usually restricted to a phenomenon of Australian culture between the wars, a discrete and apparently discontinuous period which bore little relation to the dominant concerns of Australian cultural history. Such an assumption has very little to say about the kinds of concerns that ‘modernist’ artists and writers were exploring in their work, or the cultural basis of the images they were producing. The situation is further complicated by the fact that very often the artists’ own sense of their professional identities was confused by the intense pressure to see their work in the context of European models. But when we look at the concerns their work was addressing, we see that far from being a discrete period in Australian cultural life, modernist artists were intimately involved in the struggle to develop a mode of cultural self representation, a struggle which had dominated the work of artists and writers before them. Indeed it is the very tactic of talking about these concerns in terms of a universalising and chronologically hierarchical discourse which prevents any real understanding of these concerns. Australian ‘modernism’ was neither less nor more than the European model, neither prior nor belated. It locates a range of cultural practices characterised by a profound difference from that model, a different agenda, a different range of interests, purposes, content and strategies. From its first appearance modernism offended the vitalist tendencies of Australian culture30, the Vision group31, for example, seeing it as cultural decadence.32 Modernism is often seen as an outgrowth of the symbolist33 poetry movement in late nineteenth century France34 particularly when works draw attention to their form and use forms and language which obscure their subject.35 This clash of symbolism with vitalism36 produced decades of anti-modernism in Australia which found its first focus in art – as in the opening lines of Lionel Lindsay’s book Addled Art (1942): Modernism in art is a freak, not a natural, evolutional growth. Its causes lie in the spirit of the age that separates this century from all others.37 Anti-modernism did not really turn its attention to literature in Australia until after modernism found a focal point in the Angry Penguins movement. In art Australian modernism has its origins in the very early decades of this century but concerned mainly the works of women artists.38 The mainstream tradition was impressionist landscape39 as painted by (males such as) Tom Roberts, Elioth Gruner and Arthur Streeton, a nationalist tradition loosely referred to as the Heidelberg School, after a camp where its major exponents briefly resided in the 1880s.40 But by the time of the Second World War ‘modern’ artists had combined with ‘modern’ writers in the Angry Penguins, an Adelaide journal which ran from 1940 to 1946.41 And the full wrath of the powerful anti-modernist tradition came down upon it. The Angry Penguin movement declined rapidly after the Ern Malley hoax.42 Founder Max Harris attributed the movement’s rise to the environment of the Second World War43 and its disappearance to the “dispersal of forces”44 that followed the Malley fiasco.45 But modernism in Australian literature (and art) outlived anti-modernism.46 As recently as 1991 John Tranter and Philip Mead included some of the work of hoax poet Ern Malley in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry , describing him as a “ghostly presence.” They also locate the Ern Malley nadir as the origins of literary modernism in Australia,47 whereas Angry Penguins founder, Max Harris, described the process of the survival of modernism in Australia in terms of changing politico-cultural agendas of the academy and the commodification of literature.48 9 Today the pendulum has swung and many Australian writers and works are thought of unquestioningly as ‘modern’.49 Eleanor Dark’s The Little Company (1945), for example, has been termed modern no doubt because of its concern with the city.50 But Dark’s Prelude to Christopher (1934) is also seen as modern because of the way it can be read as an allegory of mid-twentieth century Australian society which was itself modernising.51 And Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (1944) is modern because, it seems, the protagonist’s escape from Australia to England may be read as a rite of passage that parallels the kind of escape from constriction that characterises modernism itself.52 Among the many other examples which have had the mantle of modernism thrust unquestioningly upon them are Patrick White, Kenneth Slessor, Marjory Barnard, Elizabeth Harrower and Elizabeth Jolley to name but a few.53 Modernism and the Discourse of Place The feature of modernist practice that has been submerged beneath the focus on modernism as a cultural controversy, as a watershed of innovation, is the concern with place. Place does not merely denote landscape but refers to the process of representation itself, it refers to the struggle of a displaced society trying to find the words and the images with which it could constitute a reality which was separate, marked by difference rather than diversity. The impressionism of the Heidelberg School had established a way of seeing that place which struck a chord in those seeking an original representation. The revolutionary nature of this representation however ossified very quickly into a tradition. By the end of World War 1, according to conventional history, artists rebelling against this tradition sought new inspiration in the modernist styles of Europe. The venue for modernist departures in Australia was the conservative Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney. From 1898 the more open spirit fostered in classes run by Anthony Dattilo Rubbo whose students included Norah Simpson, Roland Wakelin, Grace Cossington Smith and Roy de Maistre.54 Cossington Smith’s The Sock Knitter (1915) and Wakelin’s Down the Hill to Berry’s Bay (1916) are two of the earliest modernist paintings.55 Though hardly revolutionary, they demonstrate how concerns about the ways in which the subject is located in place persisted into modernist painting despite the gradual development in style. In an art world that still held naturalism to be axiomatic, says Allen, the conceptual reversal entailed by such a stylistic shift had something of the copernican.”56 The dominant tendency of modernist discourse, and that of art history as well, is to see the revolution in style as an end in itself. But with all the innovative directions and exploratory interests of modern artists (for instance, Wakelin and de Maistre became interested in the use of colour to treat mental disorders, and investigated the link between colour and music), a continuing issue for artists between the wars was ‘what does it mean to be alive in this place?’ The experiments with colour and form, the move to abstraction and surrealism, the political battles which surrounded the concept of the modern at this time, did not lessen the impact of this question. That view of the landscape painting of the time as lacking “deeply founded conviction,”57 or as producing images that seemed “to exist somewhat ambivalently to their time and place, in spite of all attempts at topical references, local scenery or flora, and even indigenous style” misapprehends the struggle necessarily engaged in order to find a form of representation not dominated by received Eurocentric, and particularly anglocentric conceptions. 10 To some extent, of course, the reconception of place involved an increasingly higher profile for urban space which seemed to embody the values and effects of modernization, mechanization and technology. The photography of Max Dupain for instance, represents the fascination with the angles and surfaces of the industrialized city. This concern for urban space glided very easily into politically committed views of urban work and poverty in the painting of Yosl Bergner’s Aborigines at Fitzroy (1941), Albert Tucker’s Spring in Fitzroy (1941) or Futile City (1940), or his Images of Modern Evil series (1943-46) and Noel Counihan’s Before the March (194?).58 The theme of work as a focus of the ‘subject in place’ is just as important as it was for the Heidelberg painters of the 1890s. But now the idealization of human struggle with rural space, the individual’s encounter with the land, is replaced by a view of work “as the basis for human community”59 and in particular its absence as a cause of social injustice and dislocation. Re-visioning Place: Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd The analysis of Australian cultural activity as a palimpsest of interactive responses to the problems of post-colonial place, and particularly of the post-colonial subject in place, disrupts the conventional historicist view of a discrete period of Australian modernism. Thus we can see that the era of the Angry Penguins, the era dominated by Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale, rather than a ‘rediscovery of the landscape,’ is built upon concerns that had persisted since the mid-nineteenth century. Nolan’s comment that “I gradually forgot all about Picasso, Klee and Paris ... and became attached to light”60 demonstrates how crucial it was for these artists to liberate their professional identities as well as their techniques. Nolan’s best known ‘rediscovery’ is the figure of Ned Kelly, the “most important metaphor of an Australian relationship with the land since the Heidelberg settler.”61 Although an unambiguous mythic hero in Australian cultural life Nolan “preserves and enhances the ambivalence of the bushranger. He remains the antithesis of the settler: he does not work and he does not settle.”62 Possibly the most powerful expression of this ambivalence is Ned Kelly (1946) (fig 1) in which the view of the sky through the helmet remains a potent metonymy of post-colonial displacement, an ambivalent combination of harmony and alienation, of location and dislocation. In some respects the subject of this painting is representation itself, the sense of an ambivalence exacerbated by the inheritance of forms of representation which are ‘out of place’ in post-colonial space. The painting appropriates the myth and displaces it, appropriates ‘modern’ forms of representation and disrupts them. With Arthur Boyd we see even more clearly the process of appropriation. Many of his early paintings were strange transitional pictures which appropriated European or religious myths and concerns to an Australian setting. In The Mockers (1945) the Crucifixion in the background is dominated by the figure of an old king. Pictures such as this and Melbourne Burning (1946) are reminiscent of Brueghel in their massed figures and restless movement. But in The Expulsion (1947), which depicts Adam and Eve being expelled from a Garden of Eden in the Australian bush, we see a more concentrated example of the process of appropriation. Here the importation of the myth into the Australian bush, is less an example of a colonial re-enactment than it is a post-colonial assertion of displacement and ambivalence. In the curious sense of displacement which the picture engenders we find an examination of the whole question of the appropriateness of European discourse in post-colonial space. 11 This is even more obvious in Boyd’s rose paintings. In the late 1970s Boyd produced a series of four paintings63 which share the symbols of the river and (with one exception) the rose, usually brightly coloured and suspended in the sky above the landscape. The four works obviously form a set, yet two of the four (Crucifixion, Shoalhaven and Crucifixion and Rose) have been separated from the set and read as ‘religious’ art.64 This separation means that two of the works now function entirely within a separate discourse, a genre which includes some of Boyd’s early works such as The Mining Town (1946-47), some works by Leonard French, Eric Smith and many other well-known Australian artists. This re-organisation of Boyd’s oeuvre is indicative of the ‘imperial’ operation of Eurocentric cultural categories, re-organising Australian culture to confirm its links with the long tradition of Anglo-european religious art –- a “thematic category... as ancient as art itself”.65 Not only does this re-organisation of Boyd’s set of paintings obscure the themes they share, but it also obscures