At last, Britons can see the big picture of this harsh, huge land

VISITORS to the UK show of Australian art may have surprises in store.

The Drover's Wife

MANY years ago, flying into London, I was asked by the immigration officer about the purpose of my visit. I said I was visiting my publishers about a book. He inquired about the subject, and when I said it was Australian art, he answered without missing a beat: "That would be a slim volume then, sir."

His instinctive reaction was too funny to be annoying, but I did notice that it was a common one among the less educated classes in Britain. Two hundred years ago, Charles Lamb, writing to a friend in Sydney, could joke that thieving must be our national profession; British attitudes have evolved since then, and there has even been a tendency for the past half-century, from Kenneth Clark to Peter Fuller, to consider Australian modernists such as Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd as part of an expanded canon of British painting.

The history of Australian art, however, has not been properly understood or even adequately shown in Britain until now. This is partly our fault, because even in Australia the first comprehensive historical work, by Bernard Smith, dates back a little more than 50 years, and it was not until the latter part of the 20th century that the importance of our colonial artists was fully appreciated. The stubbornest and laziest myth about painting in Australia is that no one looked at the environment properly before Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, and this long justified the neglect of their predecessors. The most scholarly monographic exhibitions on John Glover and Eugene von Guerard - both represented by masterpieces in Australia, now showing at the Royal Academy in London - belong to the past few years.

FULL LIST: Artworks in Royal Academy show, Australia

As to the selection of the works, it is inevitably questionable in some areas, even in the earlier periods, but it naturally becomes increasingly shaky as we get closer to the present. One may ask why there are so many works by Nolan compared with some other important modernists. In the most recent period, the selection appears frequently arbitrary and guided by fashion rather than judgment: why include Danie Mellor or Kathy Temin - especially while leaving out an artist of the calibre of Rick Amor, who also has much more of substance to say about the experience of Australia?

The London exhibition seems to have used Nolan's Ned Kelly prominently in its promotional campaign. But Nolan's bushranger is more complicated than the kitsch image of the outlaw widely popular in Australia: he is crossed with TS Eliot's figure of the hollow man - the helmet is empty - and has become the paradoxical and inverted heir to the honest settlers celebrated by Roberts and Streeton, whose Golden Summer is also on display.

But Australian art is almost always tinged with melancholy - Glover's most famous pictures are rare exceptions - reflecting an enduring sentiment of loneliness and isolation.

The note is subdued in Roberts and Streeton, in works that celebrate themes of labour and settlement or find in the brilliance of Australian light a symbol of the harshness of the environment that we must confront in order to live here. But tragedy is the subject of Streeton's Fire's on, and a sense of loss is pervasive in Frederick McCubbin, represented by his famous picture of a little girl in the bush - the lost child was a colonial nightmare - as well as his impressive triptych The Pioneer, which celebrates the transformation of urban proletarians into nation-building settlers, but also reflects on the way an ungrateful society forgets its founding fathers.

Melancholy is common in the works of the modernists already known in England - taciturn in Drysdale, anguished in Boyd - but it also runs through the painting of Fred Williams as through that of Imants Tillers or Bill Henson or Jeffrey Smart. The inclusion of Aboriginal artists in this context emphasises the contrast between a culture that was inseparable from the land and our own more complicated relationship with an adopted environment.

But I have always thought that the exceptional remoteness of Australia and the unfamiliarity of the environment have bred a regional art more unusual and more independent than that of most European colonial offshoots. And British audiences, accustomed to thinking of Australians as boisterous and rather superficial, may be surprised by the depth and introspection they discover here.