by Doug Munro
36 Smith, unpublished notes, Bernard Smith Papers, NLA, MS 8680, Box 7/55/155.
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the Communist Party. This was the only party that he believed was
politically and ideologically capable of renovating society and rectifying
the hierarchical machine that Australia had inherited.
Also at this time in Sydney, Smith met a group of European refugee artists
and scholars who had fled Nazism; outsiders defined by the dispossession
of their cultural heritage and homeland. Though they had belonged to
some of the great intellectual and artistic institutions of Europe, Europe
was now their Antipodes. Not only did these exiled scholars dramatically
expand Bernard Smith’s knowledge, but they taught him to think on
a global scale; it was through them that he began to develop his concept of
‘antipodal inversion’ and how cultural traffic affected provincial identity
and its relation to metropolitan centres. Moreover, the refugees were
firsthand witnesses of Europe’s barbaric decline. Where once during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries its imperial hand had dominated the
South Pacific, in the 1940s Europe’s and Britain’s power lay dispersed
and ‘the disinherited’ were the ‘driving force for a revolutionary
reconstruction of society’.37 It made Smith look at what had been brought
to Australia, what had been absorbed, transformed or rejected or, as he
retrospectively put it:
I was trying to define the business of what it is to be Australian, that
is I was looking for what is typically Australian. But the only way you
could logically define this, I thought, was to find out what is European, to
distinguish what is European from what is Australian.38
For Bernard Smith, culture was a historical process and a man-made
construction. The Pacific historian and ethnographer Greg Dening
similarly believed that ‘Culture’ was an ‘analytic concept … of all human
behaviour considered as expression and communication. Culture is an
observer’s construct’.39 Spatial and temporal distance was inherent in the
observer’s method, and Smith used it to identify intellectual and cultural
patterns and to clarify and shape his discourse. It is why Dening wrote
of Smith that he ‘made us look at our own marginality in a positive way.
Be Antipodeans, he told us’.40
37 H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1934), 206–7.
38 Bernard Smith, interview with Hazel de Berg, NLA, Oral History Programme, TRC2053-17,
Tape 1 (page 43 of typescript).
39 Greg Dening, ‘Disembodied Artifacts: Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism’, Scripsi, 9:1
(1993), 80.
40 Greg Dening, Readings/Writings (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 142.
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9 . PuRSuING THE ANTIPoDEAN
If Smith’s concern was how Australia emerged from its colonial cradle
and arrived at its own distinctive modern position, this also coincided
with his own personal quest for identity as he distanced himself from his
past. For some, illegitimacy fosters a deep and lasting sense of invisibility
and of never belonging, and certainly Smith had experienced this during
his childhood: ‘No, he is not one of us’, he heard his foster sister Bertha
tell a stranger. But he was also born with a ferocious determination to
escape from the institutional constraints of his orphaned status and rise
above his humble beginnings. In Place, Taste and Tradition, he wrote that
‘[a] national tradition arises from a people as they struggle with their
social and geographical environment’ – one could think that here he was
reflecting on his own struggle to leave his social periphery.41
In his research leading up to his magnum opus, European Vision and the
South Pacific (1960), Smith captured an important factor affecting new
settlers as they came to terms with the country’s unique qualities, qualities
that he had himself experienced as a young primary school teacher when
he worked in a remote part of rural New South Wales:
For Australian nature was not merely something to be seen, but something
to be revealed, something hidden from vulgar eyes and still unknown.
The mystery of the bush could inspire not only fear but also hope …
and the hopeful and melancholic conventions fused into a complex unity
capable of reflecting the finest shades of experience and emotion. They
are therefore landmarks in the emotional maturity … [of] Australian
identity.42
Hope was the great mover of utopian ideas, and it kept Smith focused
on his future. It was also central to Marxist thought.
By the late nineteenth century, after a new merchant capitalism emerged
based upon the wealth of the gold rush, Australians began to assert
themselves more confidently. This was evident in art, literature and
architecture as well as the rapid growth of cities – the staging of the great
International Exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, and the
impressionistic paintings of a new national vision by Tom Roberts, Arthur
Streeton and Charles Conder. By the early and mid-twentieth century,
41 Bernard Smith, Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since 1788 (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1945), 30.
42 Bernard Smith, ‘The Interpretation of Nature during the Nineteenth Century’, BA Honours
thesis (Department of English, University of Sydney, 1952), copy in Bernard Smith Papers, NLA, MS
8680, Box 3/20/21, 23 and 78.
