Exceptionalism and provincialism: Rethinking the Antipodes

Australia’s settlements

If Thinking the Antipodes (Beilharz, 2015) is written with Bernhard Smith in mind, it is written against Paul Kelly's (Kelly, 1994) manifesto for the decade of Hawke/Keating reforms, The End of Certainty, which declared the demise of the Australian Settlement, launched by Federation. It leads Peter in response to contemplate two, three or four settlements: (1) from 1788 to 1901; (2) from 1901 to 1983 and the Labor/trade unions’ Accord; (3) from 1983 onwards; eventually to (4) a future reconciliation with the First Peoples of Australia, presaged by the 1998 High Court Mabo judgment, Prime Minister Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern speech and, despite the outcome, the 2023 national referendum on Voice. But what lies beyond the second Federation settlement comes into focus only indirectly in terms of two negative theses: first, that when it comes to making sense of Australia today ‘neither imperial nor nativist mythology will do’ and second, that in the process of revisioning the Antipodes, ‘it is time to transcend teleological stories of the Australians as an emerging popular subject’ (Beilharz, 2015: 5). But again, it is necessary to historicize. Both theses need to be read as a critique of Australia’s second settlement. They do not explain, however, Peter’s ambivalence in relation to the demise of the second settlement and the brave new world announced by Kelly: Peter’s ambivalence belongs not to the problems of the two settlements but rather to Peter’s own tale of two nations. In respect of the tale of two nations (rural v. urban, mateship v. civic privatization, struggle v. lifestyle), Kelly displaces Smith and reinforces the focus on Kelly’s Australian Settlement. And here the first, truly foundational settlement of 1788 is presupposed rather than examined: in Peter’s reading, the penal colony that comes good with the discovery of gold. That gold made the settlers ‘rich, lucky, complacent, and democratic’ (Beilharz, 2015: 34) hardly does justice to Australia’s golden age. To conclude that prosperity spelt mediocrity, as WK Hancock did in 1930 (Hancock, 1930), looks to be a judgement more relevant to Australian society after 1918 than to the second half of the 19th century. It is in fact little more than a lead into Kelly’s image of Federation Australia as the old, redundant, closed society, dismantled by the structural reforms of the 1980s. Kelly’s model derives from Hancock, but that does not mean that the Federation settlement itself can be reduced to monolithic closure. Between Hancock in 1930 and Kelly in 1994 lies the post-1945 economic reconstruction and expansion, fuelled by a new wave of British and European immigration. As Peter himself observes:

If Australian modernity was anticipated in 1901…it was only filled out in the postwar moment, when Australian modernity took the shape that made us, the children of the nineteen fifties, and became the frame for all that was to follow. (Beilharz, 2015: 91)

I am not persuaded that the claim to Australian exceptionalism can be identified with its institutionalization at Federation in the form of industry protection, wage arbitration and the White Australia policy, under the aegis of state paternalism, seconded by imperial benevolence. The opening of the economy to competition and Australian society to multiculturalism in the 1980s has as much a claim to exceptionalism as the preceding 80 years of nation-building – an exceptionalism, moreover, that like its predecessor achieved bipartisan consensus, despite the paralysis in policy-making that bedevilled government following the defeat of the Liberals under John Howard in 2007, and to which a leading advocate for Australia’s new post-Federation settlement, Kevin Rudd, fell victim. The occasion was the launch of Paul Kelly’s follow-up to The End of Certainty (1994). In The March of the Patriots, Kelly (2009) put forward the idea of a new bipartisan exceptionalism, still faithful to the Australian values of economic pragmatism and social egalitarianism, deemed capable of steering a course between the twin dangers of American neoliberalism and the bureaucratic over-regulation of the European Union. Rudd, also offering the idea of a new exceptionalism, was insistent that the claim to exceptionalism applied to the whole history of Australian settlement: ‘A nation that has carved an economy from an inhospitable earth to build one of the most prosperous on earth.’ And again: ‘A nation that has often led the world in social progress like rights for women and rights for working people – building one of the most open, most progressive, least class-based societies in the world’ (Rudd, 2009). The almost inalienable sense of fairness in the Australian DNA, of which Rudd speaks, never extended to the Indigenous Australians.