the specific cultural relevance they bear to the experience of everyday life in Australia. A corollary to this lies in the inclusion of a selection of ‘Aboriginal’ works into the same category of ‘religious art’.66 An inclusion of this kind into a European cultural category ‘as ancient as art itself’ clearly suggests that the re-organisation and appropriation of Australian culture is a continuous process. The main problem with this is that the category ‘religious art’ cannot account for either Boyd’s or the Aboriginal works. It cannot explain, for instance, why the crucifixions depicted by Boyd are in the river or why one of the figures on the cross is female, or why the rose should be floating in the river.67 Yet these things require little explanation once universalist European cultural categories are dropped and the works related more directly to Australian experience. A rereading should begin with the obvious: the rose, icon of England, simply does not fit in the context of the Australian place. In the earliest of these four paintings, River in Flood with Carcass and Rose, two disparate symbols, the rose and the carcass, are simply juxtaposed. But the work does more than 'contrast' the symbols. It interrogates them. Boyd wrote, about this painting: The rose symbolises imposition and the cultural arrogance of the English as they tried to make 'a little England' in Australia. I was trying to show the fragility of transporting this culture into such a harsh environment. The rose and carcass are contrasting symbols.68 The rose looks as though it has been simply added to the background of the sky in this painting, or perhaps, suspended over the landscape. But these are symbols of two different orders. They are not related but, rather, forced together and held by the frame of the painting. This theme of incompatibility is enlarged in Shoalhaven River with Rose, Burning Book and Aeroplane (1976) which contains a much more complex iconography of the landscape. The rose again appears suspended but this time in a much smaller sky where it seems to hover. Boyd has pointed to the incompatibility between the rose and the landscape in this painting: The rose represents the desperate attempts of the Europeans to impose their civilisation and culture on an essentially primitive landscape. It always floats because it cannot take root. If it does, it destroys, like lantana.69 12 Thus Shoalhaven River with Rose, Burning Book and Aeroplane may be recognised as a portrayal of the impossibility of a symbiotic relationship between this place and a simple transplantation of the culture of England/Europe. The icon of the floating rose, rather than the rose firmly attached to the soil, and the fact that it has been floating in this way for two centuries, further illustrates this impossibility. The final two of these four paintings are the most enigmatic. They not only reveal the falsity of colonial assumption of place (of an England-transported) but they also attempt to imagine or re-conceive the place without the metaphoric rose: as a sort of direct, or unmediated (by the cultural assumptions of England/Europe) link between white Australia and the earth of this place. A (white) Australia of this sort has never yet existed. In Crucifixion and Rose the crucified figure has none of the 'grace' or 'beauty' or 'modesty' of his Renaissance counterparts. These are the kinds of things the rose symbolises, and they are absent. Thus the rose is floating, half submerged in the river. But this is not simply the portrayal of the death of (European) 'beauty'; it is the portrayal of the death of a particular (European) conception of 'reality'. The river seems benign in this painting, but this is the same river that threw up the carcass in River in Flood with Carcass and Rose (1974-5), causing such havoc and loss. Crucifixion and Rose is the portrayal of 'European Man', stripped of all artifice and veneer. The rose, having failed to take root, has itself perished in this place. In the naked figure of Crucifixion and Rose is the resolution; the bringing together of the two disparate icons of River in Flood with Carcass and Rose. This is a death, but there is a companion painting, Crucifixion, Shoalhaven which mitigates the death. In this painting, the figure is a woman. Boyd remarked that one critic referred to these two paintings as 'his' and 'her' crucifixions.70 The two texts may be read together, but not to the exclusion of the other two. The two significant points of the 'her' crucifixion is the absence of the rose and the fact that the figure is now female. This is not a portrayal of death, but of birth or rebirth, as in a resurrection. The texts of these four paintings together suggest that the new will be born out of the destruction of the old. Transposing this notion to questions of Australian identity suggest, further, that the new will have an authenticity linked with this place that the old (symbolised by the hovering rose) could never attain. A category like modernism is irrelevant to these readings, but more importantly, having ‘found’ new meanings, for one set of works, outside, or ‘glancing off’, the orthodox cultural categories, the way is left open for others. The further point is that many of these extra-category meanings tend to intersect and overlap because the works are now circulating within other language-games. Such an affinity is shared by the Boyd ‘rose’ paintings and Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings.71 Rather than a figure in the landscape, that black geometrical representation of Kelly suggests a piece cut-out, or missing, from it. This is an ontologically ambiguous representation. And in those Kelly paintings which do not have eyes in the eye-slit, where one can see the landscape through the eye-slit, there is a clear sense of seeing the place as it might appear from within the mask. But what is this mask of armour which separates being from the place, if not the limitations of Anglo-european perception? Both Nolan’s Ned Kelly and Boyd’s roses, suggest relationships with place other than those conceptualised within the Anglo-european tradition. And this theme is to be found everywhere in