Clio's Lives
Page 33
13 Ibid.
14 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 39.
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to believe they had ‘gradually complete[d] the picture of the universe as
a vast ordered chain of being’. The Antipodes had ‘open[ed] a new road
to the science of man’, or, as Ernst Cassirer put it:
the motto, ‘Back to Nature’ [could] be heard everywhere, in inexhaustible
variations. Descriptions of the customs of primitive peoples were eagerly
snatched up; there was a mounting urge to acquire a wider view of primitive
forms of life … Diderot made a report of Bougainville on his trip to the
South Seas his starting point for celebrating with lyrical exaggeration the
simplicity, the innocence, and the happiness of primitive peoples.15
Shortly after commencing his research, Smith received an invitation to
join a large project on the art of Cook’s voyages. The New Zealand scholar
Dr J.C. Beaglehole, who was working on an edition of Cook’s Journals for
the Hakluyt Society, wrote to him:
Very interesting to me as we have been paddling around in NZ with the
idea of the European trained eye impacted upon by Polynesian appearance
and I should welcome extremely a treatment of the subject by one who
has really made a study of it as you have. Also I am looking forward to
your impressions of all the Cook stuff.16
The ‘Cook stuff’ consisted of some 3,000 material objects, journals and
descriptive works of art, much of which had rarely been seen. Bernard
Smith later admitted that ‘none of us had the faintest idea of the scale of
the task involved … [and it] determined much of my subsequent scholarly
life … [and] also directed my Warburg research’.17
This material, which Smith had to catalogue, was considered ‘low art’
– apart from finished oil paintings by the professionally trained artist
William Hodges – and belonged to ethnographic studies and natural
history. For Bernard Smith, however, the attraction to early colonial or
exploration art was twofold: it bridged the trained scientific eye with visual
descriptions often made in situ by trained naturalists or untrained artists,
and, importantly, it showed the origins of contact, exchange and cultural
convergence. While his research demanded a comprehensive analysis
of history, from scientific and botanical discoveries to philosophies of
identity, politics, social and power relations, it was the art of topography,
15 Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau (Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press, 1963), 49.
16 J.C. Beaglehole to Bernard Smith, 6 April 1950, Bernard Smith Papers, NLA, Acc 10.088, Box 4.
17 Bernard Smith to Doug Munro, 6 April 2000 (copy provided to author by Doug Munro).
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botany and ethnography, or that which depicted the noble or ignoble
natives that excited him. The intricate and superbly drawn flora and the
crude realism or unsophisticated drawings and portraits of indigenous
peoples provided a more accurate and comprehensive procession of
discovery, and revealed the local agencies of encounter between nativism
and imperialism, between ‘the colonised and the colonisers’.
Moreover, Smith found this type of art far more valuable than ‘high art’ or
the romantic landscapes and grand history paintings finished in the artist’s
studio for an elite audience such as the Royal Academy, where fashionable
style was preferable to truth. ‘Low art’ provided information, and for
Smith ‘there was no embarrassment to look at [it]’.18 This statement
discloses his working-class background and Marxist beliefs, in that art
should possess a social consciousness or combine a utopian aesthetic
within its cultural production. As he put it, Marxism gave him a ‘dislike
for any kind of elitist attitude to a subject’.19
An excellent example of ‘low art’ is the sketch titled ‘First Contact’,
originally thought to be by Sir Joseph Banks but more recently identified
as being drawn by a young Ra‘iatean native called Tupaia, who sailed on
Cook’s first voyage in 1768.20 It is an extraordinary work of innocent
vision and depicts the face of British imperialism as it engages with the
exotic – a naval officer bartering a crayfish with a Māori. Indeed, it was
this type of naive drawing that best encapsulates one of Bernard Smith’s
most important historical tropes, that of the ‘revision of territorialism,
possession and ownership as seen through the dramatic acquisition of the
exotic as a potential commodity’.21
18 Bernard Smith, interviewed by Neville Meaney, 6 November 1986, NLA, Oral History
Programme, TRC 2053/17.
19 Ibid.
20 Harold B. Carter identified Tupaia as the artist in April 1997 from a letter written by Banks in 1812 to Dawson Turner, a Fellow of the Royal Society. See Keith Vincent Smith, ‘Tupaia’s
sketchbook’, Electronic British Library Journal, 2005, www.bl.uk/eblj/2005articles/articles.html, in
which he quotes Banks’s letter: ‘Tupaia the Indian who came with me from Otaheite Learnd to draw in a way not Quite unintelligible[.] The genius for Caricature which all wild people Possess Led him to Caricature me & he drew me with a nail in my hand delivering it to an Indian who sold me a Lobster but with my other hand I had a firm fist on the Lobster determined not to Quit the nail till I had Livery and Seizin of the article purchased.’
