Posted by Simon on May 12, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/12/australia-reviews/
‘Warra, warra‘
(First recorded words of the first indigenous people met by the captain of the first convict fleet to Australia in 1788. They mean: ‘Go away’)
Prime fact: The First Fleet of 11 ships transporting convicts from Britain to Australia landed at Botany Bay on 20 January 1788.
If you’re my age you might remember watching the Australian journalist and art critic Robert Hughes (1938 to 2012) presenting his ground-breaking TV series about modern art, ‘The Shock of the New’, back in 1980. He looked like a boxer and expressed feisty, sometimes controversial, opinions in a muscular, punchy prose style.
Seven years later Hughes published his epic study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, ‘The Fatal Shore’ (1987). It became an international best-seller because there were few if any histories of Australia which presented the facts of the country’s early history with such a combination of solid research and journalistic brio.
‘The Founding of Australia by Captain Arthur Phillip RN, Sydney Cove, 26 January 1788’ by Algernon Talmage (1937) [The British flag was not officially planted until 7 February 1788, when possession was formally proclaimed]
The narrative starts dramatically with the arrival of the first shipload of convicts at Botany Bay on 20 January 1788. What was the land like that they had arrived at? Hughes gives us several pages description of the astonishingly weird and unique fauna of Australia (pages 3 to 7) and his narrative will go on to be peppered with periodic descriptions of the arid, sunburned, eucalyptus-riddled terrain.
What were the people like that they met? He gives us a ten-page summary of what was then known (1980) about Aboriginal or indigenous culture (pages 7 to 18).
What comes over in his description is the really primitive nature of Aboriginal culture: the Aborigines hadn’t invented the bow and arrow, they had no buildings, they hadn’t even invented the tent (unlike American Indians) because they never stayed long in one place. Some made temporary lean-tos out of bark which the settlers quickly nicknamed ‘humpies’ but their entire way of life was based on firing the bush to catch wildlife, then moving on.
It’s now thought that Australia had been inhabited for over 60,000 years when the Brits arrived. Its inhabitants had developed a patchwork of tribes and peoples and nations, each inhabiting large tracts of land (Australia is only fractionally smaller than the landmass of continental United States, 2,969,907 square miles to America’s 3,119,884 square miles). To this day scholars debate the precise number, but at least 300 languages and language families existed.
The AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of indigenous Australia
The people who inhabited the area of south-east Australia where the Brits landed were called the Iora. They had no concept of private property so the Brits couldn’t barter with them. They didn’t wash, in fact they covered their bodies with fish guts as a prophylactic against disease and so stank to high heaven. They treated their women appallingly. Unwanted children were aborted by ingesting herbal medicines or simply thumping the pregnant woman’s stomach. Deformed babies were killed at birth. There was no room for the weak in the Indigenous people’s nomadic economy.
Hughes’s description of the Aborigines sets the tone of the entire book. It is going to be deliberately anti-Romantic, debunking myths, puncturing legends, showing that the reality is always more squalid and sordid than the rose-tinted stories he and his generation were told at school or prim progressives tell each other today about the noble savage. In this story, nobody is noble.
According to the estimates available to Hughes, when the Brits arrived in 1788 there were an estimated 300,000 Indigenous Australians across a continent the size of America. No wonder it felt almost ’empty’ to the Europeans: no towns, no villages, no buildings of any kind, no agriculture, nothing that registered with them as civilisation or culture.
(I wouldn’t be surprised if someone contacts me to say this description is unduly negative. Hughes makes every effort to be fair to the Indigenous Australians, and to depict their heart-breaking plight, but he was writing nearly 40 years ago, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of his account is wrong and/or nowadays considered offensive. I apologise in advance if it is and am happy to be corrected.)
Why was the transportation policy created by the British? Hughes gives a fascinating review of the growth of criminality in Georgian Britain (the long century from 1714 to 1830), which powerfully conveys the stink, poverty and abject misery endured by most of the population (pages 19 to 42).
The Georgians refused to set up a police service, as many nations on the continent had, because of an obstinate belief that it would infringe on the ‘liberty of the subject’ which they fetishised. (Plus the French had a form of police who had the right to enter and search private dwellings, so if the French had one, it must be bad.) But at the same time, the second half of the 18th century witnessed a population explosion which resulted in a surplus of young men who migrated from the country to the city, discovered there were no jobs for them, and so took to crime.
In the absence of a police force the Georgian authorities resorted to passing ever more draconian laws, an astonishing number of them carrying the ultimate sanction i.e. the death penalty. Eventually, there were some 200 statutes carrying the death penalty on the books and you could be hanged for burning a house or hut, a rick of corn, for poaching a rabbit, for damaging a fishpond, for cutting down an ornamental shrub of appearing on a high road with a sooty face (p.29). These were in fact provisions of a particular law, the Waltham Black Act of 1723, designed to stop agrarian unrest in Hampshire (the lawbreakers moved at night with blacked-up faces, hence the oddly specific provision). But most crime was urban and the result of poverty and starvation. As you read on you come across plenty of examples of people transported for life for stealing a loaf of bread, some butter, some bacon etc.
Middle-class people could be transported too. An architect was sentenced to death for forging a contract, commuted to transportation for 14 years (p.297). A satirical poet, Michael Massey Robinson, tried to blackmail an ironmonger by threatening to publish a scurrilous poem about him and was transported for life (p.300).
Hughes describes the rituals of hanging day and the long trek of the victims’ cart from Newgate prison to Tyburn ‘tree’, the sturdy wooden frame situated where Marble Arch is now, the route lined with cheering Londoners, the actual hangings witnessed by crowds of up to 30,000, drinking heavily, pullulating with pickpockets and whores, the whole thing, paradoxically, a festival of criminality, something which outraged moralists deplored in Boswell’s day (1760s and 70s) and Dickens was still complaining about in the 1850s (pages 31 to 36).
‘The Idle Prentice Executed at Tyburn’ by William Hogarth (1747)
In fact Hughes returns to the question of class and crime repeatedly throughout the book. I suppose it’s obvious but I hadn’t thought about the way the policy of transportation was merely one aspect of British penal policy. In other words, it was entirely dependent upon and reflected 80 years of British social and economic history. What was happening in Britain entirely dictated who was sent to Australia, and when and why and in what numbers.
In other words, the book is as much a social history of Britain during this period as it is of Australia. Thus there’s a lot more detail than you’d expect about, especially early on, about, for example, the geography, slums and criminal classes of Georgian London.
Britain had no nationwide prison system, in fact at least half of the prisons were privately owned and run (p.37). There was no belief in rehabilitation, prisons were just regarded as dumping sites for toxic males to stew in their own juice.
By the 1770s the prisons had become so overcrowded that the authorities had the bright idea of sending the ever-increasing population of convicts to prison ships or ‘hulks’, the rotting shells of decommissioned navy ships moored in harbours like Portsmouth and Plymouth. In 1776 Parliament passed the ‘Hulks Act’ (16 Geo III, c.43) (p.41). These hulk-bound prisoners were used as labourers in the naval dockyards and, in the picture below, can be seen being taken by boat from a hulk to their work on the mainland.
Prison hulk at Deptford, London, after a painting by Samuel Prout (about 1826)
One of the little known facts about the period which I found fascinating is that the practice of transportation was already well established, but it was transportation to the American colonies. The Transportation Act of 1717 had begun the process of sending indentured servants to Britain’s colonies in the Americas 53 years before Australia was even discovered. Between 1717 and 1777 as many as 40,000 convicts were sent to America for seven or 14-year periods. They were sold to shipping contractors who then sold them on in America to plantation owners in the Caribbean or mainland in what Hughes describes as a ‘thinly-disguised form of slavery’ (pages 40 to 41).
But when they declared independence in 1776 the Americans refused to accept any more British criminals. Anyway, as Hughes points out, they didn’t need them. By the year of independence more African slaves were arriving in America every year (about 47,000) than white convicts had done in the previous 60 years put together (40,000) (p.41).
At first the British authorities thought the Americans would give up their fight for independence. It took until 1783 for the government to finally accept American independence and another few years for the full implications to be worked out for Britain’s overflowing prisons. By the early 1780s even the hulks were overflowing and William Pitt’s government was receiving angry demands from MPs for Plymouth and Portsmouth to do something about them. There began to be riots aboard the hulks, convicts rebelling against the disgusting conditions. In one riot aboard a prison hulk, in 1786, eight convicts were killed and 36 wounded (p.65).
It’s fascinating to read Hughes’s account of the way the mounting complaints of MPs with hulks in their constituencies became a real political problem for Pitt and drove him to appoint a commission to look into ways of disposing of the convicts which filled them – surprising that the problem of what to do with Britain’s surplus convict population became such a leading political issue. It crossed my mind it was a little like the refugee crisis of our own day: successive governments keep promising to do something decisive about it and keep dismally failing. And both involve boats and the problem of what to do with unwanted people…
Fascinating to learn that, as a result, the British authorities were open to all suggestions, and that a number of entrepreneurs came up with bold and crazy schemes. One was to transport the convicts to the island of Lemane 400 miles up the River Gambia and set up an African penal colony there (p.64). Or how about a penal colony somewhere off the coast of South America?
Zeroing in on the continent which was eventually chose, Hughes gives us a potted history of European theories and encounters with the legendary southern continent before Captain Cook did his first definitive exploration of Australia’s eastern coast (pages 43 to 48). He describes the voyages of Magellan and various intrepid Dutchmen, mentions the Englishman, William Dampier, who touched on the north-west coast of Australia in 1688.
Then, of course, Captain Cook. Hughes gives a typically factual, forthright and gripping account of Cook’s expeditions, devoting some space to the long-running problem for all seafarers of scurvy, and how Cook, a modern innovator in this as so many other things, lost not a single man from scurvy by the savvy use of anti-scorbutics. As Hughes puts it, with typical pith and wryness:
Malt-juice and pickled cabbage put Europeans in Australia, as microchip circuitry would put Americans on the moon. (p.49)
Hughes gives a characteristically thorough and vivid description of Cook’s voyage in the Endeavour (‘a converted Whitby trawler, small and brawny’, p.51). He devotes a fascinating few pages to the technical inventions which had just recently made such map-making voyages more precise and useful, namely John Harrison’s invention of the marine chronometer, a device for solving the problem of calculating longitude while at sea (pages 50 to 57).
Prisons overflowing with unreformable criminals? A newly discovered continent on the other side of the world? The British authorities put two and two together and realised that this was an opportunity to redirect the now-defunct American transportation policy, and on a far larger scale. Fascinating to learn that the policy was accompanied or swayed by a number of other considerations. For example, Admiralty strategists suggested that establishing a colony in Australia would aid in the ongoing conflict with France to establish naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean. Others pointed out the need to have a base in the Far East to compete with the well-established Dutch colonies out there.
Practically minded boosters claimed that the tall pine trees and flax plants Cook had noted on what he named Norfolk Island, 1,000 miles off the Australian coast, could quickly become a commercial business, capable of supplying Royal Navy ships with masts and sails. In the event, none of these pipe dreams were to work out. Sydney is, quite obviously, on the wrong side of the continent to be of use in patrolling the Indian Ocean and the ‘pine’ and ‘flax’ on Norfolk Island turned out to be commercially worthless.
And so, after a great deal of prevaricating, and parliamentary committees, and bickering about the number of ships and who should captain them and how it should be paid for – typical British bumbling – the first convict convoy was dispatched to Australia in May 1787 and arrived in the place Cook had named Botany Bay, on the southeast coast of Australia, on 20 January 1788. It was commanded by Captain Arthur Phillip who was to become first governor of the new penal colony.
Hughes gives a characteristically thorough profile of this modest man (a ‘middle-aged nonentity’) who had had a patchy naval career and was in retirement when contacted by the Admiralty to carry out the policy which had finally been agreed by the government of William Pitt (pages 67 to 71). What comes over is Phillip’s professionalism. Hughes shows that he thought the equipping and provision for a fleet setting out to colonise an entire continent from scratch was hopelessly inadequate and bombarded ministers and Admiralty for more (p.71).
Of the 736 convicts sent at least 431 were guilty of ‘minor theft’ and Hughes gives examples of how pitifully trivial these might be (p.72). The oldest was Dorothy Handland, aged 83, a dealer in rags convicted for 7 years for perjury. The youngest was John Hudson, a chimney sweep aged 9 (p.73).
Hughes gives a characteristically thorough description of the challenges of the 8-month-long voyage (252 days) across 15,000 miles of ocean. Forty-right people died on the journey while 28 were born. All were to be confronted by the immense disappointment of Botany Bay when they finally arrived. Within days Phillips and his lieutenants had realised it was wholly impractical as a settlement, not least due to the thin sandy soil cluttered with eucalypt detritus. The bay was open and unprotected, the water was too shallow to allow the ships to anchor close to the shore, fresh water was scarce, and the soil was poor.
So they sailed up the coast to Port Jackson, the name given to the bay area where Phillip established a settlement he called Sydney, after the current Home Secretary ,Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney (p.87).
Agricultural opportunities turned out to be very poor. Supplies were meagre and Phillip had to introduce rationing which got steadily tighter (p.96). Crops failed or wouldn’t take. The convicts became too tired and listless to work. The first couple of years were dire and some wondered if the entire colony would die of starvation, before the final arrival of the Second Fleet in June 1790.
The Second Fleet was notorious for the poor conditions aboard the vessels, and for cruelty and mistreatment of its convicts. A quarter of the 1,006 convicts transported aboard the fleet died during the voyage and around 40 per cent were dead within six months of arrival in Australia. Hughes describes in stomach-churning detail the disgusting conditions aboard the early convict ships. Not all ships in the fleets had the same standards. Those in which people suffered worse, were worse treated and with the highest death rates came to be called the ‘hell ships’.
Norfolk Island is about 1,000 miles east of the Australian coast. It turned out to be extremely inhospitable, the pine trees weren’t true pines, the flax couldn’t be woven, it was immensely difficult to clear the land for agriculture. A ship bringing supplies and more convicts sank, losing the supplies but adding hundreds of mouths to feed, making 959 in total. All that saved the first settlers from starvation was easy availability of tame mutton birds, Pterodroma melanopus which they slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands. By 1830 the settlers had driven the mutton bird to extinction (p.100).
He devotes a section to the settlement of Van Diemen’s Land off the south coast of Australia under the command of David Collins (pages 120 to 128). The island had named in honour of Anthony van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies who had sent the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman on his voyage of discovery in the 1640s. In 1642 Tasman became the first known European to land on the shores of Tasmania but the Dutch never followed through on the discovery. Now, 150 years later, the British claimed it. The capital, Hobart, was named after the Secretary of State for the Colonies who was the patron of Collins’s expedition.
The island was initially perceived to be less fertile than the land around Sydney and early attempts at farming failed, so the colonists faced starvation. What saved them was the humble kangaroo which was far more common than around Sydney. Every able-bodied man was issued a gun to hunt and kill kangaroo for himself and dependents (wife or children).
As Hughes pithily puts it this reliance on hunting triggered social results, all of them bad. It installed the gun rather than the plough as the totem of survival on the island. It incentivised settlers to ignore long-term planning required for farming and live by day-to-day hunting. And as nearby roos were wiped out and the heavily white settlers ranged further afield it brought them into conflict with the native populations who, more often than not, they shot.
It soon created a fringe class of armed, uncontrollable bushmen, most of whom regarded Aborigines as vermin. (p.126)
With their guns and hinting dogs these men became completely independent of the authorities. They were the first bushrangers. And so were laid the foundations of what would be the only real genocide of the British Empire, the deliberate extermination of the entire native population of Tasmania.
As to the natives, the government had explicitly ordered friendly treatment, enjoining Phillip to ‘conciliate their affections…[and] live in amity and kindness to them.’ At first this held, but what nobody knew was the white ships had brought white infectious diseases, endemic in Britain and entirely unknown in Australia, flu, cholera, smallpox, typhus, which quickly spread. it was a common sight for the early settlers to come across indigenous corpses huddled in the bush where they’d crawled to die. The British incomers were, literally, a plague.
As settlement spread out from Sydney, the Aborigines took to fighting back, raiding farms, killing livestock, singling out for assassination white farmers of community leaders who’d acquired reputations for killing them. Which triggered massacres of unarmed Aborigines by vigilante gangs, for example the Myall Creek massacre when at least 28 unarmed Indigenous Australians were executed by 12 armed colonists on 10 June 1838. Which triggered further revenge raids, and so on, in a deadly spiral downwards into a sustained ‘frontier war’ (pages 272 to 281).
Year by year the shipments came to be called ‘the System’, the process of sending shiploads of convicts to Australia, who had to build their own prisons and barracks for the soldiers who guarded them and pleasant houses for the civil authorities who supervised the whole thing.
Between 1787 and 1868 around 162,000 convicts were sent to Australia and Hughes goes on to give a fascinating and vivid description of every stage of the development of the System.
Hughes is at pains to dispel the stereotype of life under the convict system which he and his generation inherited, which is that it was a living hell on remote ‘secondary’ or punishment settlements on Van Diemen’s Island. On the contrary, most convicts served out their time, then were released to become citizens in the fast-growing new colony.
Only a fraction of the men and women transported to Australia spent any time in these ‘secondary’ settlements, which were as a rule reserved for prisoners who had committed second crimes while in the colony. Most served a few years of their sentences in assignment to a free settler or in government labour, never worse chains, got their tickets-of-leave and in due course were absorbed into colonial society as free citizens. (Introduction, page xiii)
He makes one simple but devastating riposte to the endless cheap jokes about Australia being a land of convicts:
Whatever other conclusions one might draw from our weird national origins, the post-colonial history of Australia utterly exploded the theory of genetic criminal inheritance. Here was a community of people, handpicked over decades for their ‘criminal propensities’ and for no other reason, whose offspring turned out to form one of the most law-abiding societies in the world.
