In the collection of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin there are two paintings that cannot be put on show. The first is Kaapa Tjampitjinpa’s Ceremonial Scene (Mikantji) from 1971, the very first work of the dot painting movement. It is a long, rectangular painting and most of it shows a male initiation scene that should not be viewed by women and children of the Central and Western Deserts. The other painting is Sidney Nolan’s Ayers Rock (1951), part of a seminal series of works he made of Central Australia after flying over it by mail plane. As with Ceremonial Scene (Mikantji), Ayers Rock has not been put up in the Darwin gallery. This is because it depicts a sacred side of Uluru, and Anangu permissions have not yet been granted to show it.

This double censorship situates something of the conundrums of writing on either Aboriginal or Australian art in the twenty-first century. Writing about Aboriginal art grapples with a vast legacy of colonialism’s confrontation with a distinct and complex Indigenous society. Writing about Australian art by colonial and settler artists is haunted by these legacies, too, as artists painting the continent’s landscape include or erase the presence of its first peoples. Ian McLean’s Double Nation: A History of Australian Art (2023) tells the story of white artists who since Captain Cook’s journey along the east coast have represented the continent, and ends in the 1970s when Australian art became an anachronistic concept for artists embracing more international trends. Since the 1970s Aboriginal art from remote Australia has taken up the parochial place of Australian art in the nation’s artistic consciousness, insisting upon its own version of nativism in the deep time of the Dreaming. The long shadow of this Aboriginal victory hangs over the illustrators and painters of Double Nation, from convict forgers commissioned to make picturesque landscapes of the colony to Nolan’s visionary reimaging of the continent and its colonial history during the 1940s and 1950s.

Double Nation is preceded by McLean’s companion volume, Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (McLean, 2016). While Double Nation tracks the debates of the Australia’s nascent and insular artworld, Rattling Spears traces a more expansive history of Aboriginal artists who were already post-national, as they sketched out their encounters with global imperialism. Making the case for the worldliness of the Indigenous encounter with the British empire, Rattling Spears radicalises the discourse of identity that has come to preoccupy writers on Aboriginal art, first with anthropologists and more recently in a postcolonial politics. McLean argues instead for the performativity of this identity in the face of an imperial regime. Rather than insisting upon Aboriginal art as an Australian or even Indigenous art, Rattling Spears proposes that it is the most global of art movements as its practitioners abstracted the cosmopolitanism of pre-invasion Australia to bring Aboriginal Australia into a global modernity.

Next to this history of the Aboriginal art movement, Double Nation’s history of white people’s art is a more insular and formalist one. The settler artists of Double Nation are provincials, looking back to Britain for approval and to Paris for the latest trends, unable to reinvent art to fit a country that is stumbling its way through the twentieth century. Ultimately it is Sidney Nolan who best imagines what Australian artist could be, reworking the colonial ideology with pictures of lost explorers and doomed bushrangers, and with aerial paintings of the continental interior. The art historian Bernard Smith conceptualised the antipodeanism by which Nolan could be understood, along with Arthur Boyd, Russell Drysdale, Albert Tucker and others. Their belated invention of Australian art and its mythologies also condemned it to a quick extinction, however, as the antipodean’s symbolic, painterly unconscious was ill fitted to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s.

The story of Double Nation does not move very far from Smith’s groundbreaking Australian Painting, 1788-1960 (Smith, 1962), that also ends after the middle of the twentieth century, shifting the same artists around on a game board set out decades ago. The innovation McLean makes is to put the provincialism and Britishness of Australian art into a dialectic with Aboriginalism, a tendency not only to romanticise the First Australians, but to seek out a certain nativity or truth through paintings of the beaches, fields and deserts of the continent. Aboriginalism is typically and narrowly defined as the construction of Aboriginality by non-Indigenous people, but through McLean’s pen becomes an explanation for some of the stranger turns that Australian artists have taken in painting the continent.  One of Double Nation’s most compelling examples of Aboriginalism lies in the popularity of nudes in Australian landscape paintings that date, not coincidentally, from the disappearance of Aboriginal nudes from Australian landscapes in the late nineteenth century. It’s a disturbing optical shift from idyllic corroboree scenes to pale, bathing figures amongst the yellowing grasses of the Heidelberg School of artists, as if the extinction of a race of people were necessary for the pagan enjoyments of the fin de siecle. 

