Review, Belonging at the National Gallery of Australia

A new exhibition tells the story of Australia’s history through a different perspective.

Detail: Mervyn Bishop’s Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hands of traditional land owner Vincent Lingiari, Northern Territory, 1975. © Mervyn Bishop / Courtesy Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney

The quest for an objective and impartial account of history is often considered today as illusory, if not disingenuous. Consciously or unconsciously, it is said, these accounts are permeated with ideology and embody the world-view of the winners or of those in power. There is some truth in this line of argument, but it can be as fallacious and self-serving as the accounts it sets out to criticise, and can undermine any basis for deciding between competing narratives.

The real difficulty in achieving objectivity is that very few people want impartial history. Different interest groups seek to impose their own version, in which they are good and their opponents bad. The dispassionate attempt to discover and describe what actually happened and why it happened in this way is lost in the contest between ideologically and morally charged arguments over the morality of the events. Nuanced analysis is replaced by straw men and caricatures.

We have less difficulty with cases that are more remote either in time or place. We can, for example, debate the rights and wrongs of Napoleon’s military campaigns and conquests, and the terrible loss of life that they entailed, but it is also possible for the historian to consider dispassionately the enormous changes that he brought about in Europe, from the destruction of the Republic of Venice to the introduction of new legal codes and innovative models of education and administration.

Similarly, we can admire Julius Caesar’s extraordinary personal courage and military genius – as well as his cool and understated style as a writer, which seems to match his coolness in the face of battle – without forgetting the dubious moral justification of his invasion of Gaul or the terrible death toll of these campaigns, too. In a sophisticated view of history, we should seek to establish the facts as accurately as possible, employing sympathy and imagination to understand the outlooks of all the parties involved and deferring judgment. Above all we need to distinguish our own moral views from those that were current in the past, for the morality of an individual, like the legality of an action, can only be assessed in relation to standards prevailing at the time.

Today, however, such subtleties are often ignored in our rush to judgment, especially in any matter connected with gender or race. We have seen this recently with our anxieties about celebrating the great explorers and mariners who opened up the world between the late 15th and the late 18th centuries. In a mature assessment, we should be able to admire their personal qualities – or in some cases deplore them – appreciate the importance of their contributions to scientific knowledge, and also acknowledge that their voyages had deep and sometimes terrible consequences for the peoples they encountered.

The way to a balanced understanding of complex events like these is to start by separating these various strands, and then to give each one due attention without allowing one to obliterate or distort the others. In the past, no doubt, heroic narratives of exploration and discovery tended to overshadow an appreciation of the cultures of the peoples encountered, as well as the impact of encounter and subsequent colonisation. Today it is obsession with alternative narratives of oppression and dispossession that obscures the understanding of these great voyages. The problem is allowing either triumphalism or guilt to dominate the story; both are ultimately forms of self-indulgence.

In Australia, our national history has alternated between triumphalism, obliviousness, guilt and hypocrisy. It seems hard for us to find the right balance between admiring the courage and endurance of our colonial settlers, recognising the crimes that some of them committed, and acknowledging the dispossession and suffering of the Indigenous peoples that accompanied the process of settlement. It is also difficult to appreciate the skill and ingenuity that allowed the Aborigines to survive in this difficult continent for millennia, while admitting that none of us would want to live in a preliterate society, killing our own food every day, in a society governed by rigid, complex and sexually segregated social customs.

It is with such issues in mind that one needs to approach the National Gallery of Australia’s new hanging of its 19th century Australian collections. The first impression is that the curators have allowed guilt to bleed into the display, especially near the beginning with a few less than subtle contemporary works. On closer inspection, the display is more sensitive: in some parts successful, with enlightening and suggestive juxtapositions, in other cases rather more heavy-handed or inept.

One of the most interesting cases is the woven figure of a female water-spirit – dangerous creatures that lure young men to their death – above John Glover’s painting of Diana and Actaeon, a very rare example of a classical myth in the artist’s oeuvre, in which he has cast Aboriginal figures as Actaeon, on the left, and as the swimming Diana and her nymphs on the right. The work has a particular pathos in the way that it uses Indigenous figures in the roles of a canonic myth, but at a period when the last of the Tasmanian Aborigines had already been transferred to Flinders Island. But the juxtaposition of the two works is suggestive, because it brings together two myths of dangerous and enchanted waters from very different cultures.

