the Royal Academy educates about Australia...

So the art establishment has decided that it is time to revisit Australian art... it has been 50 years, almost 2 generations since the last significant retrospective...and as the colonial parent, it has a role to inform the masses about what has happened to those wayward children expelled in the early 1800's. There is a small recognition that some English (and many Europeans) voluntarily took their chances to start a new life in a distant (and alien) place. It was with mixed emotions that I acquiesced to sample the Royal Academy's paternalistic mission to mount a retrospective of Australian art simply titled "Australia". I decided to ignore the assumed arrogance of their capacity to summarise 200 years of civilisation through 200 two dimensional art pictures.

It became clear that their focus was to showcase the natural landscape through 2 familiar genres; the original (mainly European) landscape painters who captured the idiosyncratic colours and unique southern scenes, albeit often illustrated with a token aboriginal and kangaroo; and the early 1900's impressionists who captured many English traditions down under. I was so impressed to see my absolute favourite picture from Queensland Art Gallery (Sydney Long's Spirit of the Plains), together with quite a few of the cigar box paintings by Tom Roberts, Charles Conder and Arthur Streeton.

I can understand how they might have wanted to use familiar styles of painting to make contrasts with the light and natural beauty - but I was sad that there was not sufficient context for people to understand what was actually happening in Australia at the time. I was quite shocked to overhear 2 educated women being astounded that they had lots of buildings, even church steeples out there... in 1865!

Politically they were wise enough to begin the exhibition with some very impressive aboriginal art - the big names and classic styles were well represented, and we saw an enormous black and white panel of Emily's Big Yam dreaming positioned high above eye level and some art displayed just above floor level, to demonstrate the aerial effect of evident contours. I was looking for some detailed explanations and I suspect most people saw this 'primitive art' as interesting and colourful. Clearly many established art critics had absolutely no idea what they were looking at.

As we moved through to the last 2 generations, I was pleased to see Brett Whitely, John Olsen and Fred Williams. I was impressed that they had suspended Olsen's "Sydney Sun" so it could be viewed from below. But again, there was no real context or attempt to explain how life was quite different out there!

The last few galleries were tokenistic and random. I left with mixed feelings...as an Australian, it was fantastic to see some wonderful old and new friends, but I fear that most of my english peers have no idea about life down under and this limited representation of Australian art did not really move them out of their own comfortable critical framework where any significant misunderstood difference is seen as evidence of lesser intelligence and civilisation...