What is the case that Kelly and Rudd were making for exceptionalism? Rudd envisaged a ‘great Australian contract’ to secure the ‘epic achievement’ of the Hawke–Keating reforms, which would build the public support needed for the difficult challenges of modernizing the economy without sacrificing the idea of a decent society – laudable aims, but hardly exceptional. Rudd is more persuasive when he singles out the exceptional capacity for adaptation and change evident in the remarkably peaceful transformation of White Australia into today’s multicultural society. Here it is worth noting that immigrants as a percentage of the population had been falling since Federation and reached at 10%, its lowest point in 1947, to rise to nearly 30% in the space of two generations – a demographic revolution that cannot be reduced to a tale of two nations. From a population of some 4 million in 1901 to 26 million in 2023, immigration is probably the most important index of Australia’s economic fortunes since Federation. More important: demographic change was the driving force determining the demise of the statist White Australian nation-building project of Federation, a project that subsequently was subsumed into the open question of Australian identity. Here I want to come back to Peter’s emphasis on the vital formative importance of the Second World War for Australian modernity – ‘Indeed, my own sense is that this is when modern Australia emerges. It is posited by Federation, the Great War and the earlier reconstruction, but it emerges only with war, planning, federal powers, Postwar Reconstruction’ (Beilharz, 2015: 50) – because it is important to add that this formative moment was prefigured in the rapid growth of cities and population in the second half of the 19th century. It was this era that produced ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, one of the great Victorian cities.

Seen in this light, I want to argue that the second half of the 19th century and the second half of the 20th century were the two vital formative epochs in Australia’s history. The first culminated in Federation, the second in the transformation of Anglo-Australian society into one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse and harmonious societies in the world. For the Federation era, ‘two nations’ might continue to reflect the continuing city/rural divide, but the divide is a residual one, and one over-determined in many ways by the inner-city v. suburban nation divide, which itself was already evident in the 1970s. The first epoch (the last half of the 19th century) worked towards the founding, defining and confining of Australian identity in the nation-state at Federation; the second epoch worked towards rethinking an exclusive national identity in terms of an inclusive civic nationalism that looks for identity in diversity rather than unity. If the discovery of gold helped make Australian society in the second half of the 19th century a social laboratory that attracted world attention, it was the impetus of postwar reconstruction that set Australia on course to be the laboratory of the social experiment in assimilation that still finds its limit in relation to Australia’s First Nations.

The provincialism problem: Colonial, national, global

If Australia’s story is exceptional, is it also provincial? I will argue that exceptionalism and provincialism are the two sides of the (self-) perception of Australian settlement, which find a particularly interesting reflection in Australian art history. Bernard Smith set the scene in 1960 in European Vision and the South Pacific (1985). The two poles of his title proclaim equivalence: the South Pacific is as significant for Europe as Europe is for the South Pacific. In this meeting of two worlds, the European vision of the South Pacific was a matter of science as much as of art. It found its primary expression in the attempts to capture the ‘essential qualities of a particular kind of geographical environment’ (Smith, 1985 [1960]: 4) in order to render the typicality or, in Alexander von Humboldt’s term, the physiognomy of the new landscapes. The typical landscape became thus the type of the encounter between European vision and the South Pacific. Indeed, the image of the Australian landscape was to be the defining image of Australian art up to Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Fred Williams and beyond (Williams’ connection with the Heide group is given through his friendship with Albert Tucker after Tucker established himself at Hurstbridge, close to Melbourne, in 1964 after his return to Australia in 1960), just as this reciprocity of metropolis and frontier has remained determinate both for Australian exceptionalism and provincialism – a question that Smith struggled to resolve from European Vision in 1960 through to the fourth edition of his history of Australian painting since 1788 in 2001.