Conditions on the first ten years or so of ships was so appalling they acquired the nickname of ‘hell ships’. Conditions of unbelievable squalor which people who’d sailed on both thought were worse than slave ships. And the condition of the survivors was no better. A propos slavery, an anonymous convict ballad from 1825 runs:
The very day we landed upon the Fatal Shore,
The planters stood around us, full twenty score or more;
They ranked us up like horses and sold us out of hand,
They chained us up to pull the plough, upon Van Dieman’s Land.
Conditions were dire. In the early years the entire colony nearly starved. But as the settlement at Sydney became established so did its reputation for appalling brutality. The descriptions of lashings and floggings which litter the book are quite nauseating, with prisoners’ backs being reduced to raw meat, bystanders being flecked with lumps of raw flesh.
Hughes devoted a passage to proving that conditions for the convicts were not literally slavery, not as practiced in the Caribbean or American South; convicts had legal rights and could take the masters they were assigned to to court (pages 282 to 287), if arrested they could invoke habeas corpus (p.346), something African slaves couldn’t do. But conditions were consistently atrocious and exploitative nonetheless. It’s difficult to imagine the primitiveness of the conditions.
Governor Macquarie’s Australia was more backward than Cromwell’s England. There was as yet no steam power; draft animals were few; and there were no streams near Sydney reliable enough to turn watermills. So every hole was dug, every log sawn, every rock quarried and every ton of rubble moved by that least efficient of engines, the human body toiling in gangs. (p.298)
Obviously convicts tried to escape continually. The most shocking story is of a group of convicts that escaped in Van Diemen’s land (Tasmania) and ended up eating each other. There was a persistent folk belief that if you travelled north far enough you would get to China. In fact most escapees either perished in the Outback from starvation and thirst, were murdered by Aborigines, or stumbled back into government settlements more dead than alive. Hughes devotes a chapter to the more colourful escape attempts, notably that of Mary Bryant (pages 203 to 226).
The New South Wales Corps were formed in 1789. Indisciplined and corrupt it quickly gained a reputation for lawlessness and corruption. In particular it acquired a monopoly of the importation and sale of rum to convicts and freemen alike, so much that it was nicknamed the Rum Corps. It repeatedly clashed with the civil governor, most flagrantly in the 1808 Rum Rebellion against governor Bligh who tried to assert civil power over them, see below.
Commander of the epic First Fleet and settlement at Sydney, which he named. After guiding the colonists through the early starvation years as they struggled to establish agriculture and had to repeatedly reduce rations of the limited supplies they’d brought from Britain, Phillip was allowed to return home.
For the next two years the military were in complete control of the fledgling colony under Lieutenant-General Francis Grose. The European population of New South Wales when Grose took over was 4,221, of whom 3,099 were convicts. Grose established military rule, abolished civil courts, and made generous land-grants to his officers. Grose unmercifully exploited the convicts and during his lieutenant-governorship a great traffic in alcoholic spirits (mostly rum) developed, managed and run by officers of the New South Wales Corps. This clique gained control of the courts and management of the lands, public stores, and convict labour, all led by John Macarthur, ‘British Army officer, racketeer, entrepreneur, grazier, usurper and politician’.
Hunter had been second in command on the First Fleet. He was appointed governor and tasked with combating the abuses of power built up by the New South Wales Corps, represented by their commander, John MacArthur, but was too mild and fair-minded to succeed. In fact the militarily cleverly sent letters back to the British ministers accusing Hunter of the very crime and peculation he was trying to stamp out, with the result that he was recalled in 1799 to defend himself.
King helped develop livestock farming, whaling and mining, built many schools and launched the colony’s first newspaper but was forced to resign after conflicts with the military. He appointed Major Joseph Foveaux as Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island where Foveaux ruled with extreme brutality and sadism.
Chosen as the job because a strict disciplinarian who was tasked with taking on the military and their control of the hugely profitable rum trade. However his confrontational style led to the so-called Rum Rebellion of 1808, a coup d’état in which the New South Wales Corps arrested Bligh, keeping him first in confinement in Sydney, then aboard a ship off Hobart, Van Diemen’s Land, for the next two years.
Johnston led the troops that deposed Governor William Bligh, assumed the title of lieutenant-governor, and illegally suspended the judge-advocate and other officials. The administration of justice became farcical, and there were signs of strong discontent among the settlers. He sailed back to Britain in 1809 where he was court-martialled but let off with the lenient sentence of being cashiered.
Had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century
Like every subject he touches, Hughes gives the background to the arrival of the first Irish convicts with brisk authority. He gives a whistlestop review of the colonisation of Ireland by England, which had started back in the twelfth century, and led to the creation of a society divided between Protestant rulers who deprived the native Catholic majority of land and rights for centuries (pages 181 to 195).
The reason this is needed is because in 1798 a great rebellion broke out in Ireland which terrified the English ruling class because a) it united both Protestant and Catholic rebels and b) the rebel leaders allied with England’s traditional enemy, France, leaguing with a French force to land in the west of Ireland and combine with them against the British occupiers. Unfortunately, the plans were discovered and most of the rebel leaders arrested before the planned rising and invasion could take place.
Most of the rebel leadership was killed and estimates of the total death toll of the subsequent fighting have been put in the tens of thousands. Hundreds of the rebels were briskly tried and transported to Australia. Here they presented the authorities with a severe security problem. The English convicts, surly and disobedient and quick to escape, nonetheless were the same nationality as the authorities. The Irish, on the contrary, refused to accept the authority of any part of the System and took every opportunity to buck it. With the result that governors and leaders of the New South Wales Corps were doubly severe and brutal with them.
The Irish were ‘doubly’ convicts. At the slightest suspicion of ‘mutiny’ they were liable to severe punishment, for example when five suspected leaders were each given 500 lashes (p.187). The brutality of their treatment triggered the very mutiny the British authorities feared in the form of the Castle Hill revolt in 1804. On 4 March 1804 233 convicts, led by Philip Cunningham (a veteran of the rebellion of 1798, as well as a mutineer on the convict transport ship Anne), escaped from a prison farm intent on capturing ships to sail to Ireland. The authorities quickly declared martial law and despatched troops who surrounded the rebels on a hillock nicknamed Vinegar Hill on 5 March. While negotiating under a flag of truce Cunningham was arrested then the troops opened fire and decimated the rebels. Nine of the rebel leaders were executed and hundreds were punished with severe floggings.
This was the largest convict mutiny in Australian history but there were further small revolts and a continual atmosphere of sullen anger among the Irish and paranoia among the English. From 1815 to 1840 the Irish countryside was in a state of more or less continual civil war and, in total, some 30,000 Irish men and 9,000 Irish women were transported from Ireland to Australia. This was never forgotten in Irish communities who nursed the grievance of their persecution.
Hughes attributes a strong Irish flavour of bolshie independence to the Australian national character, especially to its working class culture. The long, bitter memories of the Irish community gave a permanent legacy of sectarianism to Australian politics.
Transportation would deal with representatives of every British protest movement, rebellion, upheaval and agrarian revolt for the first half of the 19th century so Hughes’s account has the effect of shedding light on a whole series of political rebellions back in Britain. It’s like reading two histories side by side, that of Britain and that of Australia. British protest movements included:
The colourful adventures of the first fleets and the starvation and the antics of the New South Wales Corps grab the reader’s attention, but the heyday of transportation was actually during the 1830s, which saw unparalleled poverty and suffering throughout rural Britain, an epidemic of disorder and crime, and so the peak numbers of transported convicts (p.197). So, throughout the book, the history of transportation is also a detailed history of English social and economic misfortunes.
Though most attempts to escape were futile failures, plenty of convicts ran off into the wild and became known as ‘bolters’. As the colony expanded, agricultural land was created along with flocks of sheep so there was more for convicts living in the wild to steal. By the 1810s society was stratified enough between large landowners, often senior officials in the administration, judges and the like, and more ordinary smallholders, for convicts living in the wild to make a living stealing sheep or goods from rich landowners and secretly selling it onto the poor. These were the first whites to range through the uncultivated parts of the territory which the settlers had taken to calling ‘the Bush’ – hence ‘bushrangers’ (also known as ‘bolters’). With typically neat turn of phrase, Hughes says:
By taking to the bush, the convict left England and entered Australia. (p.243)
Hughes is as cynical and unillusioned about the bushwhackers as about everyone else in this sorry story. They gave rise to a legend which help inform Australian’s image of themselves as rebels and non-conformists and freedom fighters, who ran away rather than submit to injustice, as Robin Hoods stealing from the rich to give to the poor. The reality was, of course, both more complex and less idealised than that.
The first formal census of New South Wales was made in 1828. It showed that for the first time the free population eclipsed the number of convicts, 20,870 free and 15,728 convicts = total of 36,598. Sydney had a population of 10,815 i.e. less than a third.
In fact the peak of transportation due to English rural unrest leads to a counter-intuitive result; which is that, as Hughes showed, many of the convicts transported in the 1830s loved their new lives. He quotes many letters back to loved ones reassuring them that convict life was not at all the hell everybody believed it to be. Why? Because there was work, pay and food. These were the very basic elements of life the rural poor were rioting for during the 1830s and they were to be had in abundance in a now settled and well-organised colony.
The man assigned to a decent master in the country districts in the 1830s was, as Eyre pointed out, ‘in a better position than half the honest labourers of England’. (p.314)
And:
Convicts who found benevolent masters far preferred their assigned life to the miseries they had known in England. (p.316)
Hughes shows that, contrary to stereotypes of matey modern Australia, the early colony developed into a society obsessed with class. In particular the newly rich and free emigrants were desperate to distance themselves from ‘the stain’ of convictry. Names developed to describe the new colonial classes and the number of names for the same thing indicates the intensity with which people indicated their (or others’) origins:
Hughes devotes a passage to describing the first sheep farms in Australia and profiling the men who imported and cross-bred the delicate merino strain with hardier breeds (pages 318 to 322, and 326 to 331). He explains how the isolation of shepherds sent off into the Outback to guard their master’s flocks, sometimes in pairs, helped develop the particularly strong Australian concept of ‘mateship’, i.e. sticking with your mate through thick and thin.
So it comes as a surprise to learn that for the first 50 years of its existence, the colony’s major trade was whale and seal catching (pages 331 to 336).
Overall, the transportation System lasted from 1788 to 1868, during which period some 162,000 convicts were transported. By the 1830s Sydney was settled enough and large enough, with an increasingly free-born residents and settlers, that they lobbied the British government to end transportation. At the same time there was another force at work which is fascinating to learn about. I knew about the long-running opposition among British liberals and religious groups to slavery which became the abolitionist movement and which achieved its goal of having slavery made illegal within the British Empire in 1807. I didn’t realise the same group of people opposed transportation just as vehemently, and gained growing support in the 1800s as reports percolated back to Britain of the atrocities carried out against convicts in hellholes like Norfolk Island. Just as there was a movement to abolish slavery, so there was a movement to abolish transportation.
Thus with pressure from liberal Establishment figures in Britain combined with lobbying from the increasingly free and genteel population of New South Wales and led the government to cease transportation to New South Wales in 1840 (p.484). Transportation to Van Diemen’s land ceased in 1853 (p.402) 50 years to the day after the first settlement was founded at Risdon Cove (p.572).
Over the life of the system the British government used about five reasons to justify the policy:
Strategic. To protect against French influence in the Indian Ocean and Far East. In the event the French never tried to claim any part of Australia, the Dutch Empire was engaged by other means. No port in early Australia became an important naval station.
Regarding specifically crime, the System aimed to do 4 things: separate, deter, reform and colonise.
Separate the criminal classes from the general population on the analogy of amputating a diseased limb. This failed because it was based on the false premise that criminality is an inherited genetic attribute whereas, in almost all cases, it is the result of bad education, poor upbringing, childhood abuse and, in the great majority of transported convicts, the result of lack of work, lack of opportunity, poverty and starving.
This is always difficult to assess because it’s impossible to measure the number of crimes which weren’t committed. But the arguments against are a) contrary to the claims of its proponents, the crime rate in England did not drop after the policy of transportation was introduced (because its roots lay in gross inequality, crushing poverty and lack of opportunity) and b) for a lot of the English working classes, especially from the hunger years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Australia sounded like a land of opportunity. Hence the instructions given to governors like Brisbane, Darling and Arthur to apply relentless suffering to the convicts; hence the appalling brutality of the chain gangs and the barbaric cruelty of Macquarie Harbour, Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay. But it didn’t work. Increasing number of emigrants left for Australia of their own free will. The gold rush of 1851 crystallised the image of Australia as a place the poor and downtrodden of Britain could go to to make a fortune.
Hughes thinks chances are the system did actually ‘reform’ a lot of convicts, in the sense that they came out the other end as law-abiding citizens and, if so, this was down to the assignment system. Many masters were poor, brutal, some were sadistic; but the system did assign men to meaningful labour, which gave them some sort of self respect. It had many flaws but assignment did get many men back into society as self-sustaining workers.
Here the system was an undoubted success. Australia would never have been colonised without the forced labour of over 100,000 transported convicts. No sane free man would have emigrated there in 1788 or 1808. Although most of the first buildings they erected have been demolished and built over, convict labour created from nothing the settlements which now have populations of millions.
When he wants to be, Hughes can be a formidably vivid writer:
The sight of the hulks at Portsmouth, Deptford or Woolwich was deservedly famous. They lay anchored in files on the grey, heaving water, bow to stern, a rookery of sea-isolated crime. As the longboat bearing its prisoners drew near, the bulbous oak walls of these pensioned-off warships rose sheer out of the sea, patched and queered with excrescences, deckhouses, platforms, lean-tos sticking at all angles from the original hull. They had the look of slum tenements, with lines of bedding strung out to air between the stumps of the masts, and the gunports barred with iron lattices. They wallowed to the slap of the waves, and dark fleeces of weed streamed in the current from the rotting waterlines. (p.138)
The kind of purple descriptions a scholar, a professional historian, would never attempt. But his narrative is continually punctuated with dazzling displays of prose virtuosity.
Some convicts who tried to cross [the Blue Hills], thinking China lay beyond, died of hunger in their immense labyrinth of sandstone, where bellbirds chimed and long filaments of water fell, wreathing, from distant cliffs. (p.299)
And pages 373 (Macquarie Harbour), 399 (Port Arthur).
Australia – since australis is Latin for ‘south’ terra australis was the name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times.
Botany Bay – named by Captain Cook as testament to the number of specimens collected by expedition scientist, Joseph Banks
Brisbane – named after Major General Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane, 1st Baronet, British Army officer, administrator, and astronomer, and sixth governor of New South Wales, from 1821 to 1825
Hobart – named after Robert Hobart, 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire aka Lord Hobart, secretary of state for the colonies who commissioned Captain David Collins’ expedition to settle Van Diemen’s Land
Melbourne – founded in 1835 with the arrival of free settlers from Van Diemen’s Land and named after the then British Prime Minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne
Sydney – named after Home Secretary Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney by Captain Arthur Phillip, leader of the first transport of convicts to Botany Bay, who moved location to the cove north of it, called Port Jackson by Cook, but renamed after Sydney
Van Diemen’s Land – named in honour of Anthony van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies who had sent the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman on his voyage of discovery in the 1640s.
Australia was always destined for greatness because her population was chosen by the finest judges in England! (p.354)
The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes was published by William Collins in 1986. References are to the 1987 Guild Publishing hardback edition.
Posted by Simon on May 10, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/10/the-fatal-shore-robert-hughes/
Walk in the main entrance of the British Museum, go through the central courtyard past the great round building in the middle and walk on through the archway into room 24. This room is titled ‘Living and Dying’ and contains cases exploring ‘how people everywhere deal with the tough realities of life and death’. There’s a number of display cases looking at particular aspects of this (big) subject via the customs and artefacts of First Peoples from around the world, a lot of them from around the Pacific, although some are from Africa. But four or so big display cases are devoted to artefacts and explanations about the culture of indigenous Australians, or Aborigines as we used to call them.
Indigenous Australians understand that ancestral beings created the land, the oceans and all living things, passing on knowledge of how to live from, and care for, the land. People burn bush-land to maintain the fertility of species and perform ceremonies to mark important life stages.
Ancestral knowledge is passed from one generation to the next through painting, dancing and telling stories about the great ancestral beings. It is embodied in the designs and materials of both art works and functional, everyday objects, and these vary greatly across the continent, reflecting the great environmental and cultural diversity of Australia.
The AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia which attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of indigenous Australia
Australia has been inhabited for at least 60,000 years, predating the modern human settlement of both Europe and the Americas. Although William Dampier visited the north-west coast of Australia in the late 1600s, and Captain Cook mapped the east coast in 1770, the permanent British occupation of the continent only began in 1788 with the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts, which established a penal colony at modern-day Sydney.
The first whites came into contact with the native peoples from the first day and relations between the white interlopers and black natives were troubled and sometimes violent from the start. However, some native peoples managed to stay out of contact with whites until as late as the 1980s, 200 years after the first settlement.
Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders believed that ancestral beings were transformed into animals and plants, and that the properties of plants embody ancestral knowledge. Maintaining land and sea resources, knowing how to use the different parts of plants, and creating objects from them, thus had a spiritual as well as practical side.
One case contains nine baskets demonstrating the wide variety of styles and materials used by the hundreds of different clans or peoples ranged right across Australia’s diverse environment.
Aboriginal dilly-bag (1925) © The Trustees of the British Museum
Purukapali is a major ancestral being for the Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville Islands. In accordance with ancestral law laid down by Purukapali, Islanders mark death with public funeral ceremonies called Pukamani, in which men and women sing and dance, and erect posts on the graves of the deceased.
Baskets called tunga are woven to hold the dead person’s possessions and payment for those taking part in the ceremony. Men and women adorn themselves with elaborate body decoration and wear specially designed armlets and other ornaments. The men dance holding carved and painted hardwood spears. The distinctive baskets are placed upside down on the grave poles.
This case displays some tunga baskets, a selection of ceremonial armlets for men and women, and some impressive multi-barbed spears.
Aboriginal barbed spears from the Tiwi Islands
Indigenous Australians often depict the great travelling paths of ancestral beings in their paintings. In the guise of humans, plants or animals, spiritual beings crossed the land, creating features such as hills and waterholes. Some of these ancestral journeys (or ‘Dreamings’) cover thousands of miles.
