i am, you are, we are australian Rex Butler | A.D.S. Donaldson The “lesson of Sydney” is always to put Deleuze in your title. Sarah Wilson, email to author, 12 October, 2012 Recently one of us was watching the BBC comedy series Rev., starring Tom Hollander, set in a small parish in Hackney, East London. The Rev (Adam Smallbone) is a liberal, innercity priest, happily married and thinking of having children. One night, after a busy day of church business, he is lying in bed with his wife Alex, both of them reading. He is reading Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop, a choice that is meant to indicate his sensitivity and commitment to the job, but more tellingly for us his wife, in the context of their wanting to start a family, is reading Christos Tsiolkas’ international bestseller The Slap. Putting her book down, Alex suddenly announces to Adam, “I’ve decided we shouldn’t have a child”. Received in Australia as a novel about North Melbourne, seen through the eyes of Rev. The Slap becomes a universal narrative about the challenges of modern family life. This use of The Slap in an international comedy series tells us something revealing about ourselves. Against all of our attempts to localize and nationalize its message, even if leavened with a sprinkling of multiculturalism, seen from the outside it is shown to be coming from anywhere and speaking to everyone. Inner-city Melbourne is transported to the East End of London in a way Tsiolkas could not have imagined, even though he may secretly have dreamt of it. And the joke is sealed in Rev. when, even though Reverend Adam does not recognise Tsiolkas’ book and thus why Alex is telling him this, the audience does and laughs both at the fact they do and at their insight into Adam’s unworldly character. But let us take another example from perhaps the other end of the literary spectrum. The other of us was recently reading a book to one of his children, Hergé’s Flight 714, originally
in French Flight 714 to Sydney. Consistent with Hergé’s penchant for exotic settings (Tibet, America, the Congo), here he imagines Tintin, his intrepid boy reporter, travelling to what might have been understood to be the other end of the world, in order to attend a supposed Astro-Nautical Congress. Of course, he doesn’t quite manage to get there, with the illustrated novel ending with Tintin and Captain Haddock reboarding their plane at Jakarta after a series of alternately comedic and dramatic incidents. However, in another way, Tintin—or at least the young readers of Hergé’s book—were already in Australia, already imaginatively inhabiting the place he was travelling to. Or, to put it the other way around, Australia, as with Rev. in England, was already in France. (In some ways, indeed, the trip Hergé was imagining here for Tintin was reprising the real world travels of Paul Gauguin, who visited Brisbane, Sydney and Auckland on the way to Tahiti in 1895; and, inversely, the famous Melanesian room Gauguin erected in his studio back in Paris after he returned from his first trip to the Pacific was something like the cartoon Hergé would have drawn of Tintin’s Australian adventure.) For Hergé, at least this is the joke of the book, Australia is so far away that, like a kind of magical kingdom, Tintin can never actually get there. But, in fact, by the time Hergé wrote Flight 714 in 1968 that magical land had been in France for more than 150 years, since at least the time of Nicolas Baudin’s 1800-03 expedition, which brought back to France the fauna and flora of what was then called Nouvelle-Hollande. Indeed, between 1803 and 1814, hundreds of species of Australian plants and animals made their way to Napoleon’s wife Josephine’s primary residence, the Château de Malmaison outside Paris. The first kangaroo arrived in 1804, followed soon after by black swans. Acacias, melaleucas and eucalypts were planted, and were thereafter introduced and made popular throughout the South of France. Indeed, on the windswept island of St Helena in the Atlantic Ocean after his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon cultivated the first time two more
Antipodean specimens to remind him of Josephine: the Sydney Golden Wattle and the Australian Everlasting Daisy, both still thriving on the island today.1 It should not be surprising, therefore, that the Australian tradition of landscape painting, dominated as it is by representations of the gumtree, from the Port Jackson painter through von Guérard, the Heidelberg School and up to Fred Williams, should also be a French tradition, even a European one. We only have to think of Frenchman Henri Matisse’s Landscape with Eucalyptus Trees and River (1908), with its thickly painted deep greens and royal blues, to see him responding to the Australian landscape. But Matisse was not the only European artist to paint the gum tree, and we can even write a certain stylistic history of its depiction in twentieth century European art. We would pass here from the Belgian Theo van Rysselberghe’s Neo-Impressionist Eucalyptus at St Tropez (1906), which offers a view of the Mediterranean seen through distinctive sunlit gums set vertically in the foreground, through the Dutch Piet Mondrian’s post-Cubist Eucalyptus (1912), which has the twin branches of a flowering gum rising out of a vase, through the Frenchman Paul Signac’s pointillist The Eucalyptus Tree (1913), which features a single dotted blue and yellow gum in a vertical format, and on to Italian Giacomo Balla’s Futurist Incandescent No. 5–Eucalyptus (1914), which employs a colour scheme of hazy blue, green and yellow, so often said to be the distinctive colours of the Australian landscape. (It is, indeed, a tradition extended up to World War II, first by the French Raoul Dufy with his striking A eucalyptus [1926-27], then by the German Hein Heckroth, whose surrealistic Australia [1941] reflected his internment as an enemy alien, and finally by the German Kurt Schwitter’s collage Out of the Dark [1943], with its cut-up images of Tasmanian apples.) What is all of this to suggest? Certainly, what we see is that, if there has been a long-running tradition of gumtree nationalism in his country, carried on after Federation by Hans Heysen and Arthur Streeton, there has