Article: The Unaustralian: Doubling Double Nation

by Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson

UnAustralian art is the art of our present, those missing years since 1970 in McLean’s book. But the real point – to say this for the last time and to conclude – is that we have always been like this. This history has been written for a long time, just not in the name of “Australia”. Those stories we tell of immigrants and expatriates from the past read as though they could have happened yesterday, and we can identify with them as if they were ours. We are all first of all non-national, non-Australian, So many of us, nearly all of us, are immigrants.

Ian North, AM, 1945-2024

by Peter Beilharz

Ian North was a major shaker in the Australian art world. Not that you would guess on meeting him – mild mannered, soft in style, a gentle man who could nevertheless change the way you saw the world with a wink, a raised eyebrow or a single phrase. His personal style was minimal, and this helped make him lovable as well as determined.

Exceptionalism and Provincialism: Re-Thinking the Antipodes

by David Roberts

Peter Beilharz captures this ongoing process of exchange, fed by the flow of people, goods, capital and ideas between the old and the new worlds, between metropolitan centre and open frontier in terms of cultural traffic. Cultural traffic in turn can be understood both in the direct and wider sense as translation. As the act of relocation, transformation and recreation, translation epitomizes the idea of supplementarity and in turn the question of identity. In the following, I shall be thinking with and against Peter’s thinking of the Antipodes with the idea of translation in mind.