Wild at heart

IT is not hard to see why landscape is one of the most fundamental and perennial themes in Australian art.

IT is not hard to see why landscape is one of the most fundamental and perennial themes in Australian art.

The continent was much more alien than America, whose colonies had become independent not long before the founding of Sydney: the poor soil and unpredictable climatic conditions made farming considerably more difficult, and the native trees and plants were strange and, at first sight, unappealing.

To make matters worse, Australia was much further away than America. When the early colonists came here, they were leaving their home in the British Isles indefinitely, if not forever; when they farewelled family and friends, they knew that in many cases it was for the last time. The theme of home and inhabitation appears in the earliest art of Sydney town, but it acquires a new significance in the middle of the 19th century, when the Australian population began to grow rapidly in the wake of the gold rush. These were no longer convicts and their guards; apart from gold-rush adventurers, most of the new arrivals were now real settlers, coming out with the intention of making a new life in Australia. Even if they continued to call Britain home in a sentimental way, they and their descendants were going to remain in Australia.

This was the moment, as I argued in Art in Australia from Colonization to Postmodernism (1997), that we really had to come to terms with the idea of living in this country. Marcus Clarke famously spoke of the weirdness and melancholy of Australian nature, but acknowledged that we can end up loving this sometimes harsh and ungainly environment.

Artists naturally had an important part in re-imagining Australia as home. In the end, that process was consummated by Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, with their vision of a domesticated nature and their celebration of eucalyptus trees and brilliant sunlight. It was initiated, however, by the artists usually considered high colonial who preceded them. These artists can be considered late romantics, and the romantic conception of the sublime played a central part in dealing with the strangeness of the land, for the sublime is an aesthetic experience of what is dangerous, inhuman and even uninhabitable: the overwhelming power and scale of the ocean, of mountain peaks, of volcanoes, of the starry night are all instances of the intoxicating attraction of the sublime.

Earlier artists such as Conrad Martens and John Skinner Prout had ventured into this territory, but two of the Australian artists most associated with sublime subjects arrived here fortuitously, attracted by the gold rush in the 1850s. Eugene von Guerard, born in Vienna, and Nicholas Chevalier, born in St Petersburg of Swiss parents, are among the principal figures in Geelong Art Gallery's valuable exhibition The Silent Wilderness. Unlike the early painters of Sydney and the Heidelberg group who represented established rural life, the artists of this period sought wild and remote places well beyond the reach of the existing colonies. Some of their most remarkable pictures were made while accompanying expeditions sent out to explore the unknown hinterland of the colonies. Places that were both sublime and pristine could be imagined as secret repositories of the heart and essence of the land, just as in Europe romantic artists might seek out ancient oak forests or lonely mountain ranges. A century later, artists such as Drysdale adopted the arid outback as emblematic of some existential void in the contemporary Australian experience.

The exhibition contains a telling document in the text accompanying one of the coloured lithographs in a magnificent volume of Australian Landscapes by von Guerard (1867-68). He is describing how he and Alfred Howitt, the explorer, were the first to come upon the Moroka Falls.

"Guided by the roar of a cataract, and penetrating, with great difficulty, the woody fastnesses in which it was hidden, they at last reached that romantic spot, and experienced all the gratification which attends the first sight of a magnificent object hitherto unrevealed to human eye," he writes.

The passage is intriguing for several reasons, including the reference to the place as romantic and the quaintly Victorian way that excitement and even exaltation have been tempered by an almost prudish reserve. But the most curious thing is what is omitted: that is, the near certainty that the spot had indeed been seen by the local Aborigines.

Aboriginal figures are not omitted from the paintings in the show; on the contrary, they are ubiquitous, in striking contrast to the later Heidelberg paintings, in which they become entirely invisible. The reason for this is that, as the native dwellers in the land, they stand as clear markers against which we can estimate our own sense of being at home here. When, with the Heidelberg painters, Australian art expresses for the first and perhaps only time a sense of uncomplicated belonging, they disappear from consciousness, only to return in the less serene art of the mid-20th century.

