by Doug Munro
politics more readily. Such a process reflects the organiser’s insight into
the need to ‘involve’ prospective members and make them complicit in
the challenging and changing of their own ideas. It also echoes the sort
of pedagogical strategy an effective teacher might use. Another notable
dimension to Samuel’s thinking revealed by this anecdote is that this
process had an impact on him, too. He became ‘a little bit labour’, as he
had become ‘a little bit liberal’ through his other activities. In the intensity
of this learning process he was, therefore, not fully in control but also
subject to having his own mindset challenged and changed.
Up until the age of 22, Samuel was a committed communist activist
devoted to the party and convinced that his future lay in service to the
cause. In 1956, the year of his graduation from Oxford with a first-
class degree, this all-encompassing world was shattered. It received its
first major blow following Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about the
71 Samuel later commented that these were ‘extremely intense male friendships’ sharing similarities with ‘heterosexual relationships and jealousies’. Harrison, ‘Interview with Raphael Samuel’,
20 October 1987.
72 Harrison, ‘Interview with Raphael Samuel’, 18 September 1987.
73 Harrison, ‘Interview with Raphael Samuel’, 20 October 1987.
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CLIo'S LIvES
brutalities of Stalinism in the spring of that year. It was brought under
further pressure by the refusal of the CPGB to permit open discussion
amongst the membership or countenance internal reform amongst
its own managerial infrastructure. The final straw came in the wake of
the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising in November and the
CPGB’s continued lack of decisive response. Shortly after this, Samuel,
along with many other prominent members, left the party. Yet, although
detached from the party, and increasingly disillusioned with the idea
of political leadership, he did not abandon the sort of political work or
values that had characterised his youth, rather he now turned to them all
the more fulsomely. Looking back at that time, he explained: ‘I really was
an organizer and believed in organization and believed really in discipline,
I suppose, and it was a belief in unity and above all … I … believed in
being positive.’74 Within a fortnight of leaving the party, he became the
prime moving force behind the journal Universities and Left Review, part
of a fledgling New Left movement, and subsequently an organising force
for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the New Left club network
and the inspired but ill-fated Partisan cafe. In this sense, as Hobsbawm,
his former party comrade, would fondly recall, Samuel truly was an
‘ingrained activist’.75
Samuel’s youth provided an important crucible for both his intellectual
interests and practices. As a young communist activist, growing up against
the backdrop provided by the switch to popular front communism, his
political work was practical and people-centred rather than primarily
theoretical in nature. It aimed at engaging with and involving a range of
people from both inside but also from outside of the party membership
in political activity. For this, it was necessary to draw on a capacity to
empathise and to consciously make use of his persona as a political tool.
Outside of the formal CPGB policy position, this was further reinforced
by the complexities provided by his wider social-cultural positioning,
a Jewish family in English society, an only child surrounded by adults.
He had always to work hard in order to gain a hearing; aware and sensitive
to cultural differences, he could take nothing for granted. His aspiration to
the specific party role of the organiser further reinforced this, developing
in him ever more sophisticated analytical and communicative abilities.
Whilst the roles of activist and organiser were, in the first place, embedded
74 Ibid.
75 Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 212.
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8 . AN INGRAINED ACTIvIST
within the explicit context of the party and attached to a specific political
agenda, they nevertheless imprinted upon him an important set of deep-
rooted intellectual values and skills based around a capacity to both
understand people outside of his own immediate sociocultural group and,
as a result of this deeply personalised approach, to effectively engage with,
even challenge, their existing ideas and, in the process, his own.
Recognising this distinctive form of applied intelligence not only restores
to Samuel a greater sense of his complexity as an individual thinker, it also
provides a valuable insight into the kind of person-centred, direct-action
politics that he, through the Workshop, came to most exemplify. This
suggests the need to reconsider the significance of the Workshop’s political,
pedagogical and historiographical agenda. The deeply contextualised and
personalised nature of this form of intelligence also demonstrates the
importance of applying a biographical approach to this sort of thinker.
The great power of the organiser, particularly a communist one at the
height of the Cold War, was the ability to work subtle transformations
‘unseen and unheard’. It is only through close examination of the
individual, situated within their network of relationships and acting in
response to specific contexts, that its effects and implications can, even
partially, be discerned.