The places where the ancestors stopped or performed important deeds have great spiritual influence. Many of these sites and their associated stories are known only to men or only to women. This picture, Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters), depicts an important woman’s place near salt lakes in the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia.
Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters) painted by Anne Ngantiri Hogan, Tjaruwa Angelina Woods, Yarangka Elaine Thomas, Estelle Hogan, Ngalpingka Simms, Myrtle Pennington of the Tjuntjuntjara Community of Western Australia (2013) © The Trustees of the British Museum
The artists, all senior women of the Spinifex people, depict a story about ancestral beings that took place there. Seven sisters who are singing and dancing across the land are being pursued by a lustful man, Wati Nyiru. The women escape his unwanted attentions by launching themselves from a hill into the sky, where they become the Seven Sisters constellation. Here’s a schematic version of the painting explaining its various aspects.
Schematic explanation of Kungkarangkalpa © The Trustees of the British Museum
A number of objects on display in the museum were made by the Spinifex people. Many of the Spinifex people were moved off their land when the British carried out atom bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s. After a long struggle their claim for native title to the land was recognised by the Australian courts in 2000.
Typical of their art is this painting made by senior men of the Spinifex people: Roy Underwood, Lennard Walker, Simon Hogan and Ian Rictor. It depicts an important songline (or ‘Dreaming’) relating to a place called Pukara and the travels of two ancestral men (Wati Kutjara) who travelled across the land, creating its features and customary law.
Pukara, collaborative painting by artists of Spinifex people (2013) from Tjuntjuntjara, Spinifex region of Western Australia © The Trustees of the British Museum
The museum provides another schematic explaining key elements in the painting.
Schematic view of Pukara © The Trustees of the British Museum
Interestingly, artists from the Spinifex people, in the last 30 years, have taken to painting their stories and country in a for suitable for sale to outsiders i.e. they have engaged with the white art market, not only at home but abroad. The result is that you can now buy Spinifex art at galleries around the world. This particular painting was created by the community-based Spinifex Arts Project and bought by the British Museum in 2013.
Inspired by ancestral land and traditions, Indigenous Australians are bringing artistic innovation to ancestral traditions.
Sculptural objects made from plant fibres have long been part of Indigenous Australian culture. Historically, woven fibre baskets and sculptural forms were made for practical or ceremonial use but since the 1970s an increasing number of fibre works have been produced for the fine art market. In Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, women create woven sculptures of ancestral beings and animals.
In Pukatja (formerly Ernabella) in South Australia, Aboriginal artists use a wide range of materials and techniques. These include batik, a method of producing coloured designs on cloth, by brushing or stamping hot wax on the parts not to be dyed. The textile designs are inspired by ancestral landscapes, local plants and animals. The display case shows three sculptures of camp dogs and three batik textiles.
Batik on silk textile by Nyuwara Tapaya (2000) © The Trustees of the British Museum
Women at Ernabella Arts in Pukatja, South Australia, began producing batik work after visiting Indonesia and seeing the technique being used there. The artists are inspired by the colours and forms of the ancestral landscape of the desert region where they live. Unlike some of the other paintings we’ve looked at, they don’t attach specific meanings to their designs i.e. they are purely decorative.
The Torres Strait is the body of water which separates northern Australia from Papua New Guinea to the north. It is littered with a large number of medium-sized and small islands. Each of these was populated by Indigenous peoples, known collectively as the Torres Straits Islanders.
A map of the Torres Strait Islands showing the large number of tiny islands, by Kelisi (source: Wikipedia)
Although many islanders now live on the mainland they retain strong connections with their island homes. The sea, the sky and the land remain central to their identity and spirituality.
Before Christianity was introduced to the Torres Straits in 1871 the islanders held elaborate funerals involving masks and ceremonial dances. Often wearing turtle-shell masks, feathered head-dresses called dhari and pearl-shell chest pendants. Contemporary masks and head-dresses often incorporate new materials and forms but they are still inspired by ancestral beings and stories.
Thus the case displays a couple of traditional masks, a warup drum, dhari head-dress, stone-headed club and pearl-shell pendants. The Torres Strait drum known as the warup drum is shaped like an hourglass. This one is carved from solid dark wood. The larger end represents a fish’s head with open jaws. On the top is carved a lizard and along each side run two projecting bands ornamented with cassowary feathers and seeds. Feathers and goa nuts are attached to each side and incised decoration is infilled with white.
But it’s not just about old and traditional artefacts. The British Museum has bought, and displays, plenty of works by contemporary Indigenous Australian artists. This head-dress was made by contemporary artist Alick Tipoti.
Kaygasiw Usul by Alick Tipoti (2014) © The Trustees of the British Museum
Tipoti is from Badu Island in the Torres Strait. The name of this mask, Kaygasiw Usul, means ‘shovel-nose dust trail reflected in the heavens as the milky way’. It’s made from fibre-glass stained with polyester resin to create the transparent effect of turtle shell, along with plastic, nylon and superglue fastening more traditional materials.
The mask represents an ancestral shark, the Kaygasiw Usul, whose tail fin stirs up an underwater sand trail that forms the Milky Way. The small mask on top represent ancient dancers and the mask inside the mouth symbolises the main dancer.
As may be obvious, I have lifted most of the text of this post directly from the British Museum wall labels and captions.
Posted by Simon on May 8, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/08/relating-to-ancestors-british-museum/
This is a very, very political exhibition, bigger than I expected (5 rooms), artistically important, wide-ranging, illuminating and sometimes very upsetting.
It’s a broad selection of art from contemporary Australia all based round the theme of the calamitous impact of white European colonisation on the continent’s indigenous people. (As I understand it, we should nowadays not use ‘Aborigine’ or ‘aboriginal’; it’s best practice to say ‘indigenous Australians’ or ‘indigenous people’.)
This exhibition brings together art works by indigenous people, alongside works by Australian artists of European descent, all revolving round the themes of colonialism, expropriation, racism, and cultural erasure i.e. the systematic denial of the existence of indigenous people, their deprivation of legal and voting rights, crude attempts to turn them into good Christian citizens, and the banning of their culture, language and traditions.
The exhibition displays a wide variety of media including paintings, photos, artistically treated documents, maps, a huge video installation, some very large fabrics accompanied by sculptures. There’s a lot of explanatory text which makes you feel thoroughly ashamed to be white, British and, of course, a man, since some of the women artists in the show consider the appalling violence and injustices meted out to the Indigenous people the result not only of colonialism but of specifically ‘male modes of power’.
Untitled (Alhalkere) by Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Australia 1992 is part of a series Tate has recently devised which aims to look at the artworks which cluster round a key year in a country’s history, the series having the general name ‘A Year In Art’. The first one was ‘A Year in Art: 1973’ which explored how artists responded to the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile which brought General Pinochet to power.
This is the second in the series and the title, ‘Australia 1992’, begs the question: what is so important about the year 1992? Well, it was the year of a landmark decision by the Australian High Court which overturned the concept of terra nullius (meaning ‘land belonging to nobody’). This was the doctrine by which the British had justified colonising the land now known as Australia.
The concept was used to, in effect, deny the existence of the native Aboriginal peoples who had inhabited Australia for 30,000 years, had developed a lifestyle in balance with its particular natural characteristics, as well as complex societies built on clan structures, a culture rich in hundreds of distinct languages. The High Court decision was the climax of decades of work by indigenous rights campaigners and provided a new legal basis for ongoing campaigns to expand indigenous rights and extend legal protections to indigenous culture.
Buluwana, Female Ancestor by John Mawurndjul (1989)
The art works in the show aren’t all from the year 1992, far from it, much of it is from the subsequent thirty years and some of it is bang up to date. But it all rotates and revolves around the issues thrown up by that 1992 ruling.
The first room contains three important elements. Firstly, a set of four videos by key artists featured in the show, namely Helen Johnson, Judy Watson, and Dale Horton. These are all 4 or so minutes long. The fourth video features an extended interview with Aborigine artist John Mawurndjul who explains how, although he lives in the new world, the new dispensation of the white man, he maintains the stories and traditions handed down from his father and his father’s father, hence the title of the film, ‘I am the old and the new’. John takes the camera team to a dry and dusty location out in the country where he explains the design and meaning of ancient Aboriginal rock art. He’s also filmed using traditional tools and paints, in particular a kind of soft bark brush, to create the fine striping visible in a work like Buluwana, Female Ancestor.
Another important display in this room is of drawings made by Edward Koiki Mabo of the land on Torres Island which he claimed was his under ancestral indigenous law, drawings used in the 1992 court case. There are three of these, indicating the location of plants, landmarks, traditional use and ownership, which had been passed down to Mabo through 17 generations of tradition. They’re the subject of a wall label explaining more of the detail of the case, its results and implications.
Lastly, there’s a factual (i.e. non-art) map of Australia, an attempt by scholars to represent the language or nation groups of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
The AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of indigenous Australia, by David R. Horton (1996)
Note that the word ‘Country’ is used in a special sense to denote the Aborigines’ ancient connection with the land of their ancestry. So throughout the exhibition the curators refer to Country not ‘the country’ or ‘the landscape’.
There are five rooms in the show and, given that the central one is enormous, space for lots of art works.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye expresses her cultural life as an Anmatyerre elder and her intricate relationship to country in Untitled (Alhalkere) (top of this review).
John Mawurndjul is featured with his bark painting Buluwana, Female Ancestor, created with a fine cross-hatching technique used by generations of Kuninjku artists.
Dale Harding was the subject of one of the videos in the first room. There he explained that he often paints directly onto a gallery wall to create a site-specific work and images of these make them look dramatic. Sadly, that hasn’t happened here and he’s represented by a moveable work, The Leap/ Watershed, in which he’s blown ochre onto a large canvas to create an abstract shape. Although this isn’t particularly obvious, apparently it is intended to reference both the life-giving attributes of the land and the 1867 massacre of Aboriginal people in Mackay, Queensland. ‘The Leap’ refers to a rock formation in Yuwi Country where around 200 indigenous people chose to leap to their deaths rather than surrender to the Queensland Native Police Force.
The Leap by Dale Harding
There’s a great series of works by Judy Watson entitled ‘A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood’. These 15 framed works take official documents used by the Australian authorities in the 19th and 20th centuries to categorise indigenous peoples and allot them (or not) voting and other rights. Thus, until 1965 you had to be able to prove you had a ‘White’ parent in order to vote, in Queensland. The categorisations include racial ones by which a person was defined as being ‘fullblood’, ‘half-blood’, ‘quadroon’ and so on, terms I’m familiar with from the same system applied in the American South in the slavery era.
What turns them into art is that Watson has spattered them with red pain mimicking blood. These documents obsessed with ‘blood’ have been drenched in the object of their enquiry, blood which also indicates the numbers of indigenous people murdered by the white military and police over the centuries. A stain on Australia’s history and conscience.
From ‘A Preponderance of Aboriginal Blood’ by Judy Watson (2005)
The complete set, along with a detailed explanation, is available on the Tate website.
In a similar spirit of taking colonial documents or concepts and undermining them, is the work of Helen Johnson. She’s represented by a couple of enormous rectangular fabrics, suspended from the ceiling, on which she creates images complex satirical images. The series is titled ‘Seat of Power’ and is from 2016.
Seat of Power by Judy Watson (2016)
This work needs a bit of explanation (which is available on the Tate web page devoted to it). It consists of a large unstretched acrylic painting on canvas which depicts a satirical image of the British parliament in session by the Victorian illustrator Richard Doyle, itself overlaid with partially legible text which refers to a chair that was gifted to the House of Representatives in Canberra, Australia by the UK branch of the Empire Parliamentary Association in 1926.
It’s big and it’s striking but, as you can see, it needs a fair bit of explaining unlike, say, all of the indigenous art on display which speaks immediately to the eye and heart. It also demonstrates a small principle about art and literature, which is that satire doesn’t have to be funny. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be and Watson’s works aren’t.
This point is easily made by comparison with a set of works by Gordon Bennett titled ‘How to Cross the Void’. These are a series of gawky cartoons or sketches of scenes, with satirical text written in, but unlike the Watson they are actively funny. The best example is this one depicting a dark-skinned man hanging himself in a cell, with the advice that, if you get into difficulty hanging yourself, you can always ask a policeman. They’ll be happy to help 🙂
‘Ask a policeman’ from ‘How to Cross the Void’ by Gordon Bennett (1993)
But alongside the amusing cartoon element there’s also something quite conceptual or cerebral going on in this series. All the images incorporate a black square. This is a reference to the clack square painted by the Russian Suprematist painter, Kazimir Malevich, made in 1915. In retrospect, art historians take this to be a founding work and moment in modern art for completely rejecting all vestiges of realism or figuratism. Malevich intended it to be the end of that tradition of painting and the start of a new tradition of pure abstraction and sometimes referred to it not as a square but as a void.
So why is there a black square in all these works? Because Bennett is asking whether any cultural artefact can truly inhabit a void, in other words whether any artwork can escape from the time and place of its making, escape from its history and transcend its cultural context. The general idea is that, no, it can’t, and this might be more true of Australian modern art than many other types…
A different work by Bennett is assigned a room of its own. Dominating the room is a characteristic example of the traditional heroic white conception of the discovery, claim and colonising of Australia, ‘The Founding of Australia 1788’ by Algernon Talmage from as late as 1937
‘The Founding of Australia 1788’ by Algernon Talmage (1937)
As you might expect any modern artist to do, Bennett subverts and interrogates this kind of pompous white triumphalism with a version of his own, titled Possession Island (Abstraction) (based on a different painting, ‘Captain Cook Taking Possession of the Australian Continent On Behalf of the British Crown (1770)’ by John Alexander Gilfillan).
Possession Island (Abstraction) by Gordon Bennett (1991)
As you can see, a once fluid realistic oil painting has been converted into a stippled black-and white image in the style of a blown-up newspaper illustration. The coloured bands do three things: 1) they mask the only indigenous figure in the original painting, who has thus been erased in the same way the indigenous presence was erased for so many centuries. All that is left is the drinks tray he was holding for the refreshment of his white master. 2) The precise rectangular shapes may or may not be a reference to Malevich, which I’ve just explained. 3) But I was intrigued to learn that the colours of the blocks are those of the Aboriginal flag. In my ignorance, I didn’t know that there was an aboriginal flag.
There’s another aspect to this. Tate have cannily displayed these works in a room with a window looking out across the River Thames towards St Paul’s Cathedral, which is bang opposite Tate Modern. Insofar as St Paul’s is a seat of state, religious and ceremonial power of the Australian colonial power, Britain, the sight of it juxtaposed with these stories of colonial repression and brutality amounts to a form of geographical satire.
View across the River Thames and Millennium Bridge to St Paul’s Cathedral from a room in Tate Modern
A bit more subtly, the window in question is a tall narrow one whose shape echoes the tall red rectangle in Bennett’s work. Conceptual and visual echoes and ironies are bouncing round this room.
Arguably the best items in the exhibition are the set of enormous hanging fabrics by Yhonnie Scarce. Scarce is an Australian glass artist who is a descendant of the Kokatha and Nukunu people of South Australia. The idea behind the works is fairly simple but results in extraordinary pieces which, for me, dominated the exhibition.
Each work is a hugely magnified antique photo of members of Scarce’s family, blown up and printed onto bed linen. These are then displayed alongside blown glass artefacts relating to the images. In the photo below, the work on the left is ‘Remember Royalty: Papa Willy’ and is a photograph from 1920 showing Scarce’s great-grandfather, William, at work shearing sheep. The image is printed onto an antique woollen blanket, an obvious reference to, or invocation of, this labour. He worked hard all his life to support his 12 (!) children. The toolbox below the blanket contains actual tools (I noted shiny new spanners) mingled with glass-blown replicas of yams, traditional foodstuff of Will’s Kokatha people.
Two works from the series ‘Remember Royalty’ by Yhonnie Scarce
The work on the right follows the same patter: it is a vintage photo taken in around 1911 at the Koonibba Mission Schoolhouse and showing Scarce’s maternal grandparents and children. The wall label tells us that mission schools like this were dotted all across Australia where indigenous people were exposed to brutal regimes of cultural assimilation i.e. forced to wear European clothes and practice Christianity. In another act of care and tribute to her ancestors, the trunk below the printed sheet contains glass balls, each of which contains a horizon line and constellations: the artist is returning to her ancestors the connection with their land which deprived of during their lives.
There are four of these huge photo-sculptures (in the other two, Scarce’s blown glass artefacts are sewn into the fabric of the photos), and because of the immediacy of the images, and the directness and poignancy of their family stories, these were, for me, the standout works in the exhibition.
At the far end of the exhibition is a big long darkened room containing Vernon Ah Kee’s four-screen video installation ‘tall man 2010’. This splices together news footage of the protests and riots following the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee on 26 November 2004, on Palm Island, an island off the coast of Queensland. Doomadgee died in police custody as a result of multiple injuries. In the protests that followed, the police station, local courthouse and police barracks were burnt down. Sergeant Chris Hurley, who arrested Doomadgee, was tried and acquitted for causing his death.
One of the central figures leading the protests was Lex Wotton, a member of the Palm Island Aboriginal Council. Ah Kee presents him as the ‘tall man’ – an Aboriginal term for a bogey man or spirit who elicits the truth from wrongdoers. Wotton later won a lawsuit, alongside other Palm Island residents, which found that the police had illegally discriminated against them. The State of Queensland paid them A$30 million compensation.
So, from what the wall labels tell us, it seems to be an equivalent of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020. It is typical of the American-centric nature of all our media that the Floyd incident and movement it gave rise to massively entered Britain’s consciousness and cultural sphere (houses round where I live still have ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters in their windows) while the death of Doomadgee didn’t cause a ripple.
Still clip from ‘tall man’ by Vernon Ah Kee (2010)
On a practical level, the footage is continually punctuated by the bars used in the creation and editing of film footage and by the loud sonic whine which indicates to editors that there is no soundtrack. Unfortunately I have mild tinnitus and found this very loud, penetrating high-pitched whine made it impossible for me to be in the room.
