Patronising Poms

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.

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?