Traditional photography, as we seem destined to refer to daguerreotype or digital or anything in between, records something captured in what immediately becomes the past. That doesn’t mean a photograph represents a historical truth — there are many ways, including deliberate fakery, by which the camera can lie. But however much an image may trick or mislead us, we can still be confident that it has its roots in history, that something happened, even if that something was designed to fool us.

That is what is changing. AI images fundamentally challenge the relationship of the image with the past. It is true that AI image-making (or AI-assisted, as some would more carefully express it) does in one sense depend on the past, in the form of the vast number of extant photographic images that AI draws upon to do its work. But the resulting “photography-like” image is indeed new — the person, the object, the event that it depicts did not exist. Nothing, so to speak, happened.

Given the way the ground is shifting, it isn’t surprising that we are witnessing an upsurge of interest in telling photography’s story so far. The huge stocks of photographs held by galleries and libraries and museums, sometimes deliberately collected but often accumulated almost by chance, are increasingly being brought to the forefront, as curators and historians of photography grapple with the most effective ways of displaying and contextualising examples from the vast stocks of images at their disposal.

Three current exhibitions — one at the National Gallery of Victoria, the others at the State Library of New South Wales and the National Archives of Australia — reflect this upsurge of interest. In the words of David Campany, a contributor to the splendid catalogue of the NGV exhibition, Photography: Real and Imagined, photography “finds itself centre stage again.”

The NGV first began collecting photographs more than fifty years ago with a brief “to acquire both Australian and international photography.” The collection began with an emphasis on documentary photography but moved rapidly into what, to use the shorthand, is generally termed art photography. This distinction may once have seemed clearer than it does now, when we are much more likely, as Susan Bright writes in her catalogue essay, to see photographs as belonging “on the spectrum,” somewhere between the polarities of reality and imagination.

Whether a photograph is seen as real or imagined, as documentary or art, amateur or professional, these categories are in fact “intertwined,” to use Bright’s term; whatever its status, whether as snapshot or artistic triumph, the photograph is evidence of something that happened in the past.

Among the exhibits at the NGV is German photographer Thomas Struth’s well-known image Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001). It shows a group of gallery visitors posed in the act of viewing the Telephos frieze in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. For all kinds of reasons, including scale and complexity of composition, Struth’s image announces itself as art.

Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001). National Gallery of Victoria

We are hardly surprised by this — it is part of an exhibition, and it is in an art gallery. The past of 2001 — a group of people arranged around a room in a gallery — is shown in contemplation of the past of more than 2000 years before, suggesting how any photograph, whatever its primary intent, also acts as a record of the time it was made. That photographic record may be as open to interpretation as the surviving fragments of an ancient frieze, but both photo and frieze qualify as history as well as art.

In looking at photographs on display on the walls of a museum or a library, as opposed to a public or private art gallery, we are very much primed to read the images the other way, as history first and art, if at all, second. The exhibitions currently at the State Library of New South Wales and the National Archives of Australia take different approaches to the question of photography’s role in illuminating the past, and of how we should read photographs on display as history — but also, sometimes, as art, depending both on the innate qualities of the image and the institutional setting.

Shot: 400 Photographs, 200 Photographers, 3 Centuries inaugurates the State Library’s new photography gallery, a subterranean space created out of an old storage area once filled with “empty filing cabinets and the like.” It is difficult to think of a more striking metaphor of how photography has assumed a much more prominent role in our public collections, pushing its way forward by way of adaptive reuse.

The role of photography as historical record is emphasised by the organising principle of the exhibition — at least one photograph from nearly every year from 1845 to 2022. The library holds something in the order of two million photograph images; 400 are on display in Shot. This disparity in these numbers gives some idea of the curatorial task involved in choosing what to include.

The library’s inauguration of a dedicated space for displaying photographs is to be applauded, but it is hard not to notice, when descending into the former storage area, how limited that space is. The walls feel crowded, with some images mounted so high that details are almost out of visual reach. They can be examined more closely, however, on one of the wall-mounted monitors that have been distributed around the display area.

This combination of physical and electronic display seems deliberately to be raising the question of how we most effectively comprehend the vastness of Australia’s archive of photographic history. The viewer is being encouraged to see the images on the walls as a starting point, an encouragement to engage in further exploration online. “These 400 works,” we are advised in the useful if all too brief booklet that accompanies the exhibition, “convey some of the rich rewards to be gained by examining the archive as a whole,” suggesting how the role of curator is moving speedily through a process of democratisation — just as photography itself has undergone a similar process over many decades.