In 1979 eco-feminist Bonita Ely travelled to Jabiluka in the Northern Territory and filmed this performance, titled ‘Jabiluka U02’. Here the Mirrar indigenous community has waged a decades-long campaign against plans to mine uranium in the Kimberley flood plain. To be frank, watching her dig a pile of sand in what looks like a park is a little underwhelming. But the wall label links it with ongoing struggles against Australia’s mining corporations, singling out two current instances: in 2019 the Australian government allowed the Adani company to develop a coal mine that will endanger the Barrier Reef. And in 2020 the mining company Rio Tinto deliberately destroyed rock shelters in the Juukan Gorge, holy to the Puutu Kunti Kurram and Pinikura peoples for thousands of years. I did hear about this in the British media. Why aren’t Rio Tinto boycotted? Why aren’t the people responsible for vandalism like this named and shamed?
This is a long video which is shown at a completely different scale from the Vernon Ah Kee; that is shown across a huge screen dominating a very big wall; the Kennedy and Hughes video, by contrast, is shown on an old-fashioned TV. It addresses the history of white management, capitalism and institutionalised denial of indigenous rights, but I found it completely impossible to watch because of the highly repetitive, droning high-pitched soundtrack which eclipsed the contents and gave me a headache. Must be better ways to get your message across, guys.
Filling one side of the big central room is a series of 24 large photos by Tracey Moffatt titled ‘Up in the Sky’, shot in 1997. They depict life in a rough and ready Outback town. The whole series can be viewed on the Tate website.
The curators say the subject of the series is the forced separations of Aboriginal families by government agencies i.e. taking indigenous babies from their families and giving them to white foster parents or, as in some of these photos, Catholic convents. The abducted babies became known as the Stolen Generations.
From ‘Up in the sky’ by Tracey Moffatt (1997)
But if you look at the whole set you’ll see that Moffatt’s photos do much more than that. Most of the photos are of poor whites, what Americans call ‘trailer trash’. They prompted upset and outrage at the gross injustice of all those stolen babies and broken families. But the pictures of the immediate present also triggered feelings about living that kind of life, in that kind of place, not dissimilar from the feelings triggered by the Chris Killip exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery. Imagine living there, in a one-horse town where the horse died long ago, leaving desolation and wasted lives.
It triggered one big thought which goes slightly against the grain of the show: this is that, whereas all of the works by all of the artists in the exhibition address the injustices done to and the tragedies suffered by the indigenous people, nowhere (I think) is there mention of the injustice done to the white people sent to Australia. Almost all of them were convicts or the soldiers sent to guard them.
According to Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore, some 160,000 convicts were sent from Britain to Australia during the 50-year existence of ‘The System’ of transportation, most of them the poorest of the poor who had never been more than ten miles from their places of birth. Suddenly they were transported to a different planet.
Imagine being a nineteen-year-old woman sentenced to transportation for stealing a loaf of bread, wrenched away from your family and place of birth and familiar surroundings and sent half way round the world in the company of criminal and violent strangers to a completely alien, unfamiliar and unfriendly landscape. Imagine being the young soldiers sent to guard them.
My point is that there’s a kind of double injustice at work here. First the injustice and cruelty of the forced transportation of over a hundred thousand Britons. And then the behaviour of these scared, angry, brutalised Brits, to the relatively defenceless native peoples they discovered. Brutality upon brutality. Horror doubled. It’s a terrible historical legacy and this exhibition really drums into your mind multiple threads of injustice, violence and cultural erasure which continue up to the present day.
Most exhibition promotional videos are a zippy 30 seconds long. This one, at 14 minutes, is a more in-depth consideration of the issues and starts by explaining the 1992 High Court ruling in favour of Torres Strait Islander, featuring the man who brought the case, land-rights activist Edward Koiki Mabo, before going on to describe the practice of some of the artists in the show.
Posted by Simon on May 1, 2023
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/01/a-year-in-art-australia-1992-tate-modern/
I went back to the Masculinities: Liberation through Photography exhibition at the Barbican for second helpings.
I spent another hour and a half going round again, but this time ignoring all the American photographers, and concentrating on everyone else from the rest of the world, the photographers I’d largely overlooked first time round, starting with the eight Brits.
First a few general points:
Going round a second time, One Big Thing became much clearer: this exhibition isn’t even an attempt to represent what you could call ordinary or everyday masculinity. I hadn’t really grasped the significance of the title. When it says liberation it means gay liberation, women’s liberation and black liberation.
Liberation from whom? From heterosexual white men.
In the 1970s women, homosexuals and people of colour spontaneously generated nationwide and worldwide movements devoted to liberating themselves from what they felt was centuries of oppression, objectification and second class citizenship created and maintained by straight white men.
The fundamental impulse of this exhibition is to show how this worked through photography, through the work of gay, black and women photographers who rebelled against the straight white patriarchy.
This is an exhibition about the social and cultural liberation of these groups from heterosexual white male hegemony through photography.
This explains why Part One of the exhibition bombards us with a series of overblown, hypermasculine images – of American soldiers in Iraq (Wolfgang Tillmans), American cowboys (Isaac Julien and Collier Schorr) and American footballers (Catherine Opie). It’s a bit more mixed up than I’m implying but this first part of the exhibition establishes the images, concepts and behaviours of aggressive white masculinity which these groups are trying to flee.
So that Part Two of the exhibition shows us how these three key constituencies of progressive ideology – gay men, black men, and straight feminist women – achieved liberation from these toxic male stereotypes.
Photography is the medium, channel, gateway and door through which gay men, black men, and feminist women escaped from the grotesque, heteronormative hypermasculinity which we are bombarded with in the opening.
Huge though the exhibition is, it is not really about masculinity – it is about the escape from masculinity.
Which, for example, explains why the entire section on FATHERHOOD featured work by just four photographers (each of them good in their different ways) and this is the same number as the section devoted to FEMINIST photographers (and there are many more feminist photographers scattered round the show).
Simple maths shows you that, for the curators, feminist liberation from the patriarchy is more important, certainly more represented here, than what you or I might think of as a pretty a central element of any concept of masculinity – fatherhood.
Then again both feminists and father photos are swamped by the sheer number of gay artists and photographers.
I counted twenty gay snappers for definite, but had the impression that there were many more. Some were so popular with the curators that they featured more than once – notably gay Indian (score double) photographer Sunil Gupta, who was represented by three separate series of photographs, hung in different areas around the show:
The pretty obvious conclusion is that the image of masculinity the women curators, and the art world in general, is most comfortable with, is gay men. Almost all the images of heterosexual men were accompanied by labels criticising or chastising or scolding them.
My first review ended up lamenting the way the exhibition is dominated by American photographers, American subjects, and American academic rhetoric.
But first time round I missed the significance of a big quote printed on the wall right at the start of the exhibition. It’s from the black, gay, American (score three points) writer, James Baldwin:
The American ideal, then, of sexuality, appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden – as an unpatriotic act – that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.
This is the Key Quote, right at the start of the exhibition, and it clearly signals the extent to which the curators really, deeply, and profoundly see the entire condition of masculinity through American eyes.
I read that quote and simply thought, well, this ‘American ideal of masculinity’ may have been a deeply problematic issue for Baldwin, for other Afro-American men, for other American gay men, and for a large number of American women who have to put up with it… But it has absolutely nothing to do with me’.
When I was a boy I wanted to be Michael Caine in The Battle of Britain or Richard Burton in Where Eagles Dare, I wanted to be John Hollins who played left half for Chelsea, and like my mates idolised Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton. I envied John Noakes off Blue Peter for all the brilliant adventures he had like climbing up Nelson’s Column. At school we all tried to do impressions of the excitable naturalist David Bellamy. On Saturday nights I watched Patrick Troughton as Dr Who, followed by Morecambe and Wise lying in bed together making jokes, or maybe Dad’s Army with its cast of hilariously ramshackle amateurs. I loved Sid James’s laugh in the old Carry On films, and a little later on I was bowled over by Monty Python, and when I was about 15 my favourite radio DJ was Kenny Everett.
My point is that the chronically hyper-masculine, ridiculously macho and extremely violent world of the American Wild West or the corrupt streets of New York depicted in Starsky and Hutch or Kojak seemed, literally, thousands of miles away. Nothing to do with me or my life or my friends or my Dad or my uncle or my teachers. Nothing.
Thus the strange sense of disconnect as I walked round this Americanised exhibition for the second time, the sense of entering a wretchedly macho culture in which more or less the only way for a decent normal civilised man to escape the hyper-competitive, hyper-macho and hyper-violent world of American maleness is to be gay.
It struck me that it was a really profound mistake, and possibly a deceit and a lie, to view the entire concept of masculinity around the world through the prism of American masculinity.
Isn’t that a form of American imperialism? Judging everything according to American standards? Defining everything according to American ideas?
I was disappointed that the Barbican curators were such willing accomplices to American cultural imperialism.
Anyway, Fuck America and its bankrupt, corrupt and negative influence.
I went back specifically to ignore the Yanks and to pay more careful attention to everyone else, to the photographers from the rest of the world, starting with the Brits.
This is a grid of 12 large black-and-white prints of a big, hairy, overweight, naked man. They’re just some of the many self-portraits Coplans took of himself as – born in 1920 – he entered his 60s. in the 1980s. In fact this big grid is the first thing you see as you enter the exhibition, and is one of the many ways the curators set out to puncture the exaggerated images of masculinity which they depict elsewhere.
The most obvious thing that struck me as I confronted this sizeable display is that all the photos are artfully posed so you don’t see his willy. In fact, I must say I was surprised at the relative scarcity of willies on display.
It is a… a touching image of the male body, don’t you think? A realistic depiction of the middle-aged, naked male body, a photographic parallel to all those unglamorised paintings of fat male nudes by Lucien Freud.
This is a 30-minute video showing the life and times of the wrestler, ‘Exotic’ Adrian Street who was born in 1940 into a Welsh mining village. Street is a brilliant subject because he combines hard-edged working class attitude, with a taste for dressing in wigs and make-up as part of the identity or brand which distinguishes him from the other amateur wrestlers on the circuit.
The video was playing on a fairly big monitor which was itself embedded in a huge wall-sized painting by Deller, depicting a naive, stylised portrait of Street in his cross-dressing wrestler’s outfit, set against a stylised depiction of a Welsh town and the hills beyond.
The film reflects on the performativity of gender.
On my first visit I was so dazzled by the Herb Ritts and Arnold Schwarzenegger and American soldiers in Iraq and Andy Warhol and all the New York queers that I completely overlooked this small and brilliant display. In many ways it’s one of the best things in the exhibition.
My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words consists of a grid of 15 frames each containing a small, precise photo of the contents of the cupboards in the artist’s mother’s home, each one neat and tidy and filled with banal kitchen utensils and belongings.
And very neatly, in a florid calligraphy reminiscent of wedding invitations, opposite these nice neat drawers is printed the ferocious, vile, poisonous rants of Fox’s father, overflowing with bile and abuse, but laid out as elegant free verse poems. For example:
I’m going to
tear your mother
to shreds
with
an oyster knife
Or:
She wants
her bum
scraped
with
a rusty saw
He threatens to cut his wife’s bum off and feed it to her like slices of ham. He threatens to fry her in hot oil. It’s a kind of anti-poetry, or maybe the poetry of the damned.
The smallness of the images just as much as the prissy tidiness of their contents, and the satirically ornate calligraphy of her father’s drunken ranting, create an incredibly charged display, a screaming sense of claustrophobia and misery.
This, I thought, captures the true English misery, the misery of Philip Larkin, rainy afternoons in provincial towns where couples who hate each other are forced to spend long Sunday afternoons, or weeks, months and years in each other’s unbearable company.
Ten million miles away from bloody American cowboys and footballers and Mad Men jocks striding up Madison Avenue. The curators spoil the effect by translating it into their sociological jargon:
Fox invites the viewer to reflect on how notions of hegemonic masculinity are sustained within patriarchal structures.
Is that what this delicate, subtle and intensely charged work of art is doing?
Julien is black and gay and a film-maker so he presses a lot of art world buttons, so much so that he is represented by not one but two entries:
Note how the ‘white gaze’ is elided with the ‘racist gaze’. This is, frankly, insulting.
Note also how both Julien’s films are in thrall to American culture and stereotypes and thus, in my formulation, a kind of cultural betrayal.
There are two TV monitors on raised stands. Underneath them are ancient VHS tape players. On one screen a fairly buff young man takes off a red vest, very, very slowly. On the other screen he puts it back on, very, very slowly.
Lloyd’s penetrating gaze and carefully orchestrated presentation demand that the viewer move back and forth between the screens in a dance of observation and voyeurism.
Not really. The main feature of this piece for me was the ancient VHS recorder/players – I’m amazed you can find any which still work. Like a lot of other things in the exhibition, somehow this super-annuated technology made you realise how old and out-of-date a lot of the stuff here is.
(By the way Hilary Lloyd is a woman.)
Peter Marlow (1961 to 2016) helped set up the London office of the famous international photographers’ agency, Magnum. Unusually for this exhibition he doesn’t seem to have been gay, and is represented by a selection of fly-on-the-wall photos catching different types of very ordinary English men in various matey, group situations. These include:
This is something like the masculinity I experienced growing up.
At school I was forced to play rugby and then take communal showers afterwards, it was always bloody freezing. Photos like this bring back the sound of studs clattering on an unforgiving concrete floor and those shapes of mud punctuated with the round stud holes which used to get stuck to your boots and everyone banged against the doorframe or changing room benches so that the floor was covered in them with slivers of mud punctured by perfectly round holes.
Marlow’s photos of the shitty, windswept shopping centre at Runcorn perfectly convey the misery of English provincial life and the great betrayal of post-war town planning and architecture which turned so many English towns into concrete wind tunnels.
For the curator Marlow’s photos of the rugby players taking a communal bath:
highlight how sport has become synonymous with masculine hegemony and male solidarity.
Strand has taken 68 copies of the softcore publication Men Only and piled them one on top of each other to create a ‘tower’. She has ‘subverted’ the sexist basis of the magazines by inserting into twenty of them twenty ‘images of resistance’ tucked into black envelopes and slipped between the pages of the lucky magazines.
The gushing feminist commentary points out that Strand choosing to ‘erect them in a vertical pile is a satirical reference to the male phallus, while also being an obvious reference to Trump Tower’. Of course.
When I was a teenager the top-shelf porn magazines at the local newsagent were Mayfair and Men Only and Penthouse. The point is that they were large, glossy, magazine-sized magazines, so I was intrigued that the objects in Strand’s art work are small, square-bound, with almost plain beige covers. They look disconcertingly like the cheap communist party editions I own of the works of Marx and Engels, or a set of obscure poetry magazine.
When I looked closely I saw that the editions Strand’s chosen of Men Only start in 1947! and the most recent is 1963. For me, then, this work was much more about a delve way back into post-war history, than anything at all to do with porn or men’s magazines or what the wall label called women’s exclusion from ‘the corridors of power’.
Like the Anne Fox piece this is a deep dive into the profound misery of the really poor – the sick and alcoholic and uneducated poor whose lives are filled with drink and anger and violence.
It consists of ten very big colour prints of ragged, spontaneous, unposed documentary photos of Billingham’s alcoholic dad, Ray, and his obese mother, Liz. both caught in the seedy, shabby and poky-feeling flat in one of the crappier parts of Birmingham.
The curators blithely comment that this is a rare pictorial insight into English working class life and the visitor can’t help feeling this is partly because what gains commissions, wins prizes and gets you known is stylish films about cowboys and the Harlem Renaissance.
God, could anything be further away from the blow-dried queers of Christopher Street or Castro.
So that’s the work of the eight British photographers and artists and film-makers included in Masculinities: LIberation through Photography. I’m really glad I went back a second time and focused just on them, because taken together they do amount to a sort of sketch of British masculinity, a million miles away from the macho jocks or ‘faggots’ (I’m quoting James Baldwin) which dominate American culture.
The Peter Marlow photos are very good, but for me the top two were the grim and unrelenting insight into the lowest of lowlife existences in Ray’s A Laugh; but maybe the best is the hyper-charged, controlled explosion of Anne Fox’s sequence. Wow.
I’m too sad to tell you is a black and white art film from 1971 in which performance artist Bas Jan Ader filmed himself crying.
Åsdam made a short art film titled Pissing showing a close-up of the slacks or sensible trousers of a man who proceeds to let himself go and wee himself.
While the film reflects on masculinity’s position in relation to the patriarchal order, it also highlights the significance of the phallus as a signifier of male power.
Dijkstra has a set of four fairly big colour photos of Portuguese bullfighters or forcados shown after they’ve finished the fight and exited the arena, looking elated and marked with blood
Dijkistra’s Bullfighters explores aspects of homosociality, a term coined by theorist Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick to describe ‘the structure of men’s relations with other men’.
Dworzak is the guy who found a trove of photos taken by family photographic studios in Kandahar following the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, improbably showing them posing hand in hand in front of painted backdrops, using guns and flowers as props with kohl carefully applied to their eyes.
Taliban portrait. Kandahar, Afghanistan by Thomas Dworzak (2002) © Collection T. Dworzak/Magnum Photos
Eijkelboom is represented by two distinct photographic projects.
In With My Family from 1973 he went knocking on doors of a middle class suburb during the day when the husbands were away working, and asked if he could pose as the father in family photos with the wives and children of the absent men.
The result is pretty creepy and you suspect he’d get arrested if he tried that today. 1973 is quite a long time ago, nearly half a century ago. The curator comments:
With my family operates as a critique of the nuclear family as well as exposing outdated gender roles that demanded that women stay in the home caring for children while the father went to work and earned a living.
In The Ideal Man from 1978 Eijkelboom asked women to describe their ideal man, and then fashioned himself in self-portraits to fit the descriptions. Mildly amusing.
Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen, 1981-83, comprised of 26 black and white photographs taken inside men-only private members’ clubs in central London and accompanied by texts drawn from snatched conversations, parliamentary records and contemporary news reports, invites viewers to reflect on notions of class, race and the exclusion of women from spaces of power during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.
