Australia at the RA

To the Royal Academy for their latest show, Australia. What a joy it is – filled both with old friends and new acquaintances. And a real credit to its curators ‒ Ron Radford and Anne Gray from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and Kathleen Soriano of the RA  in London.

The last major exhibition of Australian art in Britain took place at the Tate Gallery in 1962 ‒ over half a century ago. Although, as the catalogue shows, it had plenty of fine paintings, it was treated in a patronising fashion by the London art establishment, only “rather better than the more woeful prophets might have predicted,” according to The Times.

That kind of condescension has a long track-record. The critic RAM Stevenson (Robert Louis’s cousin) recalled the first substantial showing of Australian work in London in 1886, which included four paintings by Tom Roberts (including “Coming South”), as “still English, or, to speak more correctly, showed us fashions of painting that were founded upon the English trade picture… mechanical drawings and geological, botanical or topographical diagrams.”

By 1898, on the occasion of the second major Australian exhibition (at the Grafton Gallery), Stevenson was more enthusiastic: “The cleverest, the most brilliant, the highest toned work in the show is Mr Streeton’s square canvas, ‘Early Summer’.”*

The current exhibition, focused on landscape, is filled with major works, many of which have travelled around the world for the first time. Let’s see whether it unleashes a wave of patronising comment reminiscent of 1886. 

*Was this painting “Early Summer – Gorse in Bloom”, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Australia in Adelaide?

Immigrants as the drivers of economic growth

In the 1980s, when I lived in Sydney, Aussies prided themselves on having created a truly harmonious multicultural society. It always seemed to me to be overstated, so I commissioned a study rather provocatively entitled “Racism in Australia”.

At that time the latest influx of immigrants was from Vietnam. Many of them were highly qualified in a multitude of areas, but they arrived having lost the war with the Communists and with little or no English. They took any job they could get, many of them as taxi drivers or taking in laundry. Within a very short space of time they were setting up businesses of all kinds. And their children were doing spectacularly well at school and university.

A striking insight came during one focus group, when an Aussie mum said: “I walk past the university library late evening. And the lights are still on in the library. And I know who’s in there working…”

Working too hard, apparently. It was those Vietnamese, of course. Resentment seems to follow every new immigrant wave.

It occurred to me as a result of that study that in reality Australia’s long-term success economically had been continuously driven by successive waves of immigrants – from England, Ireland and Scotland, Italy, Greece and Lebanon, Serbia and Croatia, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Singapore, Japan and so on.

In a fairly recent mixed society, such as Australia (or indeed the USA), with hindsight, this is rather obvious. But my sense is that it also applies in less evident ways to the “older” nations… such as Britain.

Above: "Shearing the Rams" by Tom Roberts, 1888-90, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Walter Barnett at 150

I missed Walter Barnett’s 150th birthday. He was born on 25 January 1862.

Walter who? H Walter Barnett. Australia’s first world-class portrait photographer. I was lucky enough to rediscover him and his fine work and thought Something Should Be Done about it. But what?

So on a trip to Sydney, I went to see my friend Leo Schofield, at that time director of the Sydney Festival. Leo knows everything worth knowing about the arts in Australia.

“What do you think of Walter Barnett’s work, Leo?” I asked as innocently as possible.

“Walter who?”

“You know, the Australian portrait photographer,” I replied.

“No. Don’t think I know of him,” said Leo.

Cue for me to lay out on Leo’s desk a dozen or so photocopies of Barnett portraits – the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, the great pianist Paderewski, Mark Twain, the “father” of Australia Sir Henry Parkes, artists Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, Dame Nellie Melba, actress Sarah Bernhardt (above), sculptor Auguste Rodin and so on.

There was a pause.

“Will you curate an exhibition for the Festival?” asked Leo.

“Well yes. I’d be delighted to.”

That morning, Leo called Andrew Sayers, director of the recently-opened National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, and so Legends: The Art of Walter Barnett became an NPG project that ran in Sydney, Canberra and the Mornington Peninsula.

Overall it was visited by some 186,000 people.