The significance of engaging with different forms of intellectual skill and
work lies not only in gaining a better understanding of individual figures
such as Samuel but has significant implications for intellectual history
more generally. Thinking is a fundamentally social activity that goes
beyond the reading of particular text and occurs across a whole cross-
section of communicative practices, many of which occur through direct
person-to-person interactions. The potent transformative power of the
personal relationship may leave little trace on the documentary record
but, as Rowbotham suggested (quoted above), it can also linger longer in
oral memory having, in the end, a deeper and more enduring effect on the
individual or individuals who encounter it.
197
9
Pursuing the Antipodean:
Bernard Smith, Identity
and History
Sheridan Palmer
Identity mattered to Bernard Smith, probably more than for most people.
As an illegitimate child and a fostered ward of the state, anonymity had
haunted him, but it also drove his ambitions. By using these two opposing
structures as tension rods, identity and anonymity, he sought validation
through his work and recognition as an art and cultural historian.
His revision of Australia’s modern cultural evolution, written from
a fiercely independent position, was based around colonial inheritance,
cultural traffic and transformation, but it was also intended to shake up
an ‘uncritical culture’ and situate it in a more conspicuous international
position. Fro
m the mid-1940s, his historiography became the benchmark
for scholars and artists in their pursuit of, or argument with, Antipodean
identity and cultural autonomy, and this chapter seeks to explain why
Bernard Smith’s rethinking of antipodeanism – a term he coined – and
his aim to legitimate Australian culture within a globalised postwar world
was a pioneering and brilliant study of cultural origins and evolution;
at a personal level it reflected his own genesis.
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CLIo'S LIvES
‘To understand Australia one must look
elsewhere’1
Writing to his friend Lindsay Gordon in 1948, Bernard Smith stated:
I am becoming convinced that the conceptions of … Utopia, and ‘working
man’s paradise’ in the Southern Land is one of the central historical ideas
running through Australian literature, art and politics. It is perhaps
the myth-making of the voyager and the emigrant … another aspect
of Illusion and Reality.2
Bernard Smith, 1948 passport photo
Source: Bernard Smith Papers, National Library of Australia .
1 Noel McLachlan, ‘Godzone: The Australian Intellectual’, Meanjin (Melbourne), 26:1 (1967), 6.
2 Bernard Smith to Lindsay Gordon, 23 November 1948, Bernard Smith Papers, National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), Acc. 10.088, Box 19.
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9 . PuRSuING THE ANTIPoDEAN
At the time, Smith was one of Australia’s up-and-coming young
intellectuals and had arrived in London on a British Council scholarship
to study at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
His research project was a comparative survey of the origins of Australian
art with that of British painting and architecture between 1788 and 1835,
and to consider in greater detail the impact of the British on the South
Pacific. He had already commenced this with his acclaimed analysis of
Australia’s sociocultural evolution from colonial settlement to 1945 in
his first book, Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since
1788. His area of research, however, was a relatively new field of enquiry,
especially the impact of British imperialism in the Pacific and colonial
settlement in the Antipodes, but his academic approach to the subject
would prove significant on several counts. First, his meticulously incisive,
polemical nature would evaluate British material from an Australian
perspective, and second, he possessed an acute sense of identity as an
outsider.
On his first meeting with Anthony Blunt, the director of the Courtauld
Institute, Smith was taken aback by the Englishman’s cultural superiority,
conspicuous class-consciousness and the inference that Australia was
subcultural; a hangover, he assumed, of a postcolonial mentality. Later,
he discovered a letter that Blunt had written to John Summerson, the
director of the Sir John Soane Museum at Lincoln Inn Fields, which
proved his reaction had not been unfounded: ‘This is to introduce
Mr Bernard Smith from Australia, who has been hitherto working on
the early phase of painting in and of Australia with remarkable results
(contrary to the expectations aroused by the subject).’3 What Smith
did not know was that Blunt’s private life was in complete turmoil and
his ‘chilling elegance’ a mask for his personal and political alienation.4
Nevertheless, Blunt’s condescending and patronising manner made
him feel like a ‘mere colonial, a modern Antipodean’ and it reinforced
his perception that England was a self-absorbed nation. Historian Perry
Anderson has defined this as a country that possesses a cultural tradition
with an ‘absent centre’. England, he wrote, ‘may be defined as the European
country which – uniquely – never produced either classical sociology or
3 Anthony Blunt to John Summerson, 19 October 1949 (copy), Bernard Smith Papers, NLA,
MS 8680, Acc. 10.088, Box 33.