“Newspapers are no longer ironed, Coins no longer boiled So far have Standards fallen” from the series Gentlemen, by Karen Knorr (1981-83) © Karen Knorr
Talking of creepy, Messager is represented by a series from 1972 called The Approaches in which she took photographs of men’s crotches in the street using a concealed camera. I suppose it’s not quite upskirting, but if you tried this nowadays I wonder if you could be arrested.
In The Approaches, Messager trails men through the street and snaps photos of their crotches without permission. In this, she turns the tables on the traditional artistic norm of the male gaze, and in showing how uncomfortable and invasive this is, critique the viewing of women in a similar way, such as in gossip magazines. ‘It was a way of treating men as objects when it’s usually women who are treated as objects,’ Messager explained. ‘Men never stop checking out women’s bottoms, breasts, everything.’
Well that put paid to the male gaze, didn’t it. No longer a problem.
Artist Richard Mosse made a film by asking members of an American fraternity house to have a shouting competition, with the young student who could shout loudest and longest winning a keg of beer. Having contrived this artificial situation in which he films the faces of young American men shouting their heads off till they’re red in the face, Mosse then described his film as ‘a performance of masculinity and elite, white male rage’.
The Soldiers, The Nineties (1999-2020) is an installation of newspaper front pages and photos, blown up and arranged into different size images across the wall which show NATO soldiers in a variety of conflict zones – Bosnia, Northern Ireland, the Gulf – in a number of poses – resting, smoking, reading, partying – accessed from different sources – press clippings, magazines, newspapers, TV screenshots.
Tillmans presents the viewer with images of hypermasculinity rubbing shoulders with male apprehension, camaraderie and vulnerability while also embedding the queer gaze and homoeroticism in military space.
A series of black and white photos Weinberger took all the way back in the early 1960s of homosexual men dressed up in leather jackets, caps and other clichéd outfits in what was, back then, very much Zurich’s hidden, secret gay underground.
Horseshoe Buckle 1962 by Karlheinz Weinberger © Karlheinz Weinberger. Courtesy Esther Woerdehoff
Let’s Take Back Our Space: Female and Male Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures from 1976-9 is a series of large frames in which Wex arranged sets of contemporary magazine photos depicting a row of men sitting in public places, in the park etc with their legs wide open, and in a row underneath photos of women sitting with their knees primly together. Manspreading.
According to the wall label:
These differences in posture are, Wex concludes, products of a social conditioning that defines one sex as strong and the other as weak, perpetuating a hierarchical distinction between the sexes in the form of patterns of physical behaviour.
A series of seven large-ish colour photos from 1972 titled Facial Hair Transplants in which Mendieta glued fragments of her fellow student, Morty Sklar’s facial hair to her own face.
Tableau vivant… if you cool the sun always shines (2002) a large embroidery with images of black people sewn or attached to it, around the central image of an embroidered version of Leonardo’s Last Supper.
70s Lifestyle, 1975-78.
By day Fosso ran a commercial studio photographing the residents of Bangui while at night he created highly performative black and white self-portraits in which he adopted a series of male personas, alluding to the idea that gender is an artificial proposition.
Represented by one piece, an absolutely enormous wall-sized photo The Last Journey of the Dictator Mussunda N’zombo Before the Great Extinction (Act I), 2017.
This is ‘Act I’ of a five-part series. the flamboyant figure in the centre is modelled on Mobutu Sese Seko, the kleptocratic president of Zaire. Kia Henda’s work:
reimagines the politics and history of Africa within shrewdly conjectured fictional scenarios.
Stunningly posed, crystal clear studio art photos of black men’s bodies arranged in intriguing shapes and wonderfully aesthetic poses.
According to the wall label:
The work of the pioneering photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode calls attention to the politics of race, representation and queer desire.
I Was Looking Back is a large installation of 18 photos in which he revisited every photo he’d ever taken,
in an attempt to formulate a new narrative that actively exposes and deconstructs white masculine power, a defining feature of Subotzky’s experience as a white, privileged, South African male.
They include photos of blacks being beaten up and intimidated by the police, photos from inside prisons or from grim wasted slums. The photos are, apparently,
an attempt to expose and destabilise the systems of hegemonic male power that enable and normalise these acts of violence.
Civil War 1977-86 a photo record of daily life in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath, including the series features here of militiamen posed against battle-scarred buildings.
Soldiers a series in which Nes photographed young men posing as soldiers in the Israeli Defence Force i.e. they are not real soldiers. Nes is, naturally, gay.
Nes not only infuses his images of the military with homoeroticism but also reveals the strong homosocial bonds that exist between soldiers, as well as inscribing the queer body into the military imagination.
Untitled from the series Soldiers (1999) by Adi Nes. Courtesy Adi Nes & Praz-Delavallade Paris, Los Angeles
Zaatari found damaged negatives of bodybuilders in the archive of the Lebanese studio photographer Hashem El Madani and blew them up far beyond their original scale to emphasise the damaged, degraded effect, conveying a poignant sense of the passage of time.
According to the curator the photographs:
examine the construction of Middle Eastern masculinity and virility while also reflecting on Western, Orientalising perceptions of masculinity.
Two series:
Memories of my father (1971 to 1990) – photographic record of the artist’s father, Sukezo, through life and death
Family (1971 to 1990) – over two decades a series of formal posed photos of Fukase and his family but in each one of them a young woman is present, often half dressed, in stylised or parodic poses, so that they:
meditate on the ways in which women are still systematically subordinated to men.
Is that what you see in this photo?
Upper row, from left to right: A, a model; Toshiteru, Sukezo, Masahisa. Middle row, from left to right: Akiko, Mitsue, Hisashi Daikoji. Bottom row, from left to right: Gaku, Kyoko, Kanako, and a memorial portrait of Miyajo, 1985, from the series Family 1971-90 by Masahisa Fukase © Masahisa Fukase Archives
Untitled 22 from the series Christopher Street, 1976 by Sunil Gupta © Sunil Gupta. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2019
This playful film from famed director and photographer Tracey Moffatt turns the tables on traditional representations of desire to examine the power of the female gaze in the objectification of men’s bodies. HEAVEN begins with surreptitiously filmed documentary footage of brawny surfers changing in and out of bathing and wet-suits. While the soundtrack switches between the ocean surf and male chanting, Moffatt moves closer to alternately flirt with and tease her subjects, who respond with a combination of preening and macho reticence. This witty piece is a potent and hilarious meditation on cinematic and everyday sex roles, voyeurism, power, and the thin line between admiration and invasiveness.
1. Lots of feminist women photographers (in the sense that all the women photographers were making points about men which were, as far as I could see, were entirely negative. None of them celebrating any aspect of maleness.)
2. At least half, if not more, of the male photographers are gay i.e. if the exhibition as a whole is about one particular type of masculinity, it is about gay masculinity.
3. No photographers and no photographs from Russia or China. Hmm. Because they don’t have men there? Or no photographers there? Or because not enough of them are gay (either the subjects or the photographers themselves)? Or because the curators don’t think Russia and China matter?
55 photographers in all, 23 from America, lots of the others covering American subjects – but none from Russia or China.
Posted by Simon on February 29, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/29/masculinities-liberation-through-photography-the-barbican-2/
This is the large-format, floppy paperback catalogue of an exhibition held at the National Gallery of Australia in 2001. The exhibition featured paintings by 20th century Mexican artists collected (and sometimes commissioned) by the wealthy art collectors, Jacques and Natasha Gelman. The book contains:
For a start, I’m surprised they call it Modernism. I thought that’s exactly what it wasn’t. I thought Modernism was cubism, futurism, suprematism, constructivism, vorticism and so on, mainly from the 1910s. I thought Rivera’s art was part of the international reaction against the abstraction of the 1910s, and back towards various forms of realism – called neo-classical realism in France, or the Neue Sachlichkeit in Germany, or the narrative realism of the Mexican muralists.
That said, once you start flicking through this book and taking in its bewildering range and variety – with Surrealist works next to abstract expressionism, light-hearted caricature next to Frida’s earnest self-portraits – you realise that maybe ‘Modernism’ is the only label which works as a hold-all term.
Jacques Gelman was born into a rich Russian Jewish family in 1909. His family fled the Russian Revolution to Germany. Twenty years later, Gelman fled Nazi Germany on the eve of the Second World War, making his way to Mexico – which was more open to European refugees than America.
In America Gelman became a successful film producer and, along with his wife Natasha, also a keen collector of contemporary Mexican art, building up an impressive collection and commissioning portraits from leading artists.
Upon Mrs. Gelman’s death in 1998, their collection was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Highlights were loaned to the National Gallery of Australia for this exhibition in 2001. And hence this book, the catalogue of that exhibition.
Frida Kahlo dominates the title and the exhibition and this catalogue.
Even in 2001 the curators write about Frida as having achieved cult status. And as the recent exhibition at the V&A showed, it wasn’t just her paintings, but her entire self-presentation – the dresses and costumes and jewellery and hair, the whole look – which make Kahlo so visually attractive, so iconic.
To a historical materialist like me, what would be interesting would be an analysis of Frida Kahlo’s rise and rise which asked why she has become such a superstar cultural icon and attempted to answer in terms of cultural history and political change.
After all, during their lifetime her husband, Diego Rivera, was much the more famous of the two, up there with Picasso as an internationally recognised synonym for modern art. And Rivera pioneered a uniquely public form of art – his educational murals – which were commissioned by the Mexican state and millionaire American patrons. He could hardly have been more high profile and public.
So what has changed in our culture to lead to the fact that this politically committed, socialist visionary is now almost entirely overlooked in favour of his preening, self-obsessed, young wife?
For you can’t deny that Frida’s work is entirely, obsessively, unrelentingly about herself – it consists of literally hundreds of self-portraits, wearing various costumes, in bed, bound in barbaric medical equipment, crying, bleeding, suffering miscarriages.
Henry Ford Hospital (The Flying Bed) by Frida Kahlo (1932)
When I was growing up in the 1970s it was axiomatic that there would soon be a socialist revolution which would sweep away American imperialist capitalism. ‘Up the workers’, ‘Come the revolution’, ‘The workers. United. Will never be divided’, ‘One out, all out’ were just some of the radical slogans which people shouted on umpteen marches and picket lines. (I’m not saying I agreed with it, but these were the widespread assumption among lefties at the time, in universities, the media, film, theatre and so on).
Over the last forty years that hope – the hope for the ‘overthrow of capitalism’ – has, it seems to me, been completely abandoned and replaced by the notion of separate and specific ‘liberations’ to be achieved, in different ways, by distinct sections of the population.
Gay liberation. Women’s liberation. Black power. Over the past forty to fifty years each of these sectors or groups has developed its own discourses, narratives, lists of grievances and injustices. Each of them insists on being heard.
Women need to talk about women’s issues and be heard. #believewomen. #me too. Gays need to talk about the gay experience. Lesbians need to find their voice. Transgender people need to be listened to. We need to talk about mental illness. Black lives matter. Refugees must be given a voice. Muslim women must tell their stories. We need to talk about…. you name it.
The idea of a unified, mass working class movement seeking to effect a fundamental transformation of society has disappeared. It has been replaced by a fragmented landscape made up of millions of voices, all clamouring to be heard, all desperate to tell their stories of suffering and victimhood and exclusion.
In this completely different cultural and political climate, Rivera’s big, loud, working-class politics seems bullying, sexist, old-fashioned, toxically masculine, redundant, or disgusting.
(The art scholars in this book don’t miss an opportunity to accuse Rivera of toxic masculinity, pointing out his philandering and unfaithfulness and general feckless masculinity on pages 10, 14, 25, 26 and 27. The fact that Frida had a staggering number of extra-marital affairs is mentioned as only her due. She was an artist, you know, and a suffering woman in a man’s world. Of course she was justified in taking love wherever she could find it.)
By contrast with Diego’s discrediting as an epitome of discredited, male-dominated, socialist, trade union politics, Frida has become an emblem of our modern concerns, dominated by the Eternal Victimhood of Woman Under The Patriarchy – about the pity and the pain and the pathos of being a woman. (The story of the bus accident in which Frida was injured by a handrail is told on page 9, repeated on page 25, and then told again on page 27. The message is rammed home. Poor Frida. Beastly Diego.)
Injured as a girl (by a male bus driver, obviously), subject to endless medical operations (by male surgeons, of course), forced to wear painful corsets and prosthetics (by male specialists, the brutes), betrayed by her philandering husband (cheating, false and unfaithful Diego), ignored by the (male) art establishment during her lifetime, refusing to conform to (male) canons of female beauty – Frida ticks pretty much every box on the feminist checklist.
My point is that the definition of what is ‘progressive’ or ‘radical’ has changed out of all recognition in the past forty or so years.
Once it was someone who tried to unite the working classes, the poor and the dispossessed, in order to seize power and transform the economic basis of society. Now it is someone who has suffered greatly because of their gender or race. Once it was the semi-pagan idea of the active hero and revolutionary. Now it is much more like more Christian idea of the suffering martyr, the victim, the permanently injured, offended or abused.
And Saint Frida – along with Saint Sylvia and Saint Emmeline and Saint Rosa – is one of the patron saints of the new religion.
I had written the above simply as a response to the way Frida’s suffering and endurance and saintliness is so obsessively repeated in the preface and the introduction and the text of the book, and was congratulating myself on developing this little critique, when I came across the fourth essay in the book – ‘People are vying for shreds of her garments’ – and was gutted to discover that everything I’d thought through for myself – is common or received opinion.
‘People are vying for shreds of her garments’ by Anthony White does precisely what had occurred to me – tries to account for the rise and rise of the Cult of Frida over a period when traditional class-based politics has declined and special-interest-group, identity politics has taken over.
White is far more scathing than I was prepared to be. He doesn’t hold back and he makes the link – which i was rather proud of – between the Cult of Frida and Christian ideas of sainthood and suffering:
Kahlo has become the exemplary modern cult figure, in the tradition of Christian saints and teenage pop stars…
Her legacy has grown into a multi-million dollar industry that crosses national and cultural boundaries….
One of the recent sources of Kahlo’s recent celebrity has been a narrative of suffering which feeds into a well-established, popular fascination with personal struggles with pain…
Her work connects to a pervasive tradition in western art that depicts the tribulations of saints…
The figure of Frida Kahlo appeals especially to women… Kahlo’s rising popularity in the 1970s was paralleled by the growth in feminism… (Anthony White, p.13)
She was a martyr to pain, menstrual cramps, erratic periods, ill-fated pregnancy, tragic miscarriages, painful abortions, unfaithful men, establishment misogyny, the whole panoply of the evil patriarchy. What woman hasn’t experienced one, many or all of these grievances? Her story features them all, whipped up into a frothy intensity of pathos.
The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo (1944) (or a portrait of the artist as a martyred woman in a man’s world)
Having discussed Frida and her many martyrdoms (physical, psychological, artistic, social) at length, Anthony White then moves on to discuss the rest of the artists featured in the show. He distinguishes three branches of Mexican Modernism, as found in the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection:
The book includes reproductions of 60 paintings and seven photos. It opens with the wonderful photos by Manuel Álvarez Bravo who was, apparently, ‘Mexico’s first principal artistic photographer and the most important figure in 20th-century Latin American photography’.
Bravo took portraits of Diego and Frida (of course) but also a huge range of subjects, from modernist architecture, street life, and women in various states of undress. Tut tut. Objectifying, misogynist, sexist pig. Great photos, though.
Forbidden fruit by Manuel Álvarez Bravo
There is just one photo by his wife, Lola Alvarez Bravo, who was also, apparently, a notable photographer in her own right – an interesting collage of black-and-white photos of ballet dancers stuck over images of the Mexican desert, which my daughter liked.
And then there are paintings by:
Apparently, the Gelman collection contained more works by Gunther Gerzso than any other painter, about 40 of them. I can see why. They’re big, bold, colourful abstracts (although Gerzso himself said that they were not purely abstract, but had their source or inspiration in the dry, sun-baked landscape of Mexico). Their existence also shows how the Gelmans continued collecting long after Frida and Diego had passed away (1954 and 1957, respectively), well into the 1960s and 70s, into a completely different cultural and visual world.
This example of Gerzso reminds me a bit of the kind of abstract prints my parents and their friends bought in Habitat and Heals and had on their walls in the 1970s.
Figure in red and blue by Gunther Gerzso (1964)
This is an interesting book because it a) contains a handful of masterpieces by Diego and Frida, but more because b) it introduced me to a dozen Mexican artists I’d never heard of before.
On the one hand, Rivera and Frida emerge as head and shoulders the best and most distinctive of the artists here, with Diego’s painting of a Calla lilly vendor, and any of Frida’s amazing self-portraits, leaping off the page – for example the ones with monkeys, in a red and gold dress or with braids.
But it was good to also learn about Latin America’s premiere photographer, Manuel Álvarez Bravo and about Gerzso and a few others. I took a shine to the crisp abstract works of Carlos Mérida, with their late-1950s, rather Festival of Britain vibe.
Festival of the Birds by Carlos Mérida (1959)
Posted by Simon on November 30, 2018
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/frida-kahlo-diego-rivera-mexican-modernism-gelman-collection/
A grave, steady man.
(James Boswell describing Captain Cook, quoted page 342)
I’ve covered a lot of the detail of the three epic voyages of discovery carried out by Captain James Cook in my review of the current exhibition about them being held at the British Library in London.
That review includes detail of the routes, the places ‘discovered’ and first mapped by Europeans (Tahiti, New Zealand, Hawaii, among many others) and the baleful impact which First Contact with white men had on the native peoples of those places.
Having put all that factual information, and discussion of the attendant cultural controversy, down in another place, this in a sense frees me up to enjoy Hough’s rather old-fashioned biography as a straightforward narrative of derring-do and adventure.
Hough (pronounced How) takes us deep into the day-to-day experience of being an officer or ordinary sailor or one of the scientific passengers, on these extraordinarily bold and dangerous voyages – cooped up in a ship 100 foot long by 28 feet wide for months on end in often terrible weather, with food and water which, after about a month, had become inedible and foul. It is no surprise to learn that drunkenness and fighting among the crew were a permanent problem, with some of the crew being drunk from morning to night, and one man on the first voyage drinking himself to death.
