Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0020/00207.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 29KB | 475 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00207}
$Pretitle{369}
$Title{Australia
Chapter 7A.   Artistic and Intellectual Expression}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Donald P. Whitaker}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{australian
australia
arts
century
first
colonial
style
period
artistic
nationalism}
$Date{1974}
$Log{}
Country:     Australia
Book:        Australia, A Country Study
Author:      Donald P. Whitaker
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1974

Chapter 7A.   Artistic and Intellectual Expression

     The state of Australian arts in mid-1973 could only be described as very
healthy. Both the fine arts and the performing arts were receiving
enthusiastic support from the government and the public at large. Australia
was beginning to emerge on the international scene with a number of painters,
writers, musicians and dancers. In particular, 1973 seemed to be a year of
recognition for Australian arts; the year saw the opening of the imposing
Sydney Opera House, considered by many an architectural masterpiece, and the
bestowal of the Nobel Prize for literature upon an Australian.

     None of the Australian arts, however, could be cited for great
originality; by and large, Australia has been a follower and not a leader. The
artistic forms employed by the country's artists have developed elsewhere,
most frequently in the British Isles and America. Australian artists, however,
have had great success in applying these forms to specifically Australian
subjects, and nationalism has been a strong theme in the development of an
Australian artistic identity. But despite the great vigor of the arts and the
undeniable talent of many Australian artists and performers, no uniquely
Australian art forms other than Aboriginal have emerged. The influx of
southern and eastern European immigrants that followed World War II may,
however, help to provide the previously absent diversity of cultural
background that often stimulates originality in the arts.

     Such changes in art forms that have been adopted by Australians have
taken place relatively slowly and have, characteristically, generally been
accepted with reluctance. Were it possible to generalize about a nation's
artistic tastes, it would have to be said that Australian tastes tend toward
the concrete and the conservative. This conservatism may be partly responsible
for the large numbers of talented Australians who have left their country to
seek training or careers in Europe and the United States. No list of notable
Australian artists, writers, or performers is without a substantial number of
expatriates. Nevertheless, the nearly two hundred years of artistic history
was, by the mid-1970s, beginning to form a national cultural consciousness.
There was a general feeling that Australia had at long last come of age in the
arts. The Australian readership, in particular, has become increasingly better
educated and more discerning, and the public as a whole has provided a
considerable market for literature. Nevertheless, many Australian writers
continued to feel ambivalent about their culture, preferring to think of
themselves as citizens of the world first and Australians only by chance.

     The intellectual community in the mid-1970s was beginning to make an
impression on the Australian consciousness. There was evidence that much of
the anti-intellectualism felt by many to permeate the society had in general
dissipated.

     Australians have achieved some success in the physical sciences; scholars
of ability were active in virtually every discipline, and three Australians
have won the Nobel Prize for medicine. The general tendency in intellectual
expression was toward the practical rather than the abstract. There were no
official constraints on the free interchange of ideas, but many intellectuals
felt that government censorship of books and films coming into Australia
tended, to some extent, to cut them off from the rest of the world.

THE ARTS IN AUSTRALIA

     The development of Australian arts can be conveniently divided into three
major periods. During the colonial period, between the first European
settlement in 1788 and the rise of Australian nationalism in the 1880s,
Australian arts were highly derivative of British models. Paintings of the
Australian countryside tended to look more like England than Australia, and a
current of nostalgia for the mother country ran through much of the
literature.

     Starting in 1880 the rising tide of political nationalism carried over to
the arts. There emerged a search for an expression of Australian uniqueness
and worthiness that characterized the arts until the outbreak of World War II;
in some respects this search has continued into the 1970s. Since World War II
Australia has entered a new era in which its artists and writers have begun to
treat subjects less parochially and with a maturity that has won for some an
international reputation.

The Arts in Colonial Australia

     During the first century of European settlement in Australia, the arts
drew heavily on the Irish and British origins of the settlers. The traditional
artistic forms of the mother country were used in portraying Australian
subjects without undergoing any sort of major transformation.

Literature

     Most of the writers in the first century of colonization concerned
themselves with description or with documentary subjects. Nonfiction at first
was generally a depiction of convict life. Later it turned to life in the
goldfields and to the problems encountered by settlers in coping with a new
and harsh environment. A few of the early eyewitness reports and memoirs were
not without literary merit; an example was Watkin Tench's A Complete Account
of the Settlement at Port Jackson in New South Wales, published in 1793. Many
of the accounts of the newly settled continent were written primarily for
British rather than Australian consumption, with the intent of enticing new
immigrants.

     Novelists tended to concentrate on subjects that offered the most
striking contrasts to life in the British Isles-the strange and rugged
environment; the problem of convicts, settlers, and miners; and the exploits
of bushrangers (see Glossary). The adventure stories of Marcus Clarke
(1846-81), dealing with convict life, and those of Rolf Bolderwood (pen name
of T.A. Browne, 1826-1915), concerned with the Australian gold rush of the
mid-1800s, were among the first successful novels (see ch. 2).

     Poetry during the colonial period was largely imitative of English
models. Two native-born Australian poets achieved some popularity: Charles
Harpur (1813-68), whose poetry imitated that of John Milton and Alexander
Pope; and Henry Kendall (1839-82), whose principal models were George Gordon
Byron and Alfred Tennyson. Much of their pride in the country also found
expression in their verse. The poetry of William Charles Wentworth (1793-1872)
specifically foreshadowed the nationalism that was to become characteristic of
Australian literature toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Folk Arts

     The British and Irish immigrants who first came to Australia brought with
them a rich heritage of folk culture that included folk dances, ballads, and
legends; the most vital and innovative form of colonial artistic expression
developed in the area of folk legends and ballads. Although no specifically
Australian dances emerged-Scottish and Irish immigrants retained their own
dances-indigenous Australian folk legends did emerge, a few of which have
survived to the present day. Several mythical animals were purported by these
legends to inhabit the bush (see Glossary). Two, the bunyip and the gumpa,
were thought to be large aquatic animals. The legend concerning the gumpa is
believed to have originated in the upper basin of the Darling River in New
South Wales. A third mythical creature, the gubba, was said to emit an
unearthly scream and was presumably found on the Lamington Plateau, near
Brisbane. Many legends concerning bushrangers also developed, mostly as
roman