4 Smith later claimed that Blunt may have known about his communist affiliation and that MI5
were monitoring his movements and, given Blunt’s undercover activity as a spy, it is understandable he would have been nervous about Smith’s presence.
201
CLIo'S LIvES
national Marxism … [It] was never challenged as a whole from within’.5
In this context, Bernard Smith would use his encounter with Blunt and
other elitist Englishmen as a tuning fork to understand British hegemony
both in its historical and modern form. Moreover, Smith’s encounter with
Blunt made him look at himself and what it meant to be Antipodean in
the world, and to resituate it politically, culturally and globally.
Fortunately for Bernard Smith, Anthony Blunt moved him from the
Courtauld Institute to that ‘republic of learning’ the Warburg Institute,
where he studied under some of Europe’s most brilliant scholars, most
of whom were exiled from Hitler’s Germany.6 Under their guidance, he
delved deep into British archives and libraries looking at some of the
earliest material on the southern hemisphere and how Terra Australis
Incognita had first been perceived – what he described as the upside-
down long view of historical reconstruction. Smith also realised how
profoundly the mythological memory had permeated history, and was
reminded of his friend Lindsay Gordon’s parting words: ‘Somewhere in
the primitive deep of the mind and the ritual of fare-welling ships there is
something of [the] birth image mixed up with the hint of Styx.’7 Myths,
symbols and utopian or renewal concepts had imaginatively interlaced
history since ancient time, and the publication of mappa mundi, especially
from the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was integral to the
perception of Terra incognita.8 Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, published in
1627, was an imaginative construction and a travel fantasy concerning
a new utopia in the Pacific Ocean, which influenced thinkers such as
the French Encyclopaedists, Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx as a model
for renovating scientific, moral and social laws.9 Indeed, Bacon’s fictional
‘Salomon House’ became an institutional model for the Royal Society
founded in 1660, which in turn influenced numerous other academies.10
5 Perry Anderson, quoted in Lesley Johnson, The Cultural Critics: From Matthew Arnold
to Raymond Williams (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 12.
6 Blunt told Bernard that he could not read an Honours course at the Courtauld Institute as he had not completed an undergraduate degree nor was his subject compatible to the Courtauld
Institute’s research program.
7 Lindsay Gordon to Bernard Smith, 7 September 1948, Bernard Smith Papers, NLA, Acc.
10.088, Box 19.
8 See Bronwen Douglas, ‘ Terra Australis to Oceania: Racial Geography in the “Fifth Part of the World”’, Journal of Pacific History, 45:2 (2010), 179–210, doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2010.501696.
9 Bronwen Price, ed., Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 14–16.
10 Ibid., 15.
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9 . PuRSuING THE ANTIPoDEAN
Other sources included Robert Burton’s ‘ideal kingdom’: ‘it may be in
Terra Australis Incognita … perhaps
under the Equator, that paradise
of the world … the longitude for some reason I will conceal’.11
But it was perhaps Linnaeus’s system of identification and classification
that had significant implications for the New World. In a recent study
of race and nationalism David Bindman noted that:
Linnaeus offered a classification of humanity, based upon the Four
Continents or Four Quarters of the Earth and the Four Temperaments
associated with each … add[ing] a number of other categories, including
the Wild Man and various forms of monster. The fourfold division was
compatible with the idea of a lost primeval unity, the Judaeo-Christian
Garden of Eden.12
Such diversification of geographica led men of science, theology and
exploration during the Enlightenment to expect in the unknown fifth
part of the world, ‘human variety as on a scale of savagery to civilization,
contingent on climate and environment’.13 This literature was fundamental
for Bernard Smith’s understanding of how European artists, explorers
and settlers imagined and visualised the landscape and inhabitants of
the South Pacific during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and
which as he discovered, still persisted in postwar England. Australia, it
seemed, had retained its mythical status amongst educated Englishmen
such as Anthony Blunt and Sir Kenneth Clark, even if it was for the
sake of rarefied amusement. But as Edward Said later argued, ‘Men have
always divided the world up into regions having either real or imagined
distinction from each other’.14
As Bernard Smith uncovered a plethora of drawings, paintings, objects
and specimens of flora and fauna, much of which lay hidden in museums
and collectors’ cabinets since it had been deposited during the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, he realised how much the sheer variation
of species would have stupefied both learned and lay people and led them
11 O.H.K. Spate, ‘The Pacific: Home of Utopias’, in Eugene Kamenka, ed., Utopias (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987), 23.
12 David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (London: Reaktion Books and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2002), 17.