I suppose that it was too much to expect.
While there have been some very positive notices about the Australia exhibition at the RA in the British press (notably in the Daily Telegraph and FT Weekend), many have struck the usual note of patronising dismissal.
For example, Adrian “I am certainly no expert on Australian art” Searle in The Guardian tells us that it’s: “… a wobbly ride through the past and into the present”, the Aboriginal paintings “extremely difficult to read”, the silverware “ghastly”, the flowering of the late nineteenth century dismissed as the work of “Barbizon-school émigrés, mediocre European impressionists and would-be symbolists”. And from then on, according to Searle, it gets “much more problematic”.
When I went to live and work in Sydney in the 1980s, I knew
all about the Aussie dislike of “whinging poms”.
But, after a while, it became clear to me that whinging isn’t
the only, or even the major, source of complaint. That is the sense that
Australians have of being patronised by us. Sometimes this springs from the
particular style of English humour, but so often it is just naked
condescension.
It had never occurred to me that this lay at the heart of
Australian-English relations for generations. That is, until I picked up a
book, Recollections, by the English-born writer David Christie Murray, published
in 1908. Murray had lived in Melbourne in the 1890s.
“I have never in my life known anything more offensively
insolent than the patronising tolerance which I have seen the travelling
Cockney extend to men of the colonies, who were worth a thousand of him,” wrote
Murray. “I have seen an Englishman unintentionally insult a host at his own
table, and set everybody on tenterhooks by his blundering assumption that the colonists
are necessarily inferior to the home-bred people. Nobody likes this sort of
thing.”
You’d think we might have learned by now.
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