There are more subtle uses of this expanded method of Aboriginalism, too, in an erudite account of John Glover’s irreconcilable strands of practice. McLean foregrounds his pictures of groups of Aboriginal people dancing amongst the hills of Tasmania to illustrate the conundrum of white Australian artists who paint in a country bewitched by genocide. These images of Palawa people constitute an Aboriginal history of Australian art, while Glover’s more pastoral pictures of his garden and of a landscape populated by cattle represent instead a very British history of Australian art. It is McLean’s point that Glover’s strands of painting are irreconcilable with each other, that their subjects occupy distinct ideologies within Glover’s practice, and that in this sense Australian art is irreconcilable with its own history.

The book arrives most firmly at the idea of a national art after World War One, as images of the European war by George Lambert and Arthur Streeton unconsciously speak to Australia’s absences. Bathed in sunlight, Streeton’s pictures of rolling French hills only hint at the atrocities taking place over the horizon, where a wisp of smoke suggest battles taking place. Landscapes haunted by the death of soldiers are second nature to these painters from a country that is haunted by massacre, as McLean employs the kind of double think necessary to grapple with both Aboriginal history and settler Australian histories of art. To double think about Australian art is to double back on what is being shown, to see the frontier wars in Streeton’s France, and genocide in Glover’s Tasmania.

Arguments over artists like Glover and Nolan have typically revolved around their naturalism, debating their gum trees and the angle of their horizons, as symbols that most succinctly stand for Australia’s self-image. Double Nation shifts the debate at a moment when the country is debating an Indigenous ‘Voice’ to parliament, seeking redemption with a gesture of inclusion in the government’s constitution. The key concept for Aboriginal opponents of the ‘Voice’ and its movement to reconcile the races is ‘sovereignty’, a concept that aspires to the political independence of Aboriginal people from mainstream Australia, rather than their integration. Double Nation captures the kind of double think about Australia that sovereignty aspires to achieve, as Australia confronts its inverse reflection in a people who regard themselves as colonised.

In the antinomy of Britishness and Aboriginalism McLean describes the haunted landscapes of Australian art, and the historical consciousness that comes with revisiting paintings from Australia’s white history. The white canon, however, remains intact in Double Nation, as we reprise Smith’s journey from convicts and their commissioned officers to the metropolitan dandies of Heidelberg and Heide. There are certainly forays along the way that situate this canon differently, as McLean rediscovers the history paintings of Alexander Schramm, mentions the Aboriginal artefacts collected by Eugene Von Geurard and Tom Roberts, and argues for the significance of Elliot Gruner and Peter Purves Smith at the intersection of the fierce debates over modernism in Melbourne and Sydney in the early twentieth century. Still we must endure reading about the French successes of Rupert Bunny and grapple with the technical brilliance of colonial era portraiture, as McLean tackles the genre of writing an introductory and inclusive monograph on Australian art. This has always been Smith’s genre, and there is something of a pastiche of Smith in every version of Australian art monograph that has followed, from Robert Hughes’s The Art of Australia (Hughes, 1966) to more recent versions by the newspaper critics Christopher Allen (Allen, 1997) and John McDonald (McDonald, 2008). There have also been attempts to bring introductions to Australian and Aboriginal art into the one volume, albeit in alternating chapters and parallel rather than integrated histories (Grishin, 2013; Sayers, 2001). What McLean gives in innovative, revisionist interpretations of Australian art history he takes away from the reader by mimicking this legacy. In this sense Double Nation is more of a conventional book than its forays into doubled consciousness suggest, its post-national deconstructions making a ‘phyrric victory’ over an enduring idea of the national.

References

Allen C (1997) Art in Australia: From Colonization to Postmodernism. New York: Thames and Hudson.

Grishin S (2015) Australian Art: A History. Melbourne: Miegunyah, 2013.

Hughes R (1966) The Art of Australia: A Critical Survey. Melbourne: Penguin, 1966.

McDonald J (2008) Art of Australia. Sydney: Pan McMillan.

McLean I (2016) Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art. London: Reaktion.

Sayers A (2001) Australian Art. London: Oxford University Press.

Smith B (1962) Australian Painting, 1788-1960. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.