Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White LandscapeMapping the tradition of pastoral painting in Australia, charting its entanglement with the great pastoral settlement of the country, this new interpretation of contact history argues that the twin strategies of friendship and betrayal were used to defeat black sovereignty over the land and that these entered the narrative of the new nation’s artists. Pastoral capitalism became the means by which the country was won, while the ancient frameworks of the pastoral were used to celebrate the pleasures of land ownership and honor the rewards of labor. And in the 20th century, with the emergence of modernism and fascism, the nation was reawakened to the values of rural Australia--in an excess of pastoraphilia. But with the defeat of European fascism the pastoral landscape lost its currency and in its place came a new pastoral landscape in the art of the great black painters of the outback. |
Contents
List of Paintings 69 | 6 |
Advertising the Land | 45 |
The Failure of Civic Humanism in Tasmania | 65 |
Is it Cricket? Pastoral and Georgic in South Australia | 95 |
Von Guerards Dilemma | 120 |
Two Versions of Pastoral | 143 |
How Pastoral Capitalism Made the Heidelberg School | 162 |
Europes Endowment in the Landscape | 183 |
Et in Arcadia ego | 231 |
Endnotes | 261 |
285 | |