Australian art and literature. With those categories a jump from 13 ‘art’ to ‘literature’ is usually only accomplished by showing one illustrating the other. But the theme of the-ambiguous-figure-in-an-alien-place is actually enhanced by that art/literature jump. An example of this occurs in David Malouf’s Harland’s Half Acre . The protagonist Frank Harland, modelled broadly on Australian artist Ian Fairweather, discovers that to represent the place (and the subject-in-place) in art, he must begin from a black or uncoloured page (premise) rather than the uninscribed 'white' page.72 These works illustrate the continuity and reciprocity between various formations of Australian cultural production. They also illustrate how categories such as ‘modernism’ really only serve to re-organise works, disturb existing relationships, and create a space for Anglo-european cultural preference. A complex example occurs in the works of Patrick White who, quite early in his career, was seen as ‘modern’. In most cases this simply meant that an author did not write in the realist mode. For example, when White’s novel Voss (1957) first appeared, realist writer Katharine Prichard saw it, compared with Vance Palmer’s Seedtime (which appeared in the same year), as “anaemic and completely out of tune with an Australian atmosphere and environment.”73 But Voss was always a ‘difficult’ novel.74 It became even more ‘difficult’ when Richard Meale (1988) turned it into an opera with a libretto written by David Malouf. Malouf’s Voss offended the expectations of the Eurocentric category of opera. It failed because it did “not add up to credible operatic language.”75 And for those who thought it succeeded it did so because it conformed to the (universalist) expectations of opera 76 Yet here again, the categories of Anglo-European culture not only provide an exceptionally narrow understanding of Voss the opera, but also serve to conceal the network of themes the work shares with other Australian cultural works and themes. The point is that when the text is taken out of the language game of (European) culture and allowed to circulate within other contexts – such as Boyd’s roses or Nolan’s Ned Kellys or any of the Malouf works – new meanings emerge. Ultimately, these all echo the concerns of those works cited earlier of ambiguities in the relationship between the subject and place of existence. They are all attempts to reimagine a new subject and a new place. And this is eloquently portrayed in Voss the opera. The opera is in two acts. The first is set in Sydney in the 1830s –- the known world. The second act is set in the unknown world –- the bush where Voss and the party are to go on their fateful expedition. The known is the world of Mr. Bonner and his family: England-transported to the antipodes. Metaphorically it is the perceptual ‘armour’ depicted in Nolan’s Ned Kelly. Its preferences and formality and glitter obscure the other world: the one Voss plans to ‘discover’. It is also, to use Boyd’s metaphor, the rose that strangles all other perceptions of place. Women and Modernism The most fascinating aspect of the modernist reconception of place between the wars is the fact that it was the women artists and writers who made the most innovative advances. This is significant because they tended to be greatly under-represented in exhibitions and in commentary about the period, yet in Sydney particularly, it was women who seemed to best appropriate the modern style. But the style is less important than the content of these paintings, which pivots on a complex interrelation of work, place and the body. Dorrit Black’s The Olive Plantation (1946) which 14 imposes a stylized art-deco aesthetic on the landscape, demonstrates the ways in which industrial technology could be appropriated to the task of reconceiving a place in which the location of the human subject is a matter of constant negotiation. The element of process and becoming is metonymised in Jessie Traill’s and Cossington Smith’s systematic documentation of the stages of the Sydney Harbour Bridge’s construction. Certainly the bridge was a potent symbol of national achievment at the time but in the depictions of its construction there is something much more, because much less than the finished bridge, for it was only during its construction that the bridge attracted such attention. The paintings made a statement of affirmation of the human work involved, but also articulated the process of occupying place, of reconstructing place, which itself lay at the core of the problems of its representation. In contrast to the dominantly male style of impressionist landscape, which had ossified by this time into a nationalist tradition, the landscapes by Cossington Smith in works such as Eastern Road, Turrumurra (1926) and Landscape at Pentecost (1929) painted a picture of unsettled, almost liminal space, of “farmland turning into suburbia, clusters of houses encroaching on fields, telegraph poles stretching half-way down the hill like scarecrows and then stopping for no reason”77 The inter-war period in which the innovativeness of Wakelin and de Maistre seems ultimately to have retreated before the conservative onslaught, saw women artists and women writers providing the most powerful images, the most concerted exploration of the question of place itself. It is in this activity that we find an uncanny fusion of the interests of feminist discourse and post-coloniality. For Proctor, Traill, Black, Preston, Cossington-Smith and many other women at the time were operating at the very juncture at which ‘writing the body’ and ‘writing place’ merge. The persistent need in post-colonial culture is to reconceive the lived space in which difference is focused. This need to write out of a sense of place is remarkably germane to the exhortations of écriture feminine for women to ‘write the body’. Hélène Cixous says Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies -- for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text -- as into the world and into history -- by her own movement.78 If we see ‘writing’ as a metaphor for representation we can see that a complex fusion of processes occurs in the work