Crosscurrents in Australian Landscape Painting and Australian Literature

Volume 26, number 1, May 1999 Morag Fraser SUBSTANCE AND ILLUSION: CROSSCURRENTS IN AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE PAINTING AND AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE A lecture delivered as the Cohn Roderick Lecture for James Cook University at Townsville and Cairns in August 1998 by Morag Fraser, at the invitation of The Foundation for Australian Literary Studies and the School of Humanities. I want to explore some of the ways in which Australian literature and Australian art—painting particularly—inform one another; how both art and literature can be read over time; how those readings, like distant relations, can be different yet bear traces of connection; how by gridding them together we pick up new reflections, refractions and understandings without violating the integrity of the words or images that have been laid down. I take the analytical-comparative path for two reasons: the writings and paintings I'll be dealing with are themselves intrinsically rewarding. It would be enough to talk about them because they are extraordinary works. But put them together and what begins to emerge for me, and what I hope to be able to demonstrate, is a subtle and complex understanding of this country and its history, revealed in and through the way its settler and indigenous artists and writers have rendered it at different points in our recent history. In other words, this is a literary and art-historical loin-up-the-dots exercise that tries to get at a deeper conception of Australia, this great southern or antipodean continent—certainly a richer one than our current politics, our current state of being almost, seems to yield. The writers and painters I've selected are all women and men of their time. Their work, from a painting by John Glover to a story by Helen Garner, dates from 1830 to 1998. That's 168 years—five or sixgenerations. They tell the truth in their fashion, as artists do. They are explorers, not slaves to truth or fact. They don't want to nail the truth down; indeed they know that they can't. Whether born before or after D.H. Lawrence wrote his famous caveat, they would get its gist: "if you try to nail anything down in the novel, either it kills the novel or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail." 1 They are not all novelists of course, so let's call them simply fellow travellers with truth. In their various and individual styles they are faithful to what they iirjc 11 Morag Fraser, "Substance and Illusion" perceive around them; they're alive to the quirks and twists of life, the rough edges, the blurs, ironies and occasional epiphanies. Their art can catch and fix for us what Shakespeare's Hamlet called "the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure." I am going to look at seven painters and three writers. (The imbalance signals nothing more than the difference between the speeds of sound and light: stories take longer to read than images.) I'll call them all Australian even though many of them were born elsewhere. The salient experiences of the writing and painting I want to examine occurred here. And that in itself says something about what it means to be that curious antipodean amalgam of migrant and Australian settler. Some of what I will have to say to you is part of an autobiographical investigation that I ought to declare now: I have for a long time been fascinated by the dynamic connection between landscape and human understanding—the way the physical environment, the natural world, bends and fashions us without our being aware of the process. There are Darwinian, evolutionary ways of expressing this idea. I am more likely, given background and training, to think about it as a process of construction and understanding of metaphor and myth. The two ways are, of course, not mutually exclusive. Let me tell you one story to illustrate briefly what I mean. I was driving in the country north of Cambridgeshire a few years back with an old friend. He is a philosopher, a sometime actor, and Welsh. Country minded. As we passed out of the flat fen land of East Anglia into the more undulating north where the hedgerows start again on both sides of the road, he asked me if I understood that other famous bit of Hamlet: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, I Rough-hew them how we will—" If you remember, it comes at the beginning of Act 5, when Hamlet, in a strange new state of philosophical calm, is talking to Horatio. "Of course I understand them," I said. "Yes, but do you understand about the hedgerows?" he asked. "What about the hedgerows?" "Well, Shakespeare's native county was full of them." "So?" "Just take a good look at them." It was winter so you could see the bones of the hedgerows on either side of us. "See how the natural uprights of the bushes and trees are bent and plaited?" He leant across me and pointed, swerving as he did so. 12 Volume 26, number 1, May 1999 I told him I didn't care for first hand experience of ditches. But he was right: the leaves on the hedgerow were sparse so you could trace the way the boughs were woven sideways through one another, neat as a pandanus dilly bag. Then came the speculative lecture: Shakespeare, who knew his hédgerows, had maybe done a stint as a hewer or a shaper when he was a lad. Hedgerows were regularly trimmed by a team of two workers: a rough hewer who nicked the trunk or bough with a great knife, so that it would bend, and a shaper who turned the injury to good account by twining the branches laterally into the intended pattern so they grew into a thick shield against marauding sheep or cattle or humans. Or cars driven by Weishmen. In other words, what I have always read as one of the grander poetic utterances of hope is indeed that, but wonderfully, it also comes out of close, practical observation of a homely agricultural practice. Espalier with an extra dimension. So the natural world and the metaphysical world meet in the layered language of a great writer who could move effortlessly between the earth he came out of and the intellectual hothouse of the Elizabethan theatrical milieu he so dominated. It could never have been easy for settler Australians to achieve that seemingly timeless Shakespearean intimacy with the land. We are too late, too post- industrial revolution. Now we are almost post-technological revolution. European matrices of imagination don't solve this continent for us. This really is another place. Most of us are certainly not at peace in the land, in Australia, yet: too many issues remain to be settled. I surely don't need to itemise the political and legislative battles over land of even this decade to prove that point. So you can expect disjunctions between this land, this country that holds us and the way in which we have recorded our occupation of it. The strains show. But they are instructive, and sometimes they make that leap of imagination one has no right to expect of human beings but for which one is humbly grateful after the event. It is as though the land itself will have its demands met. Let me show you one marvellous early rendering of this place. It's John Glover's 1837 work called, weirdly enough, The Bath of Diana. I think we now see it with late twentieth-century eyes—it looks like the landscape we know, high-gold, grass-toned in ways we recognise. Not gummed into gloomy Victorian propriety with studio varnish. It is certainly not a transplanted Turner, like this Conrad Martens of 1836. LN1c 13 0 I J 0 0 '0 I r z il *40 U '9 Morag Fraser, "Substance and Illusion" Look at the light in the Martens—put robes on the foreground Aborigines and the whole effulgent picture could be picturesque Italy. But not so the Glover. For 1837, it is extraordinary. Examine the detail—even that characteristically Australian, dead, messy eucalypt branch cluttering up the foreground. John Glover was 64 when he arrived in Launceston in 1831. An Englishman, he grew up in Leicester; he had exhibited in the Royal Academy, also in Paris. Louis XVIII had awarded him a royal medal. Yet in his mid-sixties, he could tune his eye to a radically different landscape, a radically different light. Even those curling trees come close don't they? But for all his astonishing intensity of fresh observation, Glover was also carrying lumber. Simon Schama, in his great tome of a book, Landscape and Memory, remarks of the European landscape artists who went to America and wanted to paint it afresh, as a new Eden, that they were "involuntary legatees, conscious or unconscious of an ancient and persistent metaphorical tradition." They carried Europe with them in their heads. And so did John Glover. Think about the title again: The Bath of Diana. Glover has introduced an elemental, violent Greek myth into his minutely observed, scrupulously depicted Tasmania. For a fuller analysis than mine you should look at Tim Bonyhady's discussion in the Sotheby's catalogue of April 17, 1989.2 But for now, and briefly, look at the poses of the group on the bank. By one reading they are a naturalist grouping of Tasmanian Aborigines; by another, equally valid, a classic posing: the figures could have come straight off any entablature in Athens.

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