During his career Hough wrote a variety of historical books, but was mostly a specialist in maritime history. He was born in 1922, which means this biography of Cook was published when he was 72 years old. No surprise, then, that it is rather old-fashioned in tone and approach.
Hough gives space at the appropriate points to the scientific motives of the voyages, to the behind-the-scenes politicking at the Royal Society and the Royal Navy which provide the context for the voyages, to the way Cook’s discoveries were appropriated by others (the self-promoting naturalist Joseph Banks being the glaring example), were frequently sensationalised and misreported in the press, and so on.
He deals extensively with Cook’s encounters with the native peoples of the places he ‘discovered’, and gives a better sense of their interactions than the exhibition does. The exhibition is at pains to emphasise the baleful consequences of Cook opening up these places and peoples to colonial exploitation, whereas Hough has the space in his 450-page-long book to go into great detail about the complex mutuality of many of these encounters and their diversity: some natives were friendly and welcoming, some were fierce and antagonistic; some lived in sophisticated cultures with complex religions, others lived stark naked to the elements, with no clothes, or homes or tools of any kind; some, like Queen Obadia and King Tiarreboo of Tahiti, become good friends of Cook and his officers through repeated visits.
But at its core – and what makes his book, I think, so enjoyable – is Hough’s own deep feeling for the perils and pleasures of sailing the seven seas. Although he nowhere explicitly states it, it is quite clear that Hough was an experienced sailor himself, and had visited at least some of the exotic and distant locations he is writing about, by boat.
Anyone who has sailed these waters off present-day Christchurch will appreciate how easy it was for Cook to misidentify Banks Peninsula for an island. (p.158)
This writer, arriving at Easter Island by sea and at early dawn, can attest to the discouragement to landing the fierce visages and giant size of these statues engender. (p.289)
Thus his book contains numerous moments of insight into the precise mechanical workings of an 18th century sailing ship, of the weather and sea conditions to be found on the seas which Cook sailed, and goes into fascinating detail about the great range of jobs and tasks required to keep a ship afloat and sailing.
Hough places you right there, hearing the creak of the rigging, feeling the salt spray in your face, sharing the excitement of the crew when land is sighted after weeks of being cooped up in the stinking, bickering environment of the ship.
It is, for example, typical that before each of the three voyages, Hough not only takes you through the extensive repairs and refurbishments made to each of the ships Cook sailed in, but goes to great pains to name and describe every member of the crew – their names, where they were from, their sailing experience and personalities, with indications of how they bore up during their three-year-long ordeals, right down to the 12-year-old cabin boy.
Map of James Cook’s three voyages
Mingled in among the narrative events are moments of pure lyricism with which Hough explains the lure of the sea, and the excitement of discovery.
On the ill-fated third voyage Cook took along two junior officers, William Bligh, a young arrogant but competent map-maker whose harshness, 12 years later, was to cause the infamous ‘Mutiny on the Bounty‘ – and young George Vancouver, who joined Cook’s second expedition at the age of 15. At the moments when they hove into view of new islands, or set out to explore new coastlines, discovering new sounds, bays and inlets, we share with them the raw thrill of discovery which drove Europeans all around the world, on the most cockamamie expeditions.
I’ve watched and read over the past 40 or so years as history writing has become more ‘diverse’ and ‘inclusive’. In practice this hasn’t meant many more black or non-white people writing history, it has meant that the same type of white, upper middle class, private-school-educated academics, writing on the pretty much the same old subjects, but now going out of their way to comment on 1. the presence or absence of women, and 2. the oppression of non-white peoples.
Fine. Some of this approach sheds drastically new light on old subjects, like Alan Taylor’s mind-expanding history of the colonisation of America, American Colonies, which begins 30,000 years ago with the arrival of the first humans in Alaska, and goes on to explain the staggeringly diverse range of ‘races’, nations and cultures which, right from the beginning, made up America’s multi-racial societies. A book like that completely changes your view of the subject.
But in other writers’ hands – and especially in (by necessity) the restricted space of exhibition guides and wall labels – it can sound like tokenism and box-ticking.
An aspect of the rise of identity politics and political correctness in history writing is that it can result in text which is surprisingly simple-minded, almost childish. In the several exhibitions about queer art which I’ve visited over the past few years, the curators take it upon themselves to explain that ‘same sex desire’ was once forbidden and even punished by western societies. Golly.
Reading something like this makes me wonder what age group the curators are targeting. Most of the people I see at art galleries and exhibitions are quite clearly retired, educated middle-class people in their 60s and 70s. Do you really need to explain to the average, educated, middle-class exhibition-goer that homosexuality used to be illegal? Do you think they didn’t know that?
Similarly, at the British Library exhibition about Cook’s voyages, I was struck by the naivety of some of the wall labels, like the one which pointed out that:
Violence is part of the story of James Cook’s voyages, as it is of other European expeditions of this era.
What age group would you say that is aimed at? 11 year-olds? 8 year-olds? Surely not the grey-haired old retirees I was surrounded by.
And in case you didn’t know what ‘violence’ means, the display the label refers to contains a musket which, it explains, is a kind of old-fashioned gun. And a ‘gun’ is a ‘weapon’. And ‘weapons’ are often used in ‘violence’. Get it now?
Next to a map which Cook created of Tahiti is another wall label:
Claiming of already populated lands was a common feature of European exploration.
How old do the curators think we are? 11?
This is what I mean when I say that modern, politically correct identity politics/feminism/post-colonial theory can sometimes end up treating its audience like small children, as if they have to explain every aspect of human nature from scratch, as if we’d never heard of same-sex desire, or violence, or colonialism, or slavery before.
This is what makes Hough so enjoyable: he treats his readers as adults who know about the world. Thus he takes it for granted that the main entertainment of the tough, illiterate ship’s crew was getting drunk and fighting – which we know about because of the litany of disciplinary measures Cook recorded in his logs.
And Hough expects you to understand that it was standard practice for the 80 or so crew members, whenever they hit land, to go looking women. In Westernised ports like Cape Town or Batavia, this meant prostitutes. In the islands of the Pacific, it meant native women. But this is where the voyages were so memorable for the men because there were well-established traditions of native women happily giving themselves to visiting men – with the full approval of their own menfolk. Which obviously made a big impression on British sailors brought up in our sexually repressed culture.
Thus every landfall in most of the Pacific islands was accompanied by an impressive amount of sexual activity, sometimes in the open, in full view of passersby. Hough, it seems to me, treats us adults who expect rough sailors to behave this way, and so are not as shocked as feminist art curators. Taking the human nature of humans for granted allows Hough to move on to the more interesting aspects and consequences of these cultural encounters, for example the way that many of the English men and native women formed real attachments, which led the women, for example, to follow the ships in canoes when they set sail, and to greet some of the same sailors when they returned three years later, with genuine joy.
A Young Woman of Otaheite bringing a Present. Print of a drawing by expedition artist John Webber (1777)
But it also led to the spread of venereal disease and Hough shows how Cook repeatedly tried to establish the origin of these diseases and tried to enforce bans on his own crew when they arrived at new tropical island (like Hawaii, discovered only on the third voyage) to prevent the natives being infected. The failure of Cook’s strict bans, despite being enforced with flogging the sailors, tells us more about the indefatigableness of human nature than all the exhibition wall labels in the world.
Hough makes only a passing mention of the fact that ‘buggery’ was rife below decks. He takes it for granted that 70 or 80 rough, physically fit men, cooped up in a very small space for long periods, will indulge in sodomy, even though it was forbidden and punishable by lashes of the whip. A very different world from the ‘same sex desires’ of the kind of Bloomsbury ladies depicted in Tate’s Queer British Art but one any man who went to a boys’ school will know about.
Hough assumes that we understand that maintaining discipline among drunk, potentially violent men, required severe physical punishment, namely tying wrong-doers to a wooden frame and whipping their bare backs till they bled. If the member of crew tasked with doing the whipping refused, he too was whipped. Unbelievably harsh to modern thinking, but Hough expects us to have an adult appreciation that most lives, for most of the past, have been bloody and brutal.
I’d forgotten the tradition that when the ship crossed the equator, every crewman and passenger who hadn’t done it before, was locked inside a kind of wooden cage, suspended by rope from a yardarm, and then dropped several times its own height into the speeding waves, so that the man trapped inside was totally submerged, three times. One of the several officers who kept diaries of the voyage remarks how some of the men revelled in demonstrating their toughness, while others were visibly distressed after just the first drop and wept after the second. The tradition continues to this day, though nowadays is an excuse for a party. bring back the dunking cage, I say 🙂
For me history has at least three purposes.
1. One is as pure entertainment. I bet most people read history books as they read thrillers or rom-coms, for the entertainment, for the characters, for the amazing things people got up to / endured / achieved and so on. There’s as much sex, intrigue and violence in the Tudors as in a Hollywood blockbuster, which is why books and TV shows about Henry VIII never go out of fashion.
2. A second, more straitlaced motive is to understand how we got here today by reading about our forebears in Britain, Europe, America or wherever, to better understand what happened and why it’s led us to the current situation. The ‘those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it’ school of thought. Winston Churchill said that, by the way.
3. But for me there’s also a psychological-cum-moral purpose — which is to expand the reader’s mind and broaden his or her sympathies.
Reading about the past not only often amazes us at how people lived then, what they had to endure, what they achieved despite it all – but also transports us into the minds of people with completely different expectations and values from us. The more effort we make to think ourselves into others’ places, hundreds of years ago, thousands of miles away, the more we exercise our minds and extend our sympathies.
Instead of rushing to judge people of the past according to the values of today, I think it is more profitable to make the imaginative effort of really immersing ourselves in their world and values, the better to understand:
This, in a nutshell, is behind all the different ways I’m opposed to what I’ve, rather simplistically, called political correctness, in history and historical exhibitions. Political correctness rushes to judge people in the past. I think we should be patient and try to understand them on their own terms.
I didn’t realise 18th century sailors took so much livestock with them. Many of the sailors had dogs, and Joseph Banks was notorious for his attachment to his two prize greyhounds. But they also took sheep and pigs and goats, partly to butcher and eat, partly to be gifts to native peoples on the other side of the planet, as well as coops of hens to provide fresh eggs. This meant that wherever they stopped to gather wood and water, they also had to cut grass, a lot of grass, solely as provender for the livestock. And imagine clearing up the piles of poo every day!
By the time of the third voyage, King George III, the official sponsor of all of the voyages, had seen and learned about conditions among the native peoples which his expeditions had claimed for the British Crown. Not least because the second voyage brought home Omai, a Pacific Islander Cook had met in Tahiti, and who became the sensation of fashionable London during his two-year stay in Britain (1774-76).
As a result ‘farmer’ George, as he was nicknamed for his interest in improving agriculture in Britain, decided to send the poor benighted Pacific Islanders a suite of farm animals which they could breed up, encouraging them to convert their primitive agriculture into modern, mixed British farming best practice.
Thus Cook found himself lumbered with direct orders from the king to transport a number of sheep, rabbits, a mare, a stallion, a large number of sows and several hogs, two cows with their calves and a bull, to the other side of the world and given as gifts to the king of Tahiti. Plus a peacock and a peahen, special gifts of Baron Ponsonby of Sysonby.
All on a boat little more than 100 foot long!
For the entire three-year duration of the first voyage, the officers’ tea was provided with milk by a goat, who never failed to deliver, day after day, for a thousand days. It survived all the way back to Britain where Joseph Banks bought her a collar to celebrate her achievement, and commissioned a Latin tag to go on the collar from no less a luminary than Dr Johnson, who obliged with:
Perpetua ambita bis terra preamia lactis
Haec habet altrici Capra secunda Jovis
Which roughly translates as:
In fame scarce second to the nurse of Jove
This goat, who twice the world had traversed round,
Deserving both her master’s care and love,
Ease and perpetual pasture now has found.
Most accounts of Cook’s voyages focus on their scientific achievement, their mapping and charting, their discoveries of ‘new’ lands (new to Europeans), and the first interactions of Westerners with native peoples in a variety of locations, some peaceful, some violent, all of which – in the long run – would disrupt and decimate their societies.
But one way in which a past as remote as 250 years ago is distant from us is in its attitude towards death. The politically correct tend to think that any deaths, indeed any violence carried out by people and regimes from the past, should be judged against the highest standards of modern, peaceable Western society and held to account as in a courtroom.
But it’s not defending the behaviour of anyone in the past to point out that, 250 years ago, death from all sorts of causes was much more common than it is now. The ubiquity of death – the deaths of his own family, of soldiers and sailors he served with, of crewmates and colleagues – all help to explain the sometimes apparently ‘casual’ way Cook and colleagues responded to the deaths of the native peoples they encountered.
So in among the amazing stories, the colourful characters and the breath-taking scenery, I became interested in Hough’s relating of the many deaths which surrounded Cook all his life, and therefore the presence of death as a theme in Captain Cook’s biography.
In fact there are so many deaths sprinkled throughout the book, that I’ve restricted this selection of examples to just the First Voyage.
In November 1770 the Endeavour reached Batavia, main city of the Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta). They were relieved to see white men and have access to all the joys of civilisation again, after more than a year either at sea or among native peoples, and also relieved to be able to make repairs to the Endeavour which was in poor shape after enduring such a long voyage, and a number of fierce storms.
But it proved to be a fatal stay. Batavia had been laid out in a grid of canals by the Dutch East India Company but these had silted up and become reservoirs for mosquitoes as well as a host of other tropical diseases.
In all some 34 of the crew died soon, or from lingering effects of disease caught in Batavia on the journey back across the Indian Ocean and up the Atlantic coast of Africa. Both Cook and Banks were laid low for a while with fevers, but recovered. For a man as proud of caring for his men’s health as Cook, it was a devastating blow.
On the second voyage there were two ships, Resolution captained by Cook, and Adventure, captained by Tobias Furneaux. On 17 December 1773 Furneaux sent a cutter with ten men, commanded by midshipman Rowe, to collect wild greens for the crew. It never returned and next day another cutter went in search and, at a beach they’d named Grass Cove, found hundreds of Maoris and the body parts of their colleagues.
Dogs were chewing at the discarded entrails of four or five men, and they found the eyes, hearts, lungs, livers and heads of their comrades … various feet and Rowe’s left hand (identified by its scarred forefinger) roasting on fires or scattered on the ground.
Over the next few years all visits to New Zealand confirmed that the Maori were cannibals who cooked and ate the bodies of the enemies they defeated in battle. Possibly the white men had got angry, maybe fired a few shots, then were lynched. Possibly they interrupted a native religious ceremony, and sparked the wrath of the celebrants. No one will ever know for sure.
The head of a New Zealander by Sydney Parkinson (1773)
But one of the notable aspects of this clash of cultures was the relative restraint the white commanders showed: his men wanted Furneaux to launch a massive bombardment with all the ships canon to devastate the area, but he resisted. Three years later, when Cook returned to the same area on his third expedition, the men again urged their captain to take devastating retaliation but Cook resisted. He even hosted the king of the tribe associated with the murders, Kahura, in his cabin.
This brings out a central thread of the book, which is Cook’s consistent concern to be fair to the natives, to be considerate and courteous, to pay for everything the crews bought, and to submit to quite a few (to him) incomprehensible religious and civic ceremonies. When he discovered crew members ill-treating natives, or when his subordinates were found guilty of shooting natives, Cook was always incensed, and quite a few were punished with floggings.
And yet the book also lists a steady litany of misunderstandings on both sides, and a steady pile of native corpses which builds up. The white men had cannon and muskets. With every misunderstanding which degenerated into violence, the white men (usually) triumphed. And every incident was a nail hammered into Cook’s agonised awareness that although he was carrying out his Majesty’s instructions to the letter, although he conducted his scientific enquiries, collected biological specimens and made endless maps as ordered – that despite all his good intentions, Western contact with First Peoples was fated to be disastrous.
At Ship Cove in New Zealand, in June 1773, Cook wrote in his Journal of the native Maori:
To our shame as civilized Christians, we debauch their morals already too prone to vice, and we introduce among them wants and perhaps disease which they never before knew and which serve only to disturb that happy tranquility which they and their forefathers enjoyed. If anyone denies the truth of this assertion, let him tell me what the natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans. (quoted p.264)
And it was, of course, disastrous for Cook himself, who was cut down in Kealakekua Bay, on Hawai’i island, as a result of a series of cultural misunderstandings with the islanders, which escalated into a bloodbath, described in harrowing detail by Hough on pages 412 to 427.
Cook’s brutal murder stands to this day as a symbol of the tragic ease with which minor cultural confusions can escalate into mass murder, and a gory prophecy of all the massacres which were to follow.
The death of Captain James Cook, 14 February 1779 by Johann Zoffany
After the fight ashore in which Cook and four marines were stabbed and hacked to death, one of the two boats bombarded the shore while Captain Clerke, taking command, evacuated the remaining men ashore. Some of the chiefs, forlorn at Cook’s murder, promised to reclaim his body for the white men. But next day all they were able to offer was some cooked flesh from Cook’s body and some bones.
This gave rise to the enduring myth that Cook was eaten by cannibals.
No – the Hawaiian Islanders who killed Captain Cook were not cannibals. They believed that the power of a man was in his bones, so they cooked part of Cook’s body to enable the bones to be easily removed. It was the cooking of his body which gave rise to the rumour of cannibalism.
A week after his death, what remains of Cook had been recovered (being the captain’s hands, the scalp, the skull, the leg bones, lower jaw and feet, p.433) were buried at sea in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, Captain Clerke assumed command but soon died of tuberculosis and the expedition was commanded for another fourteen months by the American John Gore, and navigated by 28-year-old martinet and expert chart-maker, William Bligh. They sailed north to chart the Sandwich Islands in greater detail, and then all the way north to Alaska to have another – futile – attempt to find the mythical North-West passage.