Paintings by Augustus Earle and Eugene von Guerard are surrounded by contemporary Aboriginal artefacts including shields and weapons, which is relevant to the time, particularly in view of the significance of Indigenous figures in the art of the colonial period. These artists were not only well aware of the presence of Aboriginal inhabitants in the country they painted, but often include them in their works, both as a kind of index against which they could estimate the colonists’ sense of being at home in the landscape, and as reflections on their own destiny.

Oddly, however, a large and rather Tuckson-like painting is hung next to Earle’s A Bivouac of Travellers in Australia in a Cabbage-tree Forest, Day Break, based on a sketch he made while taking part on an exploratory journey through the Illawarra in 1827, although the oil painting was finished a decade later in London. The central Aboriginal figure in this picture is very important, and it would be far more useful to hang the original watercolour beside the painting: for this would show how struck the artist had been at the time by the figure of their Aboriginal guide, but also how much he has changed him and made him grander and more imposing in the final work, to fit a certain conception of the noble savage.

Earle’s work offers fascinating examples of how the depiction of the Indigenous population could vary according to the genre and register of the work in hand: thus in the nearby picture of Wentworth Falls, he represents himself about to draw an Aboriginal warrior, posed as a noble figure against the sublime motif of the waterfall; yet in a more realistic vein he also painted the portrait of Bungaree, poised between dignity and pathos.

The cluster of works around Alexander Schramm’s big painting, Adelaide, a Tribe of Natives on the Banks of the River Torrens (1850) is particularly successful: it includes a painted shield, two wax profiles of Aboriginal figures by Theresa Walker (c. 1840), two lithographs from George French Angas’s South Australia Illustrated (1847), illustrating mainly Indigenous tools and weapons, and a photograph in a slightly later book. The materials in this grouping are useful and mutually illuminating because they are all from the same place and approximately the same time, whereas elsewhere the juxtaposition of works from very different times and places can be jarring.

Perhaps the most bizarre conjunction is of Streeton and Roberts with several Western Desert paintings from Papunya in the 1970s and 1980s: these pictures are almost a century later, and arise from a landscape that had nothing in common with the one that the Heidelberg painters were looking at. There is some attempt to suggest that they are both about relations with the land and the environment, but that too is misleading, for one takes that relationship for granted while the other is trying to imagine and create a way of dwelling in a new world; and one is impersonal and anonymous while the other is personal, subjective and one might say ethical.

But it is admittedly harder to integrate the Aboriginal presence into a display of the Heidelberg period, the art of the last two decades of the 19th century. This is a time when, as I observed long ago, the self-confidence of settler society grows and awareness of the Aborigines correspondingly diminishes; they were ubiquitous in colonial art, but then they seem to fade into the background until after WWII, when they return in the art of Drysdale and Boyd. Even the Mickey of Ulladulla drawings (c. 1888) fit rather awkwardly into the hanging – although one in particular has a vivid image of a sawmill, like something seen at night, with figures profiled against artificial light.

The juxtapositions of furniture and craft work with the pictures generally work well, from the magnificent colonial cedar sofa from Tasmania that sits below Glover’s view of his own house in its idyllic parklike property, to the profusion of fern-inspired silverware and pottery that accompanies von Guerard’s famous painting of Ferntree Gully (1857). There are numerous contemporary photographs of ferns as well, and a cedar chest of drawers that has been decorated with decorative designs stencilled from dried and pressed fronds.

Clusters of pictures are generally sensitively grouped, as is the case with the selection of 9 x 5in panels and the three small but very fine paintings by Roberts, including the beautiful little A Quiet Day on Darebin Creek, which he painted on his return to Australia in 1885, with a small study of the bush by Frederick McCubbin.