of women ‘modernists’ in Australia. For the body can be written in various ways, yet it seems that in post-colonial settler cultures the problems of writing the body and writing place merge most formidably. Women must write their bodies by reconceiving the body as a site of difference. There is no primordial self, no original place to be recovered, rather these must be re-invented in the creation of some “original relationship with the universe.”79 Hence the fascination by female modernists for images of process, for in process it seemed lay the secrets of representing this original relation. This is because the “original relation” is not a “return” to European origins. The relation between the people and the land is new, as is that between the imported language and the land, so the 'original' relationship, like the language, must be created anew. Women must recreate their own original relationship with the excluded and negated subjectivity located in their bodies. This explains something of the element of ambivalence, transition and process characterising the depictions of the building of the harbour bridge or of streets that are 15 neither rural nor yet quite urban. It also explains why women artists and writers in Australia, at the same time as they are making stylistic advances, are the ones wrestling most urgently with questions of location and subjectivity. It is at this point that the merging of women’s attempts to write the body with their attempts to ‘write place’ -- to conceive in the metaphor of process a way of reconceiving, recreating an originary relationship with the universe -- overlaps with the incorporation of indigenous images and forms. It is not only women in the 1930s and 1940s who appropriate aboriginality in the task of ‘constructing indigeneity’ but it is certainly women, particularly Margaret Preston who created the most striking images of post-colonial hybridity in these decades. Of course this appropriation, whatever its intentions, has been recognised as deeply ambiguous, since the attempt to reconceive post-colonial place and subjectivity within a hybridised aesthetic runs the risk of submerging aboriginal identity. But it is significant in its depiction of the broader strategy of constructing indigeneity in settler colonies. The Aborigine, even as a subject, had been eclipsed from the time of Heidelberg, and the idea of drawing inspiration from their art a radical departure from notions of cultural essentialism. Margaret Preston who discovered Aboriginal art in the thirties, reflected the interests of the Jindyworobaks in believing that here was the key to an original Australian art.80 Her painting Aboriginal Landscape (1941) is in many respects, like the paintings of the construction of the Harbour Bridge, a representation of a cultural process and a signification of social possibility. In one sense a depiction of the kind of primitivism which underlay ideas about Australia’s precocious modernism, the painting is remarkable for what it cannot say, as much as for the image of possibility which it represents. As a painting, it has nowhere to go, no school, no tradition to initiate. But as a representation of the land as ‘place’, an inhabited space in which peoples of various origins must reach some way of constituting their own reality, their own post-colonial ‘originality’ freed of the weight of tradition, it is striking. The very inability of the painting to foreshadow a counter tradition is a gesture towards the possibility of a process of representation that at least believes it can shake itself free of tradition. This remarkable confluence of jouissance, place and indigeneity is a far more interesting and productive than the discourse of ‘modernism’ can suggest. It is the very excess, the constant surplus of such cultural representation which categories such as modernism serve to obscure in their incorporation of post-colonial reality into a universalist aesthetic. oOo The concept of modernism has been such a battleground for social and class interests in Australia that whether conceived as the site of social controversy or an innovative aesthetic, its ‘imperial’ function of confirming the myth of colonial marginality and backwardness has entered the Australian psyche. If there is a ‘heart’ to Australian modernism it lies in its most provisional and heterogeneous expression: the efforts of those women artists and writers who strove to write the body, write place to construct their indigeneity through the appropriation of images of process and discovery. The struggle to conceive ways of representing Australian place and of the subject in place has always been a struggle against imperial forms of reality construction. Whatever the modern means in Australia it is ultimately in the excess of self representation and the horizonality of place that the ‘modernity’ of its construction of reality can come into being. This is the surplus which continually resists the cultural imperialism of style. 16 1 One of the best sources for information on the issues and background of the Australian republican debate will be found at http://www.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/souters/republic.html. For the party politics that lay behind the Convention see Innes Wilcox, 'Elections 96’, Age 22 February 1996, p. 12, also at http://www.theage.com.au/republic96/elect96.html. 2 A comprehensive coverage of the Australian Native Title debate will be found at http://headlines.yahoo.com/Full_Coverage/aunz/native_title. A synopsis will be found at http://www.smh.com.au/daily/content/features/features/970503/features4.ht ml. And for an insight into the party politics associated with Native Title that influence the Australian Republican debate see Margo Kingston, 'Canadian Apology "Irrelevant"', Sydney Morning Herald 9 January 1998. Also at http://www.smh.com.au/daily/content/980109/pageone/pageone1.html. 3 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity 1990) p. 6 4 This question is posed in David Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon . The protagonist, Gemmy Fairley had been marooned and had lived with Aborigines for most of his life. When he shows up in a frontier settlement people see in him the terrifying possibility that ‘culture’ could be lost: “He had started out white. No question ... But had he remained white? They looked at their own children ... entirely at home in their own tongue, then heard the mere half dozen words of English this fellow could cough up ...and you had to put to yourself the harder question. Could you lose it? Not just language but it. It” (Malouf, D., Remembering Babylon (Sydney: Random House 1993) p. 40. 