His wife, Elizabeth Cook, survived not only her husband by 56 years (he died in 1779, she died in 1835) but all of their children who died young, the three eldest sons aged 31, 16 and 16. On four days a year, the deathdays of her husband and three boys, she fasted and spent the day reading the Bible, and, according to the memoirs of her second cousin:
like many widows of sailors, she could never sleep in high wind for thinking of the men at sea. (p.444)
This may be an old-fashioned book but, partly for that reason, it is sympathetic and moving.
Posted by Simon on July 2, 2018
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/07/02/captain-james-cook-a-biography-richard-hough/
This is a very enjoyable, relaxing, easy-going exhibition. It’s small, with fewer than 50 works on display and a relatively short audioguide with only 15 items, meaning there is time to read and look and absorb all the works and then to stroll back through picking out favourites and re-examining them closely.
‘Australia’s Impressionists’ brings together paintings by three late-Victorian artists – Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder – who used new European ideas of painting in the open air to capture the urban and rural landscape of Australia. Their open air practice and the often quick, blurred finish of the works led to them being called ‘Australia’s impressionists’. They are joined here by a fourth Australian artist, John Russell, who spent most of his adult life in France, where he became friends with leading artists such as Monet and van Gogh, developing a genuinely European impressionist style and was even mentor to the young Matisse.
Roberts was in fact born in England – in Dorchester, Dorset to be precise. His family emigrated to Australia in 1869. He returned to England to study art from 1881 to 1884 before returning to establish himself in ‘marvellous’ Melbourne in 1885. The wall label explains that Melbourne was an economic and social phenomenon, having grown from a few shacks in 1800 to become the second largest city in the British Empire by the 1880s, with bustling docks, warehouses and busy streets teeming with soldiers, shopkeepers, sheep farmers and well-dressed ladies.
Thus one of the most arresting images in the show is Roberts’ Allegro con brio, Bourke Street West, an immense panorama of one of the busiest streets in Melbourne. The palette of duck egg blue for the sky overwhelmed by the sandy orange of the streets and buildings makes a tremendous impact as a depiction of an authentic Australian urban scene. But the title is important and symptomatic, too. Roberts had just returned from 4 years in London where he was much influenced by the Aestheticism of James McNeill Whistler, the pioneering American painter who gave his paintings titles from musical terminology like ‘Symphony’ and ‘Harmony’.
Although they were determined to paint the Australian scene, all three of these artists saw it with eyes conditioned by the latest developments in European art.
Allegro con brio, Bourke Street West (1885 to 1886, reworked 1890) by Tom Roberts © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the National Library of Australia, Canberra
While in London Roberts painted the city in a kind of foggy, blurry style which recalls Monet’s London paintings (e.g. The Thames at Westminster (Westminster Bridge) 1871). These made a big impression on his contemporaries and several examples are included here. (My favourite one dates from a later visit to London but is a splendidly evocative miniature of the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square – all the more so since the visitor to this exhibition has just walked past this very scene.)
Trafalgar Square (1904) by Tom Roberts © Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
In August 1889 Roberts helped to organise an exhibition of works by himself and colleagues in Melbourne. It was titled the ‘9 by 5 Impression Exhibition’ because many of the works were painted on the 9-inch by 5-inch lids of cigar boxes, an easy resource for poor artists. Although small, the sheer number of works (180-plus) in such a consistently shaky, blurry, swift, impressionistic style, made a big impact on critics (who didn’t like it) and fellow artists (who did). In some accounts the show is credited with marking the start of a genuinely Australian art. It was also distinctive for its fin-de-siecle and Aesthetic trimmings, with the walls of the gallery swathed in Liberty silks and the works bordered by large blocky frames, often painted a kind of modernist metallic tint.
Roberts brought back from Europe this taste for painting en plein air and did much to encourage friends and colleagues to do likewise, and to consciously depict the Australian scenery and life. He set up artists’ ‘camps’ in rural locations a train ride from Sydney or Melbourne (just as the French impressionists used the new suburban train network to go out to the suburbs of Paris to paint semi-rural scenes) although the commentary wryly points out that they weren’t exactly primitive, the one at Box Hill near Sydney having a separate ‘dining tent’ and even a piano installed.
As you explore the exhibition more you understand why the 9 to 5 works are placed right at the start – small, fleeting ‘impressions’ of urban scenes they may be, but they soon give way to large and sometimes enormous works depicting the countryside near Melbourne and Sydney.
Given that sheep farming was one of the fundamental activities in Australia it’s striking how few images of it there are in the exhibition. A Google search shows that Roberts did do many sheep-related paintings, including ones of herding and shearing, but there’s only one here, a big and dramatic composition, Break away! in which the mounted farmer is trying to stop sheep bolting for a dried-up waterhole during a drought.
A Break Away! (1891) by Tom Roberts © Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
This is a strikingly naturalistic work, concerned to give a realistic depiction of every detail, for example of the horse’s sweating coat, the cowboy’s lean, his braces, every detail of the fence. It’s great fun but it isn’t really impressionism.
Conder was also born in England, in Tottenham, north London. After a boyhood in India he was sent to Australia in 1884. In 1888 he moved to Melbourne where he met Roberts and Streeton. A notable early work is Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay. Note the high vantage point, as used by Roberts in the Bourke Street painting, the smudginess of the clouds and smoke from steamships, the sheen of rain on the dockside. But I saw more of L.S. Lowry in this work than Monet.
Departure of the Orient: Circular Quay (1888) by Charles Conder © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
In fact Conder went back to Europe in 1890, never to return to Australia, and became deeply involved in the Aesthetic movement, mixing with leading artists and writers of the day including Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Critics consider his later period less convincing than the earlier Australian paintings. Conder took part in the rural painting camps organised by Roberts outside Sydney or Melbourne. Towards the end of the show there’s a sequence of works by all three artists depicting beaches outside Sydney. Conder produced this work which became quite famous.
Points of interest include:
A Holiday at Mentone (1888) by Charles Conder © Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Streeton was actually born in Australia, unlike the previous two who migrated there. The paintings of his here are among the largest, and the most evocative of rural Australia. This dramatic depiction of a mine works on what looks like a blisteringly hot day is initially striking for its scale, for the portrait format and for the brilliance with which he creates the slabby effect of hard rocks. It takes a while to focus on the small humans down at the entrance of the mine, and to realise that they are bringing out of an injured miner on a stretcher.
Fire’s On (1891) by Arthur Streeton © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Streeton’s work is possibly the most accessible and enjoyable of the three. The second room of the show features a number of his really large paintings of rural Australia which make it look like paradise. Golden Summer was painted when he was just 21! painted at the artists’ camp at Heidelberg, outside Sydney, set up by him and Roberts. It was the first painting by an Australian-born artist to be exhibited at both the Royal Academy in London, in 1890, and the Paris Salon the following year, where it won an award. A reproduction can’t convey the size and the sheer sensual pleasure of this astonishingly assured masterpiece.
Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889) by Arthur Streeton © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The commentary points out that the states of Australia only came together to form a nation in 1901. The late 19th century was a great era of nationalism in politics, an interest or concern or issue which spilled over into art, music and literature. And so, for Australian politicians, commentators and artists, there was a lot of debate about what made it a nation, what was ‘Australian-ness’ etc. The commentary points all this out but it would have been good to have more from the artists or maybe contemporary commentators on what they thought Australian-ness consisted of, what they thought the distinctive features of the Australian landscape, or light, or flora consisted of.
A handful of beach paintings are brought together later in the exhibition to show the distinctive white sand of beaches outside Sydney. But in fact one of the most striking things about the show is how European most of these paintings looked to me. My early impressions of Australia were formed by movies, specifically Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), or the TV series Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (1968 to 1970). Desert and drought and hard red rock, or lush sub-tropical suburbia.
Works like Streeton’s ‘Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide’ (painted when he was just 22) are lovely but don’t look anything like the Australia I grew up seeing. It could be somewhere in the Cotswolds. The fact that the title is a quote from Wordsworth emphasises the Englishness of the imagination which is creating it.
‘Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide’ (1890) by Arthur Streeton © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
The entire exhibition is premised on identifying these artists as impressionists but I wondered. They remind me less of their French contemporaries and more of late-Victorian English naturalistic painters, as can be seen at the wonderful Guildhall Gallery. A painting like Golden Summer is not unlike some of George Clausen’s bucolic scenes of rural England.
How much these paintings are not really that impressionist is highlighted by the fourth member of the show:
Russell left Australia when he was 22, travelling to France where he made friends with the major painters of the day, including Monet and van Gogh. The section of 10 of his paintings here are completely unlike the preceding three artists.
In the Morning, Alpes Maritimes from Antibes (1890 to 1891) by John Russell © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Now this has the full French impressionist feel, vague and blurry blobs of very light and bright colours used loosely to create an impression of a scene. Also no people – unlike all the examples above. Streeton, Roberts and Conder also depicted people-less landscapes, but they are concerned with accurately depicting it, whereas Russell seems much more interested in playing with the possibilities of oil paint and colour – pushing, stretching and experimenting.
This can be seen in his many paintings of the Breton coastline where he settled and lived for decades. Here he used Monet’s tactic of painting the same scene multiple times at different times of day to capture different light and mood, in this example the cluster of rocks off the Breton coast named Aiguille de Coton.
Aiguille de Coton, Belle-Île (about 1890) by John Russell. Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth © Acorn Photo, Perth
As might be expected from a friend of van Gogh’s, Russell experiments with oil paint to express not what he literally saw in front of him but the psychological impact of colour. Similarly the big crude super-obvious brushstrokes are designed to emphasise the paintwork itself rather than the ‘subject’.
Russell’s bold colour experiments led to his work being included alongside those of André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck in the 1905 exhibition at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. A critic wrote that the works looked like they had been painted by ‘wild things’ or fauves in French, and this nickname was quickly applied to the movement which became known as Fauvism.
Russell’s section of the exhibition shows us hard-core French impressionism morphing into post-impressionism. One of the curators makes the case – in the very informative film which accompanies the exhibition and runs in a projection room off to one side – that Russell deserves to be better known and included in our accounts of late impressionism. Without doubt. But if you then walk out of his rather dazzling section and back past the restrained realistic works of Streeter, Conder and Roberts it makes you question the label ‘impressionism’ as applied to them. Plein air naturalism might be closer.
One of the most evocative images in the show is Streeton’s fabulous Ariadne (1895). For once this feels like a landscape which is impossible to confuse with England or even Europe. It could be a Mediterranean sky but the red rocks on the horizon and the mottled eucalyptus trees clearly indicate the Antipodes. No reproduction can convey the intimacy and power of this painting.
The commentary points out that it is typical of the French symbolism of the 1890s to deploy a mysterious, generally female, figure to point and focus a landscape, as is done here. But it’s only if you get really close to the painting’s surface that you can see details like the way the sandy beach is achieved by broad horizontal brushstrokes whereas the woman’s figure is made by vertical brushstrokes, as is the white of the tumbling surf. Or the way the vertical sweeps of the dress merge into the beach. The branches of the tree on the left are achieved with just one or two confident strokes. It is an astonishing masterpiece, and no surprise that this image was chosen for the posters and publicity for the exhibition.
Ariadne (1895) by Arthur Streeton © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
This is a lovely exhibition, full of what’s-not-to-like images of turn-of-the-century Australia, urban and rural, and shedding light on a quartet of artists who are well worth knowing about.
Most galleries nowadays produce at least one video about their exhibitions.
Posted by Simon on January 29, 2017
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/01/29/australias-impressionists-the-national-gallery/
Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that, “when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression ‘Fuck off’.” (p.365)
Niall Ferguson is a bit of a rock star among historians – youngish, good looking in a rugged Scottish way, he’s been the presenter of a number of TV history series for Channel 4, writes combative articles for newspapers and magazines here and in the States, has been a contributing editor to Newsweek, the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times, has actively helped US Presidential campaigns, appears regularly as a pundit on TV shows – all logged and available on his busy website.
Three things make him stand out:
1. He is an economic historian He has an impressive grasp of the economic and banking and business aspects of history. Most history books rely on government and administrative documents and interpret policy in terms of political parties or the individual psychology of a Disraeli or Churchill, with a smattering of culture (quoting poems) thrown in. For their part, most economic historians are dry specialists, working deep in the bowels of Treasury or corporate archives to produce very technical tracts.
But in the book which brought him to general attention, The Pity of War, Ferguson combined his economic perspective with a popular style and approach, taking a detailed look at defence budgets, steel production, armaments output and so on, to present the Great War from a purely economic point of view, resulting in a number of surprising insights & conclusions.
Ferguson’s unique selling point is his ability to cut through political discourse to show the economic realities – the profit and loss, the problems of issuing bonds, obtaining credit, securing loans, paying back interest, finding new markets, keeping down overheads – the sheer business of the Empire, and the challenges it threw up and the difficult decisions political and business leaders had to take as a result.
2. He is an unashamed capitalist He’s not a Marxist or a socialist or a liberal, he isn’t into cultural studies or feminism or post-colonial studies, as so many contemporary historians are. He is an unabashed Thatcherite capitalist. He has been employed by New York investment banks and has worked for Republican presidential candidates. Despite its obvious inequalities, he defends free market capitalism as the bringer of prosperity and freedom to all the countries which embrace it. After all – look at the alternatives.
3. He is a populist Three of his books are based on Channel 4 TV series which he wrote and presented – this history of the British Empire, another on the Rise of America, and the third on reasons why the West beat the Rest to world domination (all handily available to view on YouTube). He is not shy of tackling the Big Subjects.
Having worked for Channel 4 myself, I know that they value controversy above anything else, they like to encourage contrary and unexpected viewpoints, they like to feel they are stimulating debate. Ferguson, with his confidently conservative views, his brash way with economic statistics, and his Celtic good looks (it is a visual medium, after all) was perfectly placed to present the series and write the books on these epic subjects. He will have mapped out the overall approach or message – broken it down into hour-long episodes / chapters, which are built around key (ideally, controversial and ‘against received opinion’) propositions. Then teams of assistants will have been despatched to assemble the material required to fill them out. ‘We want striking locations, powerful stories, strong messages!’
This, the first of the three books-of-the-series, is hugely enjoyable, fluently written, full of deliberate provocations and journalistic summaries, pithy phrase-making and telling stories (I liked his quip that if Britain was a nation of shopkeepers, Australia started out as a nation of shoplifters) – liberally studded with graphs and diagrams displaying impressive-looking arrays of figures for the economically illiterate. It is designed to impress and persuade a broad popular audience, of which I am one.
Empire is a solid-looking Penguin paperback of medium length for such a vast subject (380 pages) and divided into six chapters which summarise the narrative arc of the story – Why Britain?, White Plague, The Mission, Heaven’s Breed, Maxim Force, Empire For Sale.
The biographical background sketched above helps to explain why Ferguson’s history ruggedly and abrasively declares the British Empire was a Good Thing. It had its fair share of atrocities, terrible behaviour, oppression and subjugation. But overall, on balance, from a high-level perspective, Ferguson in his Introduction asserts the British Empire was a civilising, globalising influence, and then spends the rest of the book going into detail to back his assertions.
The Empire was a good thing because it:
Lastly, he emphasises the way the Empire disseminated English ideas of personal liberty. Critics immediately reply, ‘How could an Empire devoted to freedom have made so much money out of slavery?’ Ferguson doesn’t underplay the cruelty or neglect of the Imperial authorities. There are strong passages about slavery, including his description of visiting the slave cells on the West coast of Africa. But the history of the Empire can be split into two parts, Slavery and post-Slavery. Anybody who condemns the British Empire for its use of slavery needs to be reminded that it was the British who were the first nation anywhere in the world to outlaw the slave trade (1808), to abolish slavery altogether (1833), and then to enforce that ban on other nations. The Americans, famously, fought to defend Slavery into the 1860s.
Ferguson makes the profound point that, no matter how rapacious, violent or unjust its activities abroad, there was always a strong party at home which tried to hold the Imperialists to account against the highest standards. Even if the ideal of liberty was betrayed again and again in practice, it was nonetheless an ideal that a significant number of Britons aspired to, and the anti-slavery movement is proof of its power. (After all, a generation earlier, the American colonists had rebelled against their king in the name of a higher ideal than monarchy, in the name of Freedom, and a lot of 18th century Englishmen sympathised with them.) Thus, throughout the nineteenth century, economic and political Liberals criticised the idea and the implementation of Empire, against a range of higher ideals about freedom and national independence.
It was the very power of this British notion of liberty, holding the Empire’s rulers to account against nobler ideals, which meant the Empire’s days were always numbered. By about 1900, as domestic discourse became divided between shrill Imperialists (Kipling, Rhodes) and even shriller opponents (Gladstone’s heirs like John Hobson, author of the stinging critique, Imperialism) the whole idea of Empire was becoming difficult to defend, when it was dealt a body blow by the stupidity of the Boer War.
The grossest, the most obvious defence of the British Empire is – Look at the alternatives. Empire critics tend to base arguments on the notion that, if the British hadn’t arrived, the ‘native’ red Indians, or Indians or Africans or Maoris or Aborigenes would have continued living their environmentally-friendly, spiritual lives. But no they wouldn’t have. They would have been colonised by the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, or God forbid, the Belgians or Germans. And, after the Great War, in the 1930s, the new empires were the totalitarian ones of the Japanese, the Russians and the Nazis. Without a shadow of a doubt, much much worse.
The Soviet Union, the Nazis, the fascist Japanese did not emphasise the rule of law, did not have powerful parties at home holding the Imperialists to account. Critics of their totalitarian policies were shot. Opponents in colonised countries were shot. Anyone complaining about British rule in the 1930s should spend a few minutes reading about the Japanese Rape of Nanking, or the way Germany behaved in its new East European colonies after 1939.
Ferguson is perhaps deliberately controversial, when he asserts that what ended the British Empire wasn’t the various rag-tag nationalist movements which agitated in their countries (Sinn Fein, the Indian Congress, Mau Mau) it was that in a few short years Britain comprehensively bankrupted itself fighting off other empires which were significantly worse, undoubtedly evil.