21 Sheridan Palmer, Hegel’s Owl: The Life of Bernard Smith (Sydney: Power Publications, 2016), 122. This chapter draws extensively upon this biography.
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But Bernard Smith did not intend to analyse Australia ‘as a geographer
might … in terms of physical structure and climate, nor yet purely in
terms of literature and art, but something between the two’.22 Synthesising
complex ideas and finding interdisciplinary connections and overarching
narratives reflected his pluralist methodology, but it also revealed his skill
in locating interstices. The focus on art as a recording tool of the binary
manifestations of science and nature, the empirical and the romantic, also
repositioned the role of the artist as primary witness and descriptor of
historical events and things that had never before been seen. This lifted the
art of exploration out of its narrow confines towards a new visual plateau
in which ‘witness’ art illuminated the root of contact with the exotic and
unknown. It was an extraordinary lens through which the geopolitics of
imperialism, identity and cultural convergence could be more thoroughly
contextualised. Even James Cook and Joseph Banks had insisted that ‘the
drawings made on the voyages would provide a better idea of the matter
under discussion than their own words’.23 The philosopher Emmanuel
Levinas also believed that ‘[t]he judgement of history is set forth in the
visible. Historical events are the visible par excellence; their truth is
produced in evidence’.24 Between this descriptive ‘low art’ and literature
on imperial exploration, Bernard Smith was able to conceptualise how the
idea of a ‘working man’s paradise’, or a new society in the great southern
con
tinent was envisaged.
One of Britain’s most influential patrons and wealthy young ‘experimental
gentlemen’, who helped determine the future of New Holland, was
Joseph Banks. He accompanied Cook on his first voyage in 1768 and
his advice that Terra Australis could become ‘a food basket for both Great
Britain’s and Europe’s immigrants, convicts and her “redundant poor”’
was heeded by the House of Commons in the late 1770s.25 It was pivotal
to the colonising of New South Wales as well as relieving pressure on
England’s penitentiary problems and burgeoning population. As Smith
noted, Australia:
22 Bernard Smith, ‘The Artist’s Vision of Australia’, given as a talk on the BBC in 1950 and published in The Listener, 30 November 1950, 631–3, and later in The Antipodean Manifesto: Essays in Art and History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1976), 159 .
23 Bernard Smith, proposal to Yale University Press, 1978, Bernard Smith Papers, Mitchell Library, MSS 5202, add on 2039.
24 Emanuel Levinas, quoted in Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London/New York: Verso, 1995), 123.
25 Alan Frost, ‘The Planting of New South Wales: Sir Joseph Banks and the Creation of an
Antipodean Europe’, in R.E.R. Banks, B. Elliott, J.G. Hawkes, D. King-Hele and G.L. Lucas, eds, Sir Joseph Banks: A Global Perspective (Richmond: Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, 1994), 137.
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9 . PuRSuING THE ANTIPoDEAN
inherited neither craft traditions nor the Grand Style of Sir Joshua
Reynolds. The convicts and the ‘redundant poor,’ who constituted the
early Australian community had been dispossessed of their cultural
traditions almost as completely as they had been dispossessed of their land
and their citizenship by the legal code of eighteenth century England.
No country in the history of the world has begun the history of its art
under more unpromising circumstances than Australia.26
But the priorities of imperial possession and mercantile expansionism
also simultaneously presented a paradox of freedom and imprisonment,
material wealth and reformism, scientific progress and economic
materialism. As the influential Joseph Banks oscillated ‘between the world
of science and the world of taste’, he and his circle of dilettante gentlemen
created a concept of Terra Australis as a potential destination for the grand
tourist. This quest to satisfy an elite appetite for curiosities enhanced the
Antipodes not only as an appendage of Empire but as a utopia inhabited
by the noble savage, weird animals and strange vegetation, which, in
the public’s imagination, confirmed those ancient perceptions of the
Antipodes as a large, primitive counterbalance to the civilised northern
hemisphere.
As the Europeans and British sailed into the South Pacific, they were
confronted by their own limitations and constructed the spectacular
‘unknown … in terms of the known’.27 This, as far as Bernard Smith was
concerned, illustrated ‘the insular British mind’ and how it reacted ‘to
the vast ocean spaces’ and ‘free-love’ arcadias of the South Sea islands, in
particular the Society Islands and Tahiti.28 What it did achieve, however,
was a new system of perception from which a transformative arts
program developed in Britain and Europe. W.T.J. Mitchell has pointed
out that ‘[j]ust as the landscape movement was at its height the islands
of the South Pacific and the larger continental prize of Australia loomed
to dislodge the Romantic pastoral’.29 The exotic lands of the New World
and the sensual nature of its Oceanic people introduced a new language,
26 Bernard Smith, ‘Australian Art and War’, Bernard Smith Papers, NLA, MS 8680, Box 2/65.
27 Greg Dening, ‘Ethnography on my Mind’, in Bain Attwood, ed., Boundaries of the Past
(Melbourne: History Institute, 1990), 15.