5 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge 1992) p. 228 6 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’, in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, (Sydney: Pluto, 1983). 7 T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), in Selected Essays, (London: Faber and Faber 1986). 8 Wittgenstein describes language games in Philosophical Investigations: (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963). See especially #65 – #67. 9 Review of James Joyces’ Ulysses,The Dial Nov. 1923. 17 10 John Barth, The Literature of Exhaustion and the Literature of Replenishment (Northridge 1982) p. 68. 11 Ricardo Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press 1985) p. 121. 12 Christopher Allen, Art in Australia: from Colonization to Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson 1998) p.98 13 Allen, Art in Australia p. 98 14 Allen, Art in Australia p. 98 15 Andrew Milner, “Postmodernism and Popular Culture” in S. Alomes and D. den Hartog, Post Pop: Popular Culture, Nationalism and Postmodernism (Footscray 1991) pp. 46-57. 16 David Carter, “Modernity and Belatedness in Australian Cultural Discourse” Southerly vol. 54, no. 4, 1994-5, p. 9 17 Carter, “Modernity and Belatedness” p.9 18 Carter, “Modernity and Belatedness” p.8 19 Carter, “Modernity and Belatedness” pp.12-13 20 Carter, “Modernity and Belatedness” p.14 21 John Williams, Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 19131939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995) p.5. 22 Williams, Quarantined Culture p.6 23 In 1927, Lionel Lindsay was ‘honoured to propose the toast on etching’ at the Royal Academy and he proceeded to villify Modernism, behind which lurked the spectre of the Jew, as the corruption responsible for all the ills of British society. What is wrong with your public and the times? You all know the reason -this malady of modern art. And who is to blame for the continental infection? -- the press and a people that England has so long welcomed, the Jews. I am no Anti-Semite… but I am decidely hostile to the dealers who bribe a corrupt press. Lionel Lindsay, Comedy of Life: An Autobiography (Sydney: Angus & Robertson 1967) p. 259. 18 The alliance of futurism with Judaic bolshevism was ‘well established’ says Williams, “the standard inter-war critiques of modernist art were already evident in March 1919: it was a fad that would soon go away; it was made by rootless, urban cosmopolitans with foreign sounding names, people who set themselves apart from the world of true beauty that lay in the countryside; its value was inflated out of all proportion by a few dealers, who often, like [Picasso’s dealer] Kahnweiler, were of Jewish origin” (Quarantined Culture p. 161). 24 Williams Quarantined Culture p. 29 25 Williams Quarantined Culture p. 7 26 Williams Quarantined Culture p. 7 27 Robert Menzies, reply to letter from Norman McGeorge, Argus, 3 May 1937. Herald (Melbourne), 4 May 1937; Argus, 28 April 1937; Age, 28 April 1937; Argus, 3 May 1937. Letter to the Argus 28 Lionel Lindsay, “Australian Art,” The Exhibition of Australian Art in London 1923: A Record of the Exhibition Held at the Royal Academy and Organised by the Society of Artists, Sydney, (Sydney 1923) p. 168 29 Lindsay, “Australian Art” p.168 30 Cf.: “Modernism in Europe was a response to the authoritarian and materialist beliefs of the nineteenth century but in Australia it was also a reaction against the widespread acceptance of vitalism and deterministic Darwinism”, Julian Croft, ‘Responses to Modernism, 1925 – 1965’, in The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, ed. L. Hergenhan (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1988) p 412. 31 Vision was a Sydney periodical edited by Jack Lindsay, Kenneth Slessor and Frank Johnson. It published only four issues in 1923-1924 but was very influential. It was both anti-modernist and anti-nationalist. Major contributors were the editors, Norman Lindsay, Hugh McCrae, R.D. Fitzgerald and others. This group of artists and writers had no liking for Australian cultural life and their method of injecting doses of Nietzschian ‘Dionysian’ vitalism into Australian life was to paint pictures of fauns and satyrs prancing through the Australian bush. 32 Cf.: “[E]ven those in the Lindsay circle could feel the strength of the siren song on the unconscious, the allusive austerities of The Waste Land and its solipsistic pessimism, and even be excited by the terrible uncertainty produced by the antiNewtonian Physics of the 1920s. These ideas circulated throughout Australia and although style took some time to respond, the ideas themselves took vigorous root” (Croft, ‘Responses to Modernism’) p. 410. 19 33 See Wilson, E. (1959), Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 18701930 (New York: Scribner, first published 1931). 34 Irving Howe cited the ambitions of the Symbolists as: “a) to create an autotelic realm of experience in their poetry, with a minimum of references back or correspondence to the external world, and with an effort to establish the effect of formal coherence through an epiphany of impression; b) to abandon for the most part logical structures and to create a revelation of insight as a substitute for orderly and formal resolutions; c) to depend heavily on the associations of images, sometimes on kinesthesia and dissonance of images; d) and thereby make the writing of the poem itself into the dominant matter of the poem”, ‘Introduction, the Idea of Modernism’ in Literary Modernism, Irving Howe ed. (New York: Fawcett 1967) p 29. 35 Cf: “Formal experiment may frequently be a consequence or corollory of modernism, but its presence is not a sufficient condition for seeing a writer or work as modernist” (Howe ‘Introduction’) p. 22. 