He gives pages of figures showing the collapse of Britain’s economy in the 20th century, begun in the Great War and ruined in the second. We were only able to continue fighting after 1940 because of huge American loans. Whatever the military or diplomatic facade, the baton for policing the world and combating evil empires had been handed on to America, an America reluctant to take on the role.
Despite listing the things the British Empire gave to the 25% of the world it governed, I thought the book didn’t really address its subtitle, ‘How the British made the modern world’. In the introduction and again in the conclusion, Ferguson repeats the roll call listed above, but I don’t think that’s quite the same as showing how Britain made the modern world. All kinds of other things made the modern world as well. Oil. Coffee. Cars. Airplanes. Computers. Some Brits might have had a hand in some of them, but so did Germans, French, Americans.
Instead, the lion’s share of the text is taken up with a fairly traditional narrative of the key events in the Empire’s history, with a kind of running economic commentary. Insofar as it is a chronological narrative, it covers an awful lot of familiar ground, albeit littered with entertaining stories and stunning stats. So we get:
A lot if not all of this is familiar from other books I’ve read, like Robert Hughes’ harrowing history of Australia, The Fatal Shore (1986), Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery (1997), Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble For Africa (1991), Lawrence James’s The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (1994), The Crisis of Imperialism by Richard Shannon (1974), Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–78), Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (1987).
Like these predecessors Ferguson takes this well-worn story and tries to make it new by studding it with telling anecdotes or accounts of significant figures, garnished by sections on the economics of imperial trade or slavery or the East India Company etc. These economic sections, frequent though they are, somehow don’t have the same impact. A graph about, say, English net migration 1601-1801, while mildly interesting, has little or no impact compared to the 40 or more pages he devotes to a long biographical sketch of David Livingstone, from his impoverished childhood, through his training as a doctor and missionary, and then a thorough account of his adult explorations. Or the long account of Indian Viceroy Lord Curzon, seen as epitomising the cultural moment of high Imperial pomp in India.
In this book and in the Tate Britain exhibition about Artist and Empire I went to recently, I read that the legacy of Empire is ‘all around us’. Hmm. I don’t really agree. My daily commute to Clapham Common, travelling by Tube to Old Street, walking through dirty streets to a 1970s concrete tower block where I work for part of the NHS – not much of that strikes me as a legacy of the British Empire. It all happens to take place in the capital city of the same country, but none of those things were created by or for the British Empire. (Indeed, Ferguson points out that the cost of the NHS and the new welfare state, created after the Second World War, was one of the reasons running an empire became unaffordable.)
To me the most obvious and by far the most important legacy of the British Empire is America. America is the world’s superpower. We founded it, gave it its language, religion and political ideals, and then it grew up and went its own way.
The next most important thing we gave the world was the Industrial Revolution: coal and iron and steam power, railways, electricity, the telegraph and telephone, preparing the way for the oil economy – cars, airplanes and computers. These are the real and immediate physical and technological presences in the life of me and most Londoners. The fact that Indians have parliamentary democracy or Ghana’s judges wear British wigs or Australians play cricket are nice aspects of the world, but as irrelevant to me as the statues of all the generals and viceroys who line Whitehall.
In such a densely researched account, packed with stories, quotes, biographical accounts, facts and figures about such a vast undertaking over such a long period, a number of thoughts stood out, things I never knew or had forgotten, twists or turns in the familiar story:
1995 Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897–1927
1998 The Pity of War
1998 The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild
1999 Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals
2001 The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000
2003 Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
2004 Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
2005 1914
2006 The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred
2008 The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
2010 High Financier: The Lives and Times of Siegmund Warburg
2011 Civilization: The West and the Rest
2013 The Great Degeneration
2015 Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist
Posted by Simon on January 26, 2016
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/01/26/empire-how-britain-made-the-modern-world-niall-ferguson/
‘The first major exhibition in the UK to present a history of Indigenous Australia through objects’
In three medium-sized rooms The BP exhibition, Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation, packs scores and scores of artworks and artefacts designed to illustrate and illuminate the history of the indigenous peoples of Australia. A timeline on the wall starts 60,000 years ago with the first evidence of humans on the continent, proceeds to the first artefacts and art some 40,000 years ago (at a time when Neanderthals were still living alongside homo sapiens in Britain), among much other evidence that Indigenous Australian is the longest continuous, unbroken culture anywhere in the world.
A huge map of Australia on the wall shows the patchwork of tribes and peoples which covered this vast country – the size of Europe – and, when the Europeans arrived, home to some 1 million Indigenous people speaking an estimated 250 separate languages.
From the BM’s collection of 6,000 Australian objects, this exhibition showcases a range of bowls, masks, spearheads, boomerangs, pendants, belts, shields, shell ornaments, speartips, generally dating from the Early Colonial Period (1770 to 1850) when missionaries and explorers began to collect them, most beautifully crafted and decorated with very appealing abstract and geometric designs.
Standout objects included a 5-foot-long crocodile ‘mask’ designed to be worn on the head and a small (6 inch square), wonderfully evocative head and shoulders carved out of coral.
Mask in the form of a human face and a bonito fish, Attributed to Kuduma, Murala. Turtle shell, goa nut, cassowary feather, shell. Nagir, Torres Strait, Queensland, Australia before 1888 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Interspersed with these generally anonymous folk artefacts were large, sometimes very large, paintings by named and much more contemporary aboriginal artists. Almost without exception these were stunningly beautiful and inspiring. The artists included:
They are generally acrylic paint on canvas and there are enough of them, showing enough similarities in style, to have become known as ‘desert paintings’. (There are photos showing the large canvases laid out on a patch of desert and being worked on by one or several artists simultaneously with wide open spaces in the background.) They show abstract patterns derived from natural objects or creatures, but converted into flat panels covered in geometric patterns.There is no attempt at naturalism, they are not confined or trapped by Western notions of perspective or the notion that a painting must be a ‘window on the world’.
‘Kungkarangkalpa’; Kunmanara Hogan, Tjaruwa Woods, Yarangka Thomas, Estelle Hogan, Ngalpingka Simms and Myrtle Pennington (2013) © the artists, courtesy Spinifex Arts Project
I really liked the way the patterning suggests geometric regularity but is never actually exact, always has an organic-feeling variety and fluidity in its lines and circles, its matrices and swirls. And I loved the use of stippling, large dots of coloured paint to create a mosaic affect.
A century ago most Westerners lived in a post-Renaissance visual world, inculcated to think of ‘Art’ as depictions of heroic white men and docile gauze-veiled women (as exemplified in the recent exhibition at Leighton House). It took decades, maybe a century, of Modernism, the influence of Picasso and his generation breaking free from Renaissance traditions and taking inspiration from South Sea Island masks and African carvings to teach us how to see beauty in art which bears little or no relation to the stifling realism of the Western tradition, and to enjoy images like this for their confidence and imaginative power.
As well as examples of this ‘desert painting’ style, there were other bang up-to-date art works:
James Cook with the Declaration by Vincent Namatjira (2014) © Vincent Namatjira
And the Museum has commissioned works specifically for this show from Indigenous artists, including two from Judy Watson (b.1959) – the holes in the land 3 and the holes in the land 4 – in which she’s taken floor plans of the current museum and of the museum extension, created standard-size framed prints of the plans, then given them a wash of colour and superimposed on them the outlines of large dark Indigenous artefacts, in the first case, piturri bags.
A large video screen just inside the door showed a montage of shots of contemporary Australia, breath-taking landscapes, the beaches and sea and islands, mysterious tree-fringed rivers and wide expanses of red desert dotted with spinifax plants, and then humans, the white world of highways and cars and shopping malls, and groups of aboriginals together in camps, painting young boys’ bodies with traditional designs, and the sound of flies in the desert.
Bark painting of a barramundi (about 1961) © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Against this visual and aural backdrop the wall labels and audio commentary didn’t attempt a summary of aboriginal beliefs but dropped insights. Not least because Aboriginal religion or traditional beliefs stretch the western mind, their traditions and holistic mindset completely different from our crisp, clearly demarcated divisions of meaning. I don’t pretend to understand it but it includes:
Something which struck me is the way the songlines stretch right across the land and are shared by different groups, so that someone walking them has to pass on to a different song in a different language to continue the journey. Different tribes and sub-tribes inhabited specific areas, but there was much migration and movement, and people could travel freely across the country.
In a small but, I think, significant way this sharing and overlap is exemplified in some of the desert paintings which are actually the product of many hands – the largest painting in the show, right at the start – exhibit 1 – was created by five artists.
Pukara by Roy Underwood, Lennard Walker, Simon Hogan and Ian Rictor (2013) © the artists, courtesy Spinifex Arts Project
I was already well aware that most of the artefacts here are in some sense ‘loot’, sometimes bought or given but most often simply plundered from their rightful owners, often in violent circumstances, and almost always separating the artefacts from the tribe, the location and the tradition which produced them, thus stripping them of much of their meaning and power.
After all, this is true of almost everything in the British Museum which, from one perspective, is a vast stash of loot from the criminal enterprise known as the ‘British Empire’.
But in the second room of the exhibition the dire history of British colonialism began to make its presence increasingly felt, with a sequence of images of the first British explorers, Dampier and then Captain Cook. Cook and his party had only been ashore ten minutes before they stared firing their guns at a couple of curious natives who’d come down to the beach to see them and relations with the Indigenous peoples continued in the same spirit of misunderstanding and one-sided aggression for the next couple of centuries.
The show is, after all, not an art exhibition but an attempt to tell Indigenous Australian history via objects, and no history of Australia is complete, or can even begin to be written, without taking account of the fact that the land was for tens of thousands of years inhabited by hundreds of tribes of people with an intimate relationship with the land, with rich and strange culture and traditions, and with expert knowledge of coaxing a livelihood out of the dryest continent in the world. Until we showed up and started shooting them, enslaving them, hunting them down, introducing them to alcoholism, prostitution and – even worse – western law about property and land ownership.
All this is indisputable and, if you wanted to be sickened and disgusted by the behaviour of the British explorers, colonists and convicts I recommend Robert Hughes’s massive history of crime and injustice, The Fatal Shore.
But as the exhibition moves into room three and the political injustices are laid on thicker and thicker the show becomes quite oppressive.
Land rights placard from the aboriginal Tent embassy, erected, as a site of protest, in 1972. National Museum of Australia
The final room is dominated by a wall-size video screen showing a 3-minute sequence of stills recording the aborigines’ liberation struggle, with highlights such as the way protesters renamed the 150th anniversary of the claiming of Australia for the British Crown, on January 26 1938, ‘A Day of Mourning’. And other milestones in the 1970s, 80s, 90s and up to the present day (‘Key moments in the struggle for indigenous rights 1901 to 2015’). Among other striking facts we learned that the 1901 constitution which actually created the nation of Australia from six self-governing British colonies, for the purposes of census and population counting, explicitly excluded the aborigines, who were thereby declared non-people, non-existent, in their own country.
All this is true and important and tragic and disgusting BUT it had the regrettable affect of almost completely destroying the impact of the first half of the show.
For the first half hour I was straining my brain to understand concepts of land and tradition and art which are completely alien to the Western tradition, well beyond my understanding – as well as learning more tangible insights into Aboriginal art such as, snakes are an important symbol as they are bringers of water to this dry land – or about techniques of painting with ochre on bark. I was working up a feeling of wonder and awe at the age and depth and beauty of these works and of this culture.
Spear thrower. North Western Australia, late 19th or early 20th century © The Trustees of the British Museum.
But I felt the delicacy and fragile insight conveyed in these early impressions was rained all over by the increasing politicisation of the show. No doubt the Indigenous peoples have to fight fire with fire and join in the governing western discourse in order to win their due and their rights. No doubt they had to hire lawyers and sign petitions and lobby the authorities and protest and create posters and banners and march for freedom. But I am over-familiar with the rhetorics of western political discourse; like a lot of other people I am sick of western politics and politicians.
With an audible thump the show went from celebrating the invaluable and barely comprehensible insights of a unique and priceless culture, to feeling like I was listening to John Humphreys barking at a lying politician on the Today programme.
I was much more interested to learn that Uta Uta Tjangala (1926 to 90) was a native artist who initiated the transfer of sand and body paintings onto canvas, and therefore a ‘pioneer of contemporary Australian art’. Or to see the photo of aboriginal artist Byron Brooks painting on a large canvas stretched out on the dirt floor outside with a vista of desert stretching into the distance and surrounded by ten or more dogs lazing or sleeping in the hot sun.
You’d have to be quite tough-minded to retain the fleeting feelings the wonderful art and artefacts evoke in the first part of this exhibition and not allow them to be tainted by mounting feelings of anger and shame at the miserable treatment of the Aborigines which the second half documents.
The aborigine show is a few hundred yards away from the bigger, blockbuster exhibition about Greek sculpture also currently showing at the British Museum. That show ends with Michelangelo adulating fragments of Greek statuary and so, along with the rest of the Renaissance, passing on the worship of the perfect body into the Western tradition. I made the point in my review of it that, just as all Western philosophy can be said to be footnotes to Plato, so all Western art could be said to be footnotes to Greek sculpture.
Going further, the Defining Beauty exhibition shows the intimate connection between images of perfection and power: the gods were powerful because they were perfect embodiments of the human form: their power somehow stemmed from their perfection; and their perfection gave them power. They are stunningly perfect.
Discobolus: Marble statue of a discus-thrower (discobolus) by Myron. Roman copy of a bronze Greek original of the 5th century BC © the trustees of the British Museum
People often forget that Athens, at the peak of its artistic and political achievement, was a slave-owning society at the head of an Empire which it had conquered by force. In this sense the Greek statues in the Defining Beauty show are not innocent. They represent Power.
But not just the power of an army. They represent the power of Greek ideas, the fundamental notion that you gain control over things, over the world, by defining and distinguishing, just as the Greeks pioneered mathematics by exploring all aspects of the interactions of precise, defined values or Plato’s dialogues pursue the definition of abstract terms like the Good, the Beautiful, the Just into mind-boggling depths of analysis.
In fact, Plato found himself persuaded that all earthly objects are the fallen, imperfect copies of things which exist in Ideal Form in another dimension. In some heaven or the Mind of God reside the permanent and Perfect Forms of Beauty, Justice, Law, Power, Morality and so on. These abstract ideas had one perfect form which we lesser mortals, in this fallen world, invoke every time we mention them. Just as, on a cultural and religious level, there was one god to an idea – the god of war, the god of the sea, the goddess of love, the king of the gods and so on.
Precision of Idea. Unity of Idea. Intellectual Perfection. Physical Beauty. Power. All are interlinked. (And were of course handed on into Christianity, the intellectual heir of the ancient world.)
I had these Greek ideas in mind as I walked through the Indigenous Australian show and the vast distance between the two worlds crystallised, for me, in a photo included in the video of key moments in the aborigines’ struggle for justice. This photo shows a white man (presumably a lawyer) standing with three Indigenous men in western suits, all in the shadow of a neo-classical statue of Justice, perfect in shape and form with a light toga falling off her perfect breasts and holding the requisite scales of justice.
One of the tens of thousands of copies of Greek-style super-realist statues which were deployed all around the British Empire to embody ‘our values’: eg the rule of law (i.e. the rule of lawyers), democracy (for white men only), justice (if you can afford it), the integrity of private property (once you’ve stolen it from its rightful owners) and so on.
When Captain Cook and his crew came ashore they brought not just the obvious tools of conquest – the guns and metal tools and diseases which would decimate the natives. More insidiously, they brought Western law with its vast array of definitions of property and ownership, the precise and pedantic system of codes and rules which was to steal an entire country from its inhabitants. They brought minds educated to venerate big abstract ideas: Civilisation, Culture, Law, Justice, Writing – and used to ‘reading’ those ideas in their chracterstically classical embodiments – Architecture, Public Spaces, Libraries, Statues.
In Australia they found none of that. The reverse. The early part of the exhibition emphasises aboriginal culture’s fluidity and depth and localism, the land inhabited by numerous tribes with their own histories, cultures and languages and myths of ancestors criss-crossing the terrain in mysterious tracks and passages, creating the animals and the stories and the means for survival.
Difficult-to-grasp, intangible ideas which the earliest settlers simply didn’t see, couldn’t touch or understand, and so ignored, and so assumed the land was, to all intents and purposes – to white men’s intents and purposes – empty, because the aborigines’ life and culture couldn’t be captured or defined in our precise and pedantic legal terms, wasn’t embodied in forms, in objects or buildings or books, which we could understand.
Mask from Mer, Torres Strait, Queensland, before 1855 © the trustees of the British Museum
And the scattered artefacts, the beautiful things the natives made and which gained their meaning from the location and tradition they arose from, these also couldn’t be defined, didn’t refer to One God (as Christian missionaries understood it) or even to one Pantheon of Gods (as a classically-educated Westerner would be familiar with) couldn’t be explained according to the kind of unitary system which Westerners understood and insisted on as the only method to generate meaning. And so could be looted and shipped back to the vast lumberyard of the Museum with impunity, higgledy-piggledy, stripped of their mystical associations, the spoils of Empire.
All of which led me to wonder: If all philosophy can be said to be footnotes to Plato, then can the whole history of Western colonialism and imperial conquest be said to be footnotes to the Greek ideals of discrete, defined, logical concepts – to Greek notions of perfectionism – to the tyranny of Perfect Ideas and concepts – a mindset, a way of thinking, which the conquerors repeatedly failed to find among the native peoples in America, Australia and Africa who instead practiced more holistic, overlapping, complex and less authoritarian modes of belief.
And that this fateful clash of cultures is epitomised – in the realm of art and iconography, at any rate – in these two fascinating exhibitions at the British Museum.
On the way out, right next to the main entrance to the museum, don’t miss the room off to one side which is displaying a handful of larrikitj, or memorial poles by contemporary artist Wukun Wanambi, made from the trunks of young-ish trees, absolutely covered with minute designs based on swarms of mullet fish – creating a mesmeric swirling pattern of tiny lozenges or facets which, on closer examination, turn out to be teeny, tiny stylised images of fish. Wonderful, beautiful, enchanting.
Posted by Simon on April 30, 2015
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/indigenous-australia-the-british-museum/
Books & Boots 