Thus, in Australian Painting (Smith, 2001 [1962]), we find side by side two statements difficult to reconcile. First: from the beginning Australian art ‘has been the product of a perennial commutation between the northern and the southern hemispheres. It still is.’ And second: ‘the European art of Australia has continued to be provincial art carried on for almost two centuries now in a south-east Asian situation far from such metropolitan sources as London, Paris and more recently, New York’ (Smith, 2001 [1962]: 333). Is then the distinguishing feature of Australian art its provincial dependence on the imperial centre – even though Smith makes a point of quoting Charles Darwin’s enthusiastic endorsement of Sydney in 1836 – ‘ancient Rome, in her imperial grandeur, would not have been ashamed of such an offspring’ (Smith, 1985 [1960]: 284) – or does it lie rather in the ‘perennial commutation’ between the old and the new worlds? Both apparently contradictory positions presuppose the two-way flow of cultural traffic. The question, however, is the following: is this traffic best understood as cultural translation or as cultural imitation? Smith (2001 [1962]: vi) compounds the problem by making the answer dependent on the development of a national tradition in Australia when he writes in the ‘Introduction’ to Australian Painting:

A national tradition always matures slowly and in the arts very slowly indeed. So in this book we study seed-time, the harvest still being beyond knowledge…One thing is certain, however: Australian art will not emerge fully formed until it produces masterpieces which fashion from the Australian experience of life something of lasting value for the whole field of human experience.

Robert Hughes was one of these expatriates, the modernist in search of the metropolis: London, before he found his ‘homes from home’ in New York and Barcelona. Like Bernard Smith, Hughes was a historicist, whose time – the revolving door of New York avant-gardism – was already running out when he left Australia. Hughes straddles two distinct iterations of the provincialism problem in Australian art: the one in relation to 19th-century colonial painting, the other the inescapable contemporary subjection of Australian artists to the assumption of an ever more relentless provincialism, dictated by the domination of the metropolitan centre (Smith, 1974).

The first, more interesting problem is drastically exemplified in Hughes’ (1970: 51) rubbishing of the whole period of colonial art in Australia (and with it Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific):

No country in the West, with the possible exception of Patagonia, was less endowed with talent. Granted the minor exception of Gill, Glover, Martens and Buvelot, a whole century passed without producing anything but mediocre, amateurish or thwarted painters. There is little in the history of Australian art between 1788 and 1895 that would interest an historian except the way that painters set down in an environment for whose forms their training had not prepared them, accommodated themselves to it.

In the process of bringing what is known to the experience of the unknown, these cultures illuminated ‘the most profound relationship that we have – that with the land on which we live’ (Johns, 1998: 12). Patrick McCaughey (Johns, 1998) speaks of an ‘inner imaginative awakening’ (Johns, 1998: 17) that has made it impossible to imagine either Australia or America in the 19th century without recourse to landscape depictions from Glover to Tom Roberts or from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer. This meant recognizing in the process that Glover and Guérard are ‘artists of substance’ (Johns, 1998: 17). McCaughey’s question: ‘Why should such a distinctive and distinguished national school have won such little recognition beyond its shores?’ nicely captures the problem of exceptionalism and provincialism as the two sides of the same coin. Did the exhibition answer the riddle of metropolitan non-recognition? Yes and no, according to McCaughey. On the one hand, Australian art came of age by being placed in the comparative context of another expanding and developing society (America). On the other hand, even though the art of both colonies can lay claim to ‘remarkable historical achievements’, it remains the case that neither corpus of works amounts to more than an object of curiosity to European taste: ‘The new worlds may mean something to each other, but their past presses lightly on the imagination of the old’ (Johns, 1998: 20–1). In other words, the process of a post-Eurocentric reorientation needs to go beyond ritual obeisance to post-colonialism to a rethinking of the metropolitan–frontier symbiosis, that is, by reframing and recontextualizing the problem of provincialism, whether colonial or national, within the larger historical context of an expanding and developing Anglo-American world system since the late 18th century (Belich, 2009).