36 Modernism in Australia, has also been thought of as a synonym for vitalism. Michael Roe, for example, referred to the period 1890 to 1914 as “an era of extraordinary ferment for European culture and intellect – a ferment perhaps best labelled ‘the onslaught of vitalism’ (although ‘modernism’ would do well enough)”, Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives, Vitalism in Bourgois Social Thought 1890 – 1960 (St.Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press 1984) p.1. 37 Lionel Lindsay, Addled Art (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1942) p. 1 38 See Janine Burke, Australian Women Artists, 1840-1940 (Collingwood, Vic.: Greenhouse Publications 1980). 39 Cf.: “Conservatism is inevitably a rearguard action, and the fight, in the face of change, became more and more desparate … What ought to have been clear was that the old establishment was in its death throes and a new one was being born”, Richard Haese, Rebels and Precursors, The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin 1981) p.4. See also Humphrey McQueen, The Black Swan of Trespass: The Emergence of Modernist Painting in Australia to 1944 (Sydney: Alternative Publishing 1979). 40 For Roberts’ work, see Virgina Spate, Tom Roberts , revised ed. (East Melbourne: Lansdowne 1978). For Gruner, see Barry Pearce, Elioth Gruner 18821939 (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales 1983). For Streeton, see Ann Galbally, Arthur Streeton (East Melbourne: Lansdowne, 1979). 41 Angry Penguins was initially sponsored by the Adelaide University Arts Association but was soon taken over entirely by Max Harris and John Reed and published from Melbourne. The journal declared itself anti-political and was wide ranging. Its articles dealt with art, literature, jazz, cinema and the visual 20 arts. Among its contributors were Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, Geoffrey Dutton and Peter Cowan. The journal ceased in the wake of the Ern Malley hoax. 42 In 1944 academics James McAuley and Harold Stewart sent poems to Angry Penguins under the pretence that they were the work of a recently deceased insurance salesman and mechanic, Ern Malley. The accompanying letter was supposedly from Malley’s sister. The editors of Angry Penguins published the poems believing them to be genuine and of great literary merit. The hoax was discovered by the press and the perpetrators publicly confessed that they had simply “opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them into nonsensical sentences. We misquoted and made false allusions”. The purpose of the hoax was not particularly to embarrass Max Harris but to redress a “literary fashion” (i.e. modernism) whose distinctive feature was, in the hoaxers’ words, “that it rendered its devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination” Harris, M. & Murray-Smith, J., Ern Malley (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1988) p. 6. 43 Cf.: “War conditions created Angry Penguins with a sense of urgency and excitement, and wartime Australia was a pressure cooker, flooded with other races” (Harris & Murray-Smith Ern Malley p.44). 44 Cf.: “All those Angry Penguin characters started to flit off ... These were desertions you couldn’t blame them for. There was just better, sympatico reception overseas ... With the painters this flight was geographical; with the poets it was the size and nature of the audience. Why publish in a hostile environment with the Alec Hopes set up against you crying ‘Crap Merchants! We don’t want you’? We found sympathetic souls everywhere outside the country” (Harris & Murray-Smith Ern Malley p. 44). 45 London literature and art critic Herbert Read became involved when he supported the Ern Malley poems. Also Harris was prosecuted by the South Australian police, and eventually fined, for publishing indecent material. Some of the farcical testimony of Detective Vogelsang is recorded in Harris & MurraySmith Ern malley pp.12-13). 46 Harris distinguished between the demise of Angry Penguins and the future of Australian modernism. “Australia was now part of the ebb and flow of modernism ...The concept of modernism was being validated day by day despite McAuley and the others. The galleries were buying modernist paintings, New Directions and other foreign publications wanted the poems that were being written, including my own ... Australian modernism was taking off” (Harris & Murray-Smith Ern Malley pp.44-45). 47 Tranter & Mead, in fact, locate the origins of modern poetry in the work of Kenneth Slessor. Slessor’s last two books were published in 1939 and 1944. The latter, as they also point out, is the same year of the Ern Malley hoax (Tranter, J. and Mead, P. eds, The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1991) 21 48 Cf.: “I acclaimed a young Joycean writer, Patrick White, for his novel Happy Valley as a teenager in 1941, and got thumped by Furnley Maurice, H. M. Green and the mandarins at large for my trouble. Two decades later the academics were still at it. A decade further on they were somersaulting in hundreds to be eligible for bandwagoning, converting White from a novelist to an industry” (Harris & Murray-Smith Ern Malley pp.17-18). 49 Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life (1903) has been read as a postmodern novel. See Anastasia Anderson, ‘The Postmodern Position: A Reading of Furphy’s Such Is Life’, Imago: New Writings, 1997, v. 9, , no. 2, pp. 65–75. 50 (Croft ‘Responses to Modernism’ p. 422). This is also the reason Slessor is often thought of as modern. Cf.: “[Slessor’s poetry] for the first time in Australian poetry is a voice like some of those we hear around us from day to day ... The neon-lit urban streets filled with busy traffic and anonymous crowds, the mournful sounds of the city harbour at night – these are the modern landscapes of discontinuity and doubt” (Tranter & Mead Modern Australian Poetry: xxviii). 51 Cf.: “[T]he novels of Eleanor Dark show clearly the acclimatisation of this mode [modernism] in Australia ... Dark in this novel and The Little Company (1945) showed that the modernist tradition in the novel was as much at home in Katoomba where she lives” (Croft ‘Responses to Modernism p. 422). 