Fiona Hall Black boy (Xanthorrhoea australis) 1989–90 aluminium, tin 24.5 x 11 x 1.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 1994 © Fiona Hall IRN 6104
Robert Campbell Jr Abo history (facts) 1988 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 130 x 200 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 1988 Courtesy the artist’s estate and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery IRN 82130
Fred Williams returned from London converted to modernism and, on first sight of his homeland in January 1957, immediately resolved ‘to resurrect the gum-tree’ from the stale conventions of Heysenesque landscape. A group of near-city, beach and alpine landscapes by Williams constitute a lyrical centrepiece to the period—a zone of peculiarly Australian overall luminosity, extended space, subtle bleached and jewelled colours, varied temperatures, and intimate touch. Postmodernism, exemplified by Imants Tillers’s Shadow of the hereafter 2007, analyses ideas and cultural concepts, not visual or tactile sensations. The vast painting appropriates the ever-popular Hans Heysen’s
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small watercolour Land of the Oratunga 1932. Ghost-white stencilled lettering recites the names of settler ghost towns and of Aboriginal tribes who no longer haunt these inland ranges. Dark semicircles resemble the Aboriginal ideogram for a seated figure and can be read as a muttering of lost meanings and intercultural misunderstandings. Aboriginality was the big idea in late twentieth-century Australian art. The second big idea for the period was environmentalism. Peter Dombrovskis’s magical photograph Morning mist, Rock Island Bend 1981, taken on Tasmania’s Franklin River, helped change an Australian government. The wild river was to be drowned for a hydro-electricity dam; a protest poster used the image to ask, ‘Could
you vote for a party that will destroy this?’, and in 1983 many could not. Fiona Hall’s Paradisus terrestris 1989–90, the first of three suites of miniature intricate sculptures fashioned from recycled sardine cans, is a postmodernist take on botany. She sets up human-botanical parallels in diverse fertilisation procedures and recognises that many plants, though unexploited economically by colonists, were an important source of Aboriginal bush tucker, shelter and craft. Even if Australian nature—the world’s poorest soils and most erratic climate—is the main creator of our generally free and co-operative Indigenous and settler cultures, notes of pleasant otherness in immigrant English-elm botany—Daniel Crooks’s video