The contributors to the New Worlds catalogue were fully aware that Australian art did not suddenly come into being with the Heidelberg School but that the latter represented the culmination of a century of colonial endeavour (Smith, 2001 [1962]). It was rather the rise of cultural nationalism from the late 19th century that relegated colonial art to a mere precursor of the new national school, elevating the Heidelberg School to the solitary splendour of a national legend. The naturalistically rendered image of the sunlit Australian landscape was the pastoral projection of an urbanized population, which it peopled with rugged rural workers. If this orthodoxy, inimical to new tendencies, became the new nationalist version of provincialism after the First World War, its other face was expatriation – escape to the metropolis. The progressive institutionalization of art from the 1870s in the form of art galleries and art schools led in Australia as in Europe to the formation of small (bohemian) subcultures of professional artists, for whom the metropolis beckoned with the prospect of study and advancement, patrons and profit, which Australian society was too small to satisfy. Of the artists who left for Europe between 1880 and 1914, Bernard Smith distinguishes between the short- and the long-term visitors, that is, between visitors and expatriates. The latter comprises a long list, from the Heidelberg painters Roberts, Streeton and Conder to the society painters Rupert Bunny, Hugh Ramsey and George Washington Lambert. Expatriation proved to be a mixed blessing. Bunny and Lambert achieved success as portrait painters. Severed from its native soil, the Heidelberg diaspora, however, suffered a drastic loss of inspiration (Johns, 1998; Smith, 2001 [1962]). In the light of this expatriation, we must speak of an aborted national school in relation to the first four decades of Federation, whose substitute, as we have seen, was the cultivation of the national legend of the Heidelberg School. For Smith (2001 [1962]: 196), Streeton after his return to Australia became the embodiment of a ‘pathological nationalism that had been growing in the country since the Anzacs had stormed the Dardanelles’.

The brief moment of the Heidelberg School and its dispersion is repeated in the second brief moment of the florescence of Australian painting, the years of rebirth (Smith) across the angry decade (Hughes) of the 1940s. Tempting as it would be to revisit the querelle between Hughes and Smith (Berryman, 2021), let me just refer to the distinction Smith draws between Australian isolation and isolationism in his response to Hughes. Where for Hughes it was geographical and cultural isolation that defined Australia’s perennial provincialism, it was isolationism for Smith that defined the provincialism of Australia between the wars, against which the Heide artists around Melbourne-based John and Sunday Reed revolted. But here again, the lack of public recognition and support in the 1950s and 1960s played a major role in dispersion and diaspora. When Albert Tucker departed in 1947 he thought of himself as a cultural refugee; Nolan moved from Melbourne to Sydney in 1947 and then to London in 1951. Arthur Boyd moved to London in 1959 to return as a celebrated artist in 1971. For all three, their greatest work was created before leaving for Europe. One can only concur with Hughes’ (1970: 227) harsh verdict on Nolan: ‘As one passes from his African paintings to his Antarctic series to his latest Australian landscapes, one becomes uncomfortably aware that a cast-iron technique is being applied to a sequence of superficial tourist views.’

We are left with the two brief moments of Heidelberg and Heide as the two defining episodes of Australian art as tokens of a national school of landscape painting, with figures in a landscape in its second incarnation from Ned Kelly to Boyd’s Breughelesque biblical scenes and his first Aboriginal series ‘The Hunters’ and ‘The Lovers’ – tokens, because they were followed by expatriation.