52 Cf.: “Teresa Hawkins ... escapes first from the constriction of her family and then from an emotionally parasitic lover to find freedom. In this novel Stead celebrates the notion of a rite of passage – to somewhere out of the parental (or more specifically, paternal) Austraila – and like Eleanor Dark conveys both the social oppression and natural freedom of the Australian environment” (Croft ‘Responses to Modernism, p. 423). 53 For Patrick White, see for example, Chaman, A., ‘Modernism in Patrick White’s Plays – An Exercise in Synthesis’, Literary Half-Yearly, vol. 11, no.4, 1975 or Brady, V., ‘Making Things Appear: Patrick White and the Politics of Modernism’, Island, no.52, Spring, 1992. For Kenneth Slessor, see Taylor, A., Reading Australian Poetry (St.Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press 1987) or Smith, V., ‘Australian Modersnism: The Case of Kenneth Slessor’, in Reconnoitres: Essays in Australian Literature, eds Margaret Harris and Elizabeth Webby (South Melbourne, Victoria: Sydney University Press and Oxford University Press 1992). For Marjory Barnard, see Croft ‘Responses to Modernism’, p. 423. For Elizabeth Harrower, see Mansfield, N., ‘“The Only Russian in Sydney”: Modernism and Realism in The Watch Tower, Australian Literary Studies, vol.15, no.3, 1992. And for Elizabeth Jolley, see for example, Kirkby, J., ‘The Nights Belong to Elizabeth Jolley, Modernism and the SapphoErotic Imagination of Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, Meanjin, vol.43, no.4, 1984. 54 See Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The Australian Years (Melbourne: Craftsman House 1988). For Nora Simpson, see Janine Burke, Australian Women Artists,. 22 55 See Bruce James, Grace Cossington Smith (Melbourne: Craftsman House 1984). See also Lloyd Rees, ‘Roland Wakelin’s “Down the Hills to Berry bay”’, Art and Australia 17 March 1980. 56 Allen, Art in Australia p.99 57 Allen, Art in Australia p. 113 58 For Tucker’s works see James Mollison, Albert Tucker (Sydney: Macmillan 1982). For Counihan, see Bernard Smith, Noel Counihan – Artist and Revolutionary (Melbourne: Oxford University Press 1983). For Bergner, see Cecil Roth, Jewish Art (London: W.H. Allen 1961). 59 Allen, Art in Australia p. 118 60 Allen, Art in Australia p. 125 61 Allen, Art in Australia pp. 125-6 62 Allen, Art in Australia p.126 63 River in Flood with Carcass (1974-5); Shoalhaven River with Rose, Burning Book and Aeroplane (1976); Crucifixion, Shoalhaven (1979-80); and Crucifixion and Rose (197980). 64 R. Crumlin, Images of Religion in Australian Art (Sydney: Bay Books 1988) 65 Manion, M. 1988, ‘Foreword’ in CrumlinImages of Religion. 66 These include A Bush Tucker Story (Johnny Warrangula Tjupurrula 1973); Rock Wallaby Dreaming (Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri 1982); Moon Dreaming (Tommy Lowry Tjapaltjarri 1987); Wagilag Ceremony (Mathaman 1963); and Yarla Jukurrpa (Bush Potato Dreaming) (Paddy Jupurrula Nelson & Larry Jungarrayi Spencer 1986).The Thunderman, Djambuwal (Mitinari 1951); Old Man’s Dreaming on Death or Destiny (Old Mick Tjakamara 1971); Tngari Dreaming at Wilkinkarra (Anatjari Tjampitjinpa 1986); Tingari Dreaming at Marra-pintinya (Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi 1982); and Yarumayi Jukurrpa (Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan 1987). 67 See, for example, Sandra McGrath, The Artist & the River: Arthur Boyd and the Shoalhaven , Sydney: Bay Books, 1982. McGrath quoted Boyd on how the rose: “destroys like lantana”. But when he said this he was in fact referring to Shoalhaven River with Rose, Burning Book and Aeroplane which was not one of the ‘religious’ works. 68 McGrath, The Artist, p.262. 69 McGrath, The Artist, p. 272 23 70 (McGrath, The Artist, p. 254 71 A selection of Nolan’s ‘Ned Kelly’ series is available at http://www.netspace.net.au/~bradwebb/kelly5.html 72 David Malouf, Harland’s Half Acre (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin 1985), see, for example, p14; pp114–127 and pp.175–178. 73 Katharine Susannah Prichard, 'Comment on Voss and Seedtime', Overland 13, Spring: 14, 1958, p.14 74 See for example, James McAuley, ‘The Gothic Splendors: Patrick White’s Voss’, Southerly vol. 25, no. 1, 1965; G.A. Wilkes, ‘A Reading of Patrick White’s Voss’, Southerly, vol. 27, no.3, 1967; Ingmar Björksten, Patrick White, A General Introduction (St.Lucia, Queensland: University of Queenlsand Press 1976); Tacey, D. 1988, Patrick White, Fiction and the Unconscious (Melbourne: Oxford University Press). 75 See, for example, Tom Suttcliffe, 'Lost in a Great Australian Desert', The Guardian Weekly, 26 April 1987, p. 18. 76 See, for example, B. Beresford, 'Voss: The Opera', Quadrant 30, 5, 1986, pp. 6869; R. Covell, 'Exploring Changes in Voss', Sydney Morning Herald, 31 May 1986, p. 48; J. Koehne, 'Interiors/Exteriors', Age Monthly Review, 2 March 1987, pp. 1213; M. Ewans, 'Voss: White, Malouf, Meale', Meanjin 48, 3, 1989, pp. 513-525. Australian opera commentator and writer John Cargher once claimed (even after the production of Voss), that “there is no such thing as 'Australian music, let alone 'Australian opera', and there never will be". J. Cargher, Bravo! Two Hundred Years of Opera in Australia (Sydney: Macmillan, 1988) p233. 77 Allen, Art in Australia p. 105 78 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in Elaine Marks and Isabelle Courtrivon, eds., New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester 1980) p. 245 79 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” [1836] in Stephen E. Whicher, ed., Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956) p. 21 80 The Jindyworobaks were a Australian nationalist cultural movement of the late 1930s–1950s. It was begun as a club in Adelaide by Rex Ingamells. In 1938 he published an essay entitled Conditional Culture which set out the aims and ambitions of the group. It advocated Aboriginal culture as the true source of Australian culture and saw the traditional language forms of imported AngloEuropean literature as artificial and non-representative.