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artists such as Margaret Preston, Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan, Arthur
Boyd and Noel Counihan and the writers Miles Franklin, Vance and
Nettie Palmer, Frank Dalby Davidson and Brian Penton, to name a few,
were constructing an Australian idiom with even greater assurance. But
this vigorous Antipodean character began to wane again after the Second
World War as dominant metropolitan cultures altered Australian cultural
values.
Others have noted that Bernard Smith’s interpretations of Australian
art and identity were consistently based around ‘the circularity between
Europe and Australia’, and never on a distinctive entity in and by itself.
Yet this was precisely because of the Eurocentric cultural inheritance that
had been implanted with British possession in 1788, and that continued
well into the twentieth century. It was what made Australians ‘refer back’
in order to ‘mediate influences’ or ‘wilfully disrupt’ received styles and
reposition themselves within their own locality.43 As he said, ‘Even if
the past is another country the historian has to find a way to get there’.
For a cultural historian like himself, that route was through the dominant
cultures of Europe and Britain.44
When Smith first arrived in England in 1948, he was concerned with
this notion of identity and cultural revision. By the end of his two years
there, and with extensive travels through Europe, he had developed a real
sense of the cultural past and its global present, though he could never
have stayed on in England nor felt comfortable in its class-based society
�
� even though he had married a middle-class Englishwoman in Sydney
in 1941. Bernard Smith was resolutely and defiantly Australian and, as he
discovered, there simply was not enough interest in the Antipodes as
a historical or modern cultural entity. Geographical distance and British
principles of exclusion still hampered contemporary Australia almost as
much as it had 150 years earlier. In a letter to his mother, he assured her
he would not be staying on in England as he felt he could do much more
important work back home.
Before leaving London in late 1950, Smith gave several broadcast talks
at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on ‘Australian Landscape
Painting’ and ‘The Artist’s Vision of Australia’. From the discovery by Cook
43 Geoffrey Batchen, in Ian Burn, Dialogue: Writings in Art History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), xviii.
44 Bernard Smith, notes for review of T.J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea, July 1999, Bernard Smith Papers, NLA, MS 8680, Box 8/57/176.
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9 . PuRSuING THE ANTIPoDEAN
and the importance of Sir Joseph Banks and Charles Darwin, Bernard
led the listener through the unique qualities of the Australian landscape
and how it created for artists a distinct way of seeing and a unique style
of painting. From the colonial, picturesque, romantic and impressionist
genres to the ‘psychic centre’ of the great outback, he finally arrived at
Russell Drysdale who, he said, painted the landscape in its own terms of
reference, as though he was ‘half in love and half in fear of his subject …
because the Australian landscape is … a wilful capricious thing, half-wild,
half-tame, half-myth and half reality’.45
The pursuit of cultural autonomy
After returning to Sydney in 1951, Smith became frustrated by the
impact that prevailing American and British cultural forces were having
on Australian art, and he was determined that an Antipodean cultural
identity should be more internationally acknowledged. Australians viewed
the world through their entrenched nostalgic attachment to Great Britain
and this had to be replaced by ‘an Australian way of looking’. Moreover,
the western world’s new watchdog, America, was using its invasive cultural
power to assert its metropolitan monopoly in Europe and Australia and,
according to Smith, this was twentieth-century cultural imperialism.
The historian Robin Winks once observed that a scholar’s subject matter
or academic discipline usually holds ‘an autobiographical meaning, in that
one is often attracted to a discipline that appears to reflect the world as
one understands it, rather than using the discipline to order the world’.46
Bernard Smith used art and culture not only to understand ‘the sociology
of colonisation’ and its relations of exchange but as a mirror for addressing
his own personal ‘position and position taking’.47 One extraordinary
construction for identity and cultural difference that he masterminded
was the Antipodeans exhibition and its Manifesto in 1959.
As its originator and convener, Smith used the idea of myth-making
to illuminate Australia’s cultural autonomy and proclaim its distinctive
originality; as he put it, ‘We live in a young society still making its myths.
The emergence of myth is a continuous social activity. In the growth and
45 Bernard Smith, ‘Sir Russell Drysdale (1912–1981): A Memoir’, Art Monthly, 110 (1998), 28.
46 Robin W. Winks, The Imperial Revolution: Yesterday and Tomorrow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 8–9.
47 Bernard Smith, interview with author, 7 June 2001.
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transformation of its myths a society achieves its own sense of identity’.48
But with politics never far from his mind, it was also an agenda for his
concerns about regionalism, contemporary cultural imperialism and the
Cold War.