Hughes himself left for Europe in 1964, first to Italy, London in 1965 and then to New York in 1970 as the art critic for TIME magazine. And it is from the metropolitan centre that he can formulate the question that signals the end of the fatal entanglement of nationalism, provincialism and diaspora: ‘When does one stop talking about Australian art’ (Hughes, 1970: 310)? When do we stop talking about it ‘as if it denoted some kind of shared relationship to an environment among painters’ (Hughes, 1970: 312)? Bernard Smith also discerns signs in the 1960s of a change in Australia’s ‘provincial situation’. Although Australia remains as distant as ever from London, Paris and New York, it is by this time beginning to create a metropolitan centre of its own, which Smith (2001 [1962]: 334) attributes to postwar migration and the growth of cosmopolitan art circles and improved possibilities of travel and communication, in short, the emergence of the critical mass capable of generating its own creativity. For all that, Smith’s survey into the 1990s of the pluralized postmodern art scene concludes that the ‘double-binds of provincialism’ (2001 [1962]: 554) have now been recast in more complex forms.

The cultural turning point of the 1960s anticipated the end of Kelly’s Australian Settlement, which Robert Hughes articulates in his view of the irrelevance of the idea of a national school of Australian art. If Smith registers the multiplication of art centres as a new stage of globalization, it is Hughes who spells out the consequences for art in Australia: the generalized dissemination of images across the world announces the condition of an ‘unstable eclecticism’ (1970: 313), which was soon to be dubbed postmodernism. Hughes is not ready to abandon the double-bind of provincialism, however. Despite the new global context, Australian isolation persists. On this view the spatial isolation of the 19th century had mutated into the temporal belatedness of the 20th century that left Australian artists limping a generation behind the European avant-garde. It was precisely this identification of art history with the ever-accelerating ‘Shock of the New’ (Hughes, 1980) that led in 1974 to Terry Smith’s globalized, hence ultimate, statement of the provincialism problem. Despite the fact that by the 1970s there were many art worlds they all shared the same fatal problem: the problem of provincialism – or ‘subservience to an externally imposed hierarchy of cultural values’, brought about by their common submission to the New York art world as the global metropolitan centre, the sole font of the New, the factory of ‘accelerated avant-gardism’ (Smith, 1974: n.p.). Echoing Hughes, Terry Smith laments the inescapable belatedness of the periphery as the condition of provincialism, defined as the impossibility of being anything but derivative. When Smith (1974) characterizes Nolan and Boyd’s work as ‘eccentrically eclectic blends with a local accent’, it is in order to qualify Nolan as a great Australian artist, as opposed to Jackson Pollock who is a great artist tout court (n.p.). Terry Smith pushes the provincialism problem to the limit. But whether we take Bernard Smith or Terry Smith or Robert Hughes, we are confronted by the irresolution of the double bind premised on the thesis that the provincial artist cannot choose not to be provincial – the very dilemma exemplified by the history of Australia’s expatriates (cf. Beilharz, 2015: 230).

Terry Smith’s own unresolved double bind is itself belated in all sorts of ways. His vision of the chosen few, riding the crest of the avant-garde wave, who were alone able to propel their work into the long-term history of art, was indeed a vision of art history, which had reached its own self-destructive limit and whose end – the dernier cri of the New – was soon to be proclaimed, in New York of course. To declare the whole world, including all of the United States, apart from New York, provincial totally inflates at the same time as it totally devalues the term. Terry Smith is thus left stranded between the one world of art history as progress and the alternative global conception of multiple art worlds as the expression of multiple modernities. Once this alternative global perspective is recognized as the counterpart to the end of the Australian Settlement, then the provincialism problem and with it the obsessive question of what the identity of Australian art is ceases to be a problem.

This is the argument of Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson (2017). With the advantage of 40 years’ hindsight, they question not only Terry Smith’s ‘relentless provincialism’ but equally the validity of the term itself. Their reply to Smith takes the form of two theses:

First: ‘An understanding of Australian art in terms of the national, and hence in terms of its provincialism, can no longer stand.’