28 Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of Cook’s Voyages (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 1992), xi.
29 Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 4; W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Imperial Landscape’, in Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 18.
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both literary and pictorial, that helped change the nature of English art
during the late eighteenth century away from classicism towards a poetic
or mysterious sublime.
While exploration of the South Pacific may have initially romanticised
the origins of European settlement in Australia, the anticipated utopia fell
well short of being a working man’s paradise. Instead, it became a colonial
experiment in dispossession for the transported and the Indigenous
inhabitants and a fatal attrition of native populations through murder
and disease. What enabled Bernard Smith to analyse this period and
its imperialist material so brilliantly was his acute sense of the ‘unequal
exchange’ – typified by his meeting with Anthony Blunt – and his
hostility to anything that subordinated ideas or relations of exchange.
This yielded an understanding of power relations that gave his ideas and
grasp of history real resonance, especially when he reached one of his most
significant intellectual peaks during the height of the Cold War. Later in
1980, when he gave the Boyer lectures, The Spectre of Truganini, Smith
drew upon the crime of dispossession that had occurred during the British
invasion and colonisation of Australia, and the subsequent immolation of
the Indigenous population. These brilliant essays on ‘the locked cupboard
of our history’ revealed his sensitivity towards the injustice of conquest,
whether historical or contemporary, and anything or anyone subverted by
moral and ethical arrogance.30
Bernard Smith’s two-year sojourn in England marked a major turning
point in his career; it crystallised his scholarship and launched him into
a school of international scholars, many of whom critically tested his
intellectual credentials while also praising his ideas and achievements.
For Bernard Smith, it confirmed the importance of measuring Australia
against Europe, locating the intervals between reality and myth and
synthesising the cultural and political strands that linked or locked these
two countries together. As he said, ‘I was looking for sources and the
sources were northern European and still are’.31
30 Bernard Smith, The Spectre of Truganini (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980), 10.
31 ‘Interview with Bernard Smith’ by Rex Butler, in Butler, ed., Radical Revisionism: An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2005), 76.
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9 . PuRSuING THE ANTIPoDEAN
The quest for identity
Later in his career, Bernard Smith gave a seminar paper titled ‘On being
Antipodean’ in which he spoke of his ‘identity paradox’. Identity was
about the ontology of interactive relationships between people and place
– to think of Europe was to think of the other.32 His self-perception as
the singular ‘I’, a filius nullius dispossessed of his natural parents, had
taught him humiliation and social inferiority – ‘Whose ya fat
her Ben’,
the school boys would taunt or, as he later admitted, ‘a state ward can’t
expect much’.33 So embedded in Smith’s identity was this notion of being
different that he emotionally distanced himself from those who wielded
authority.34 In a letter to his friend Vincent Buckley in 1984, he expanded
on this: ‘many illegitimate children who do not succumb to self-pity
experience a kind of distancing from society. One sees oneself almost as
a kind of witness figure’.35 This ability to stand apart and conscientiously
monitor society would develop into a conceptual device with which to
archive the Antipodes and map how the British constructed the Pacific as
a place and shaped its possession and reception. He summed it up as ‘I am
thinking of distance, or more precisely distancing, as an intellectual tool
both for aesthetic evaluation and for writing of history’.36
Bernard Smith also spoke of how his research in England in the late 1940s
had made him ‘look back at his own intellectual origins’ and cultural
inheritance. Born in 1916, he experienced the after effects of the Great
War, the hardships of the Depression and witnessed, from a distance,
the full panorama of the Second World War. Like many who matured
during the angry decades of the 1930s and 1940s, when fascism and
the European crisis dramatically altered concepts of identity, national
boundaries and political power, he moved towards the left and joined
32 See Peter Beilharz, Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511470202.
33 Bernard Smith, The Boy Adeodatus: The Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1985), 267; Smith, conversation with the author.
34 Bernard Smith claimed he was never abandoned as a child; he lived with his mother for the first six months of his life and once fostered saw her daily until the age of two, after which she wrote regularly, with Bernard corresponding with her once he had learnt to write. He also met his biological father on several occasions as a small boy but, from an early age, believed he did not belong to anyone. See Bernard Smith’s first volume of autobiography, The Boy Adeodatus, for an account of his life to 1940.
35 Bernard Smith to Vincent Buckley, 8 December 1984 (copy), Bernard Smith Papers, NLA, Acc.
10.088, Box 66.