The curators have made an effort to discover the Aboriginal names for all the places that are represented in the pictures or referred to in the captions and labels. In itself this is a good thing, and indeed it is fascinating to learn some of these original toponyms and their meanings. But it becomes intrusive and painfully tendentious to put such a word in front of the accepted English names every time they are used. And it is also fundamentally inaccurate. For if Warrang was indeed an Aboriginal name for some locality around the vast area that is now Sydney, it was in no sense the original name of the city, which was entirely the creation of the colonial settlers. And thus what was no doubt intended as an effort to restore forgotten truth becomes misguided and even mendacious.

Belonging, National Gallery of Australia, ongoing.

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PUBLIC WORKS

For more than 10 years Natasha Bieniek has been creating richly detailed, miniature paintings, inspired by the 16th century French and English tradition of miniature portraits. But although she is influenced by this historical tradition, she feels that working on such a small scale is truly relevant to modern times.

For Bieniek, her work is about pulling together the past and the present and finding the nexus between the two. “As a culture we are constantly glued to our iPhones and other devices and they are essentially miniatures in the way that we see images daily,” she has explained.

Her work is painstaking and laborious, and she can take about six weeks to finish a painting. She works in such a small scale because she is interested in the relationship between the viewer and the painting.

“Because the work is so small you do have to get up close to view it accurately, which is creating this one-on-one relationship with the viewer, and also unavoidable intimacy.”

Bieniek, who is based in Melbourne, is known for both her portraits and her landscapes. She has won the Portia Geach Memorial Award, the Wynne Prize, and has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize numerous times. In 2015, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Warrnambool Botanic Gardens in southwestern Victoria, the Warrnambool Art Gallery commissioned her to paint a scene from the gardens.

For Bieniek, it was “the perfect project”, because she is interested in the way people relate to nature, particularly in an urban or inner-city context. The work can be viewed online, along with an essay, at www.thewag.com.au/story/natasha-bieniek.

Natasha Bieniek, Warrnambool Botanic Gardens, 2016

At the Warrnambool Art Gallery, director Vanessa Gerrans says Bieniek’s painting is “a wonderful addition” to the collection. “Natasha’s work brings together the essence of miniature, fine detail and modernity. It encapsulates so much of the Warrnambool legacy, not only the vista of our Botanic Gardens designed by William Guilfoyle, but also the brushstrokes of colonial painter Eugene von Guerard in Tower Hill (1855).”

Gerrans says she “was captivated by Natasha’s work on Dibond sheets, a very modern material, about the size of an iPhone screen, because it draws you deeply into the work and captures your attention as you discover the meticulous detail”.

To create the piece, Bieniek spent two days wandering the Warrnambool Botanic Gardens looking for the right location and aspect. “She endured wild weather and sheltered from hailstorms in the rotunda,” Gerrans says. “Finally, she settled on this view across the water to the monumental trees and palms waving around the bridge. Her use of colour is rich and verdant as she portrays the quiet sensory nature of the gardens, their movement and strength through this vista.”

Materials: oil on Dibond panel
Dimensions: 9 x 9cm

Bronwyn Watson

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SALEROOM

The Wimmera, a district of western Victoria, is wheat country known for its flat landscape. In the late 1940s, Arthur Boyd first visited the area with his friend, poet Jack Stephenson, and painted the country near the Wimmera River. He then exhibited the paintings at the David Jones Gallery, in Sydney in 1950, and both the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired works for their collections. Boyd’s first visit to the Wimmera is considered one of his defining moments because he continued to paint it over the following decades. One of Boyd’s paintings of that sparse landscape, titled Wimmera, was the top sale at a recent Shapiro auction of Australian and international art. It sold for $92,400 (including buyer’s premium). The second top sale was a work by one of Australia’s foremost sculptors, Robert Klippel. The bronze sculpture, titled Optus 456, from 1982, fetched $69,600. Other notable sales included Margaret Olley’s oil on board, The Sitting Room, Afternoon, 2004, which sold for $55,200, and David Hockney’s etching and aquatint, Two Vases in the Louvre, 1974, which fetched $48,000. Full results at www.shapiro.com.au

Bronwyn Watson