Thomas Clark's Falls on the Wannon (c. 1860) is a good example of the role they play in the high colonial period. Although not as fine a painter as von Guerard, Clark has taken a highly original viewpoint in this picture, which makes it one of the most memorable images of the period. We look up from a cavern at some distance from the foot of the falls, so that the sky is an elliptical opening in the rock. On the lower left, several Aborigines are situated within the cave. High on the rocky ledge above, in contrast, a group of Europeans with a horse can just be made out. In reality, as the exhibition's curator Lisa Sullivan points out, the site was already a well-known beauty spot; but Clark imagines it, in the spirit of the passage quoted from von Guerard, as though at the moment of its first discovery.

Not only the presence but the presentation of Aboriginal figures is significant in the pictures of this generation. Thus in von Guerard's painting The Weatherboard Falls (1863) -- today called Wentworth Falls -- an Aborigine stands on a rocky ledge as though a witness to the sublime spectacle, or perhaps rather as part of it. The difference is tellingly brought out by the juxtaposition of J.H. Carse's picture of the same subject in 1876.

Carse is a far less able painter than von Guerard, and large areas of the view are consigned to a vagueness that is meant to signify mist; profiled against this and on an even more perilously projecting spur of rock stands another Aborigine, only this time he is pointing at the waterfall. Two of his companions, nearby, are in conversation, one of them pointing back to the view behind him. Looking at these two paintings side by side, you see that von Guerard understood something that escaped Carse: the Aborigines don't look at waterfalls and discourse about views; they are simply one with them.

The point is, if anything, reinforced by the lithographic version of von Guerard's picture a few years later, in 1867-68. Here the Aborigine is replaced by two Europeans, and one of them, of course, is pointing at the waterfall, evidently extolling its beauties to his companion. But why the substitution? I would suggest it is primarily a matter of genre. A lithograph is almost a form of journalism and addresses the viewer as an invitation to visit the site personally. The oil painting, however, is a serious landscape, and in that context the figure of what would be thought of as a noble savage is a more elevated motif and prompts the mind to meditate on our place in this land, rather than simply to plan a day trip.

Light is always important to the landscape painter, since whether painting from a particular site or composing a fictional landscape in the studio, the artist must have a very clear idea of the source of light, the conditions of clarity or cloudiness, and the time of day. We may be unsure whether a particular picture represents a morning or afternoon scene, especially in reproductions that are always inadequate, but the painter must know exactly what he intends.

The treatment of light unifies the picture, structures it and gives it expression. The biggest picture in the exhibition is Chevalier's Parker River Waterfall (1862), which makes a powerful impression on the right as you enter. Chevalier's picture evokes dawn light falling at a low angle on the waters of the cascade and the rocks and trees opposite. A golden glow plays over the surface of the water, but it is a bit overdone; perhaps Chevalier was pandering to what he felt was a lack of refinement in his audience, but the picture is spoilt by a quality that vitiates art of any period: preferring effect to truth.

There is a smaller and far more sensitive picture by Chevalier (who can show true brilliance in his plein-air oil sketches), Cumberland Creek near Apollo Bay (1863). Here, low morning light comes in from the left, casting the left bank of the creek into shadow and bathing the cliffs and rocks opposite in fresh brightness. At first sight we are aware only of the evocative and expressive use of light, but in fact this picture is a fine example of the way light and shade give pictorial and tonal structure to a view.

It also shows why landscape painters generally prefer morning or afternoon light, which give shadow and form; at midday the light is too strong and too high. The Heidelberg painters made a conscious, if almost paradoxical, decision to confront the midday sun, because they felt this was something like a symbol of the challenge of living in Australia; but even they often resorted to more congenial lighting states.

The strangest and most uncanny landscape in the exhibition is W.C. Piguenit's A Mountain Top, Tasmania (1886), a view across a lake towards a row of monstrous columnar rocks rising up against brilliant white clouds; this is a picture that must record the encounter with a breathtaking but disturbing and -- to use Clarke's term -- weird spectacle.

It is as though the artist, venturing into ever more remote wilderness in search of the mystical spirit of the land, has come upon the heart of darkness.