A history of Australian art 1830-1930 : told through the lives of the objects

Abstract

This is a history of Aboriginal and settler art between 1830 and 1930. The focus is a close study of the contexts in which some of Australia's best-known works of art were produced, collected, and, over time, assessed. Written from the humanist perspective, the thesis shows history as shaped by people; thus it incorporates a multiplicity of human perspectives; the obverse of a history based on the operation of abstract forces. There was a reason for taking the humanist approach. Traditionally, the histories of Australian art have been divided by taxonomies of race and civilisation. Without doubt the division had effect in the past assessment of art however there was every reason why it should not govern a revised history. The context for re-imagining the past is that, in our own time, the Aboriginal people's capacity for cross-cultural expression, via a dialogical mode, has earned their art a prominent place in contemporary art world-wide. Rather than writing theoretically, the solution was to build an alternative history on the basics, on specific information about objects and the contexts of their production. The fate of the objects subsequently - the collecting of them, and their periodic assessment over time, became a means of incorporating the explanations of art history and anthropology without having to endorse the viewpoint of either. The text was structured according to sequential themes of land-claims, cultural allegiance, and cultural reformation (with the observation that the themes continue as influential aspects of art to the present). Aboriginal art was observed to take a dialogical mode from early on, whereas art in the western mode has only recently - under globalisation- shown signs of a comparable self-objectification leading (possibly) to a dialogic.