Second: ‘Australian artists of all kinds have always thought of themselves as – and actually were – not provincials existing in a mediated relationship to a faraway metropolitan centre, but contemporary with and immediately connected to what was happening elsewhere’ (Butler and Donaldson, 2017: n.p.)

If the globalization of art worlds was the precondition of this process of re-evaluation of Australian art history, it is paralleled by the re-evaluation of cultural translation that has established itself during this most recent wave of globalization. As I indicated in the introduction, cultural translation seems to me to be the concept that captures best the reciprocity involved in the relationship between the old and new worlds, as relevant to the whole endeavour of Australian settlement as to the more focused question of the pictorial representation of the new environment. Just as the significance of translation has at last come to be recognized in the field of literary and linguistic studies as the precondition of world literature since the collapse of the paradigm of national literary histories, so in turn has the historical significance of translation as the very condition of the formation of cultures and of cultural creativity (the European Renaissance and the Reformation are inconceivable without translation). The translation of texts has always been more than a linguistic exercise for it always involves a process of transmission, transfer and transformation of the encounter between two semantic worlds. The conventional understanding of translation as secondary to an original source makes translation as it were exceptional and provincial at the same time – as long as we understand that exceptional and provincial represent the two sides of the same assumption of the supplementarity of the act of translation. Rather than arguing for exceptionality as a compensation for provincialism I think it is essential to grasp translation as the act of re-creation of the source and thus in relation to settler societies as the re-creation of the old world in the new. To put my argument in pointed form: to be Antipodean is to live in a state of translation. Furthermore, the idea of translation is a pivotal way of understanding Australian exceptionalism. The act of translation coalesces the exceptional and the provincial, making them ultimately each a version and a mirror of the other. Acts of translation cast a fundamental light on both the question of Australian art history and that of Australian settlements. In brief:

Colonial art in Australia was not provincial. On the contrary, as the meeting of European vision and an unknown environment, it documents the translation of the old world into the new and the translation of the new world back to the old.

Australian identity understood as a set of reciprocal translations (between old and new, new and old, and so on) brings us back to Peter’s reading of Australia’s two settlements, which I want to reread in the form of two counter-theses:

The first settlement – the penal colony of 1788 – was Australia’s most important social laboratory, whose outcome was ratified and codified at Federation. It was the progressive, even explosive construction of a new world from the old and its greatest creation was its cities, also in the wider sense of the building of the institutions (the common institutions of the Anglo-World) that were the precondition of Federation.

To conclude, I want to argue that the work of translation, which occurs in all encounters between different cultures and civilizations, establishes the significance of cultural reciprocity in relation to the all too reductive focus on the priority of power differentials of European globalization since the 16th century (cf. Wallerstein’s economically determined world system). Cultural reciprocity (Peter’s traffic) forms the first crucial context for the encounter between Europe and the South Pacific and for the successive extensions of Australian settlement across the 19th century. It is the context that has underpinned Australia’s distinct fusion of exceptionalism and provincialism, itself premised on the polarity of metropolis and province and the two-way flow of goods, capital, people and ideas. The second crucial context is that of economic reciprocity, which focuses on the dynamics of growth generated by migrant flows that generate in turn the dynamic symbiosis of metropolis and open frontier, central to the rapid expansion and development of the settler societies in North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa and the rise of the Anglo-World to global dominance since the Napoleonic Wars. If Bernard Smith revealed for Peter cultural theory as social theory, then James Belich’s reframing of the debates about Australian exceptionalism and provincialism within the larger world-historical context of the rise of the Anglosphere reveals economic history equally as cultural theory, underpinning my parallel reading of Australia’s colonial, national and global settlements and art history. More importantly, Belich’s rethinking of the Antipodes in a comparative global context opens the way to putting the Antipodes back on its feet by giving it its proper due as the amazingly successful creation of new worlds from old.

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Peter on the Great Ocean Road, Victoria, 2016