Ever since first proposing the idea to Sir Kenneth Clark in London in
1949, Bernard Smith had been keen to mount an exhibition showcasing
the best of contemporary Australian figurative art, with the aim of touring
it nationally and internationally. The plan was reactivated in 1957,
when he heard the Melbourne architect Robin Boyd deliver a lecture on
Australia’s de-culturalisation and the ‘featurist’ and ‘Austerica’ banality of
its urban design and architecture. He wrote excitedly to Boyd:
I cannot tell you how much I admired and enjoyed your lecture … I am
right behind you – but can anything really be done about it? … I should
dearly love to think that one or two of our artists and architects were
standing up squarely on their own feet and thinking out their own
problems before an Australian and a world audience. Of course the waters
of nationalism have always been treacherous ones to fish in – but at least
they’re deep.
As the letter shows, the genesis of the ‘Antipodeans’ had evolved:
What is needed is a small compact group of artists (architects, painters,
perhaps a sculptor), about 6 or 7 would be enough with a common
purpose … one thinks of The Impressionists, de Stijl, The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood. … Better to make history than write about it. What is
needed is a brotherhood of some kind … with a colourful title … The
artists I can think of … who would qualify for what I have in mind are
Sid Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Brack. … If some sort of Antipodean
Brotherhood did somehow crawl upsidedownedly into existence its birth
would have to be veiled in mysteries … I can assure you I rarely write
letters like this – but this is what you have brought me to … Meanwhile
my congratulations on your magisterial stand against the … hands of
Austerica.49
Art, Smith insisted, had to communicate as ‘a recognisable shape,
a meaningful symbol’, and a reflection of society, and he used the
Antipodeans exhibition as a platform to convert artists and audiences away
48 The Antipodean Manifesto, first published as a foreword to the Antipodeans exhibition held at the Victorian Artists’ Society, East Melbourne, August 1959.
49 Bernard Smith to Robin Boyd, 22 September 1957 (copy), Bernard Smith Papers, NLA, MS
8680; these papers have recently been deposited in the NLA and are awaiting accessioning.
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9 . PuRSuING THE ANTIPoDEAN
from the ‘vacuous geometric patterning’ of international abstraction,
a style that emanated from the dominant New York School of abstract
expressionism and the ‘canonical dominance of Clement Greenberg’s
post-painterly abstraction’.50 Bernard Smith had first witnessed this new
art form at the 1950 Venice Biennale where Jackson Pollock’s dribble
technique or, as Bernard described it, the ‘glamorous wallpaper of his own
alienation’ was on show.51 He also had information that major American
exhibitions, which had been touring Europe since the beginning of the
Cold War, were funded by the CIA and New York’s Museum of Modern
Art (MoMA), which further intensified his hostility towards America’s
postwar cultural hegemony.
Bernard Smith qualified cultural imperialism as ‘a study in inequality’, and
therefore ‘what is vital and native to our tradition’ needed to be protected.
This was not xenophobic nationalism but, as Peter Beilharz has suggested,
a more cryptic, hybrid form of nativism.52 Australian artists, Smith wrote,
had to ‘battle for survival in the post-war years against powerful and at
times overwhelming cosmopolitan tendencies, at times stimulating and
vitalizing, at times devitalizing’.53 With his sight fixed on Australia as
it intersected with metropolitan cultural powers, Bernard chose seven
artists who were ‘distinctively Australian, without being self-consciously
nationalistic’.54 These were John Brack, Charles Blackman, Arthur and
David Boyd, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh and the Sydney painter Robert
Dickerson. To avoid being tagged nationalistic, the group, driven by
Bernard’s preferences, chose the word ‘Antipodeans’. As he explained:
Europeans have used [the term] in connection with this part of the world
ever since the Greeks and there is no reason at all why we should sneer at it
… no reason why painters … should not be able to find something worth
saying both to their community and to the world at large.55
50 Gary Willis, conversation with the author, 2015.
51 Bernard Smith, A Pavanne for Another Time (Melbourne: Macmillan, 2002), 444.
52 ‘A day with Bernard Smith’, La Trobe University Thesis Eleven symposium, 23 April 2003.
53 Smith, notes for a speech given at the annual dinner of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, 1 September 1959, Bernard Smith Papers, NLA, MS 8680, Box 20/24. Bernard later published a
significantly revised version of events with ‘The Truth about the Antipodeans’ published in The Death of the Artist as Hero: Essays in History and Culture (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988).
54 Bernard Smith to Sidney Nolan, 1 February 1960 (copy), Bernard Smith Papers, NLA,
MS 8680.
55 Ibid.
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He also suggested to Charles Blackman, the artist who designed the
Antipodean Exhibition poster, that he should look at the primitive Antipode
creatures illustrated in the 1493 medieval Nuremburg Chronicle, a copy
of which was held in the Melbourne public library.
Antipodeans exhibition poster, 1959
Source: Private collection .
By refashioning the mythic past with the political present, Bernard