On the evidence of one moderately busy morning, that strategy is working: the monitors in the room were all taken up by people zooming in on details of the image — or seeking out further background information, or comparing one image with another — while others patiently waited their turn.

Shot explicitly challenges any distinction between “art” and “documentary” photography, consigning that distinction, not altogether convincingly, to history, to the twentieth century when “the ‘art-hang’ was a popular method for exhibiting the work of artist-photographers.” The library doesn’t abide by that distinction, instead choosing a middle way between a gallery-style “art-hang” and what might be called a documentary-hang. “If they’ve got visible sprocket holes, for example, that’s how we reproduce them.”

The many photographs in the library’s collection have been “sourced from official documents,” from shoeboxes and mantelpieces and from the archives of newspapers and portrait studios, but there are also images that we would conventionally think of as being more at home on the walls of art galleries. Max Dupain’s The Sunbather is there (in two versions) along, for example, with a beautiful autochrome Still Life (1912–20) by an unknown photographer, and Anne Zahalka’s 1988 Cibachrome print The Sisters, which also, as it happens, includes a still life, in the bottom right hand corner of the frame. Zahalka’s is a brilliant image, its forthright compositional techniques — its multiple references to framing, for example — and its combination of visual formality and domesticity inviting reflection on what a difference a frame makes.

Anne Zahalka’s The Sisters (1988). State Library of New South Wales

The inclusion of works by Dupain and Zahalka emphasise the fact that, in addition to their status as photographic art, these images are also part of Australian history and of the time in which they were made. The exhibition makes the further point that all manner of photographic output — studio portraiture, holiday snaps, photojournalism, police mug shots, “art photography” — documents the past, and indeed that examples of all those genres have a place in the library’s collection.

“Most of the Library’s photographs,” remarks curator Geoffrey Barker in the exhibition booklet, “have been acquired for their documentary value rather than for their artistic or aesthetic value, but… when visitors look at these photographs they will realise that often there’s not much between them and art photography.”

Some images, rather more than others, bear out this contention. Photo Kiosk (1949), for example, by the little-known Brian Bird, captures a moment in history, but it would also look perfectly at home displayed among the work of the world’s great mid-century street photographers. As an indication of the richness and variety of the library’s holdings — and by extension of the country’s photographic heritage — the exhibition is best seen as it suggests we see it, as an incentive to look further, to explore and curate these collections for ourselves.

Brian Bird’s Photo Kiosk (1949). State Library of New South Wales

The selection criterion for Focus: Australian Government Photographers at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra, is quite different. This is a selection of the images produced by the professional photographers employed, in various capacities and under various departmental headings, by the federal government. This system of direct employment lasted from its inception in 1939 until 1996, when it gave way to outsourcing.

The job of these photographers was, as Martyn Jolly puts it in his introduction, to “show off” Australia, its landscape, its industry and way of life. The photographs were destined to be printed in brochures and departmental reports, often without attribution. “They weren’t,” says Jolly, “taken for the gallery wall.” And yet here they are, framed and attributed and looking very much like art.

Many photographers worked for the government in this way. Eighteen are represented in the exhibition, complete with names and brief biographical details, the recovery of which in many cases required diligent research. Only one, the pioneering Aboriginal photographer Mervyn Bishop, could be described as widely known outside professional circles.

The names of the other seventeen will almost certainly be less familiar, including that of the sole woman among them, Jocelyn Burt, for whom entry into the world of professional photographers was no easy task. “I ran headlong into male chauvinism before I even started to work professionally,” she says in her laconically knockabout memoir Shutterbug in the Bush (1981).

Seeing these works displayed alongside one another gives an idea of the tightly encompassing brief to which the photographers were working. The human subjects look happy or purposeful or occasionally pensive, with few images of suffering or deprivation and only occasional ones of delicately implied sadness. People are typically arranged in groups, working on some common task or engaging in sport or leisure activities in a spirit of cheerful competitiveness. (Buildings, meanwhile, are shown as modern and clean-lined, embodying Australia’s commitment to the future.)

We cannot help but be conscious of how people have been directed to stand here or there or hold their heads just so. In John Tanner’s Workers at the BHP Steelworks (1956), for instance, a trio of men in hard hats gazes towards the future. One of the men is shown with his arm draped over the shoulder of his colleague, looking very much as if this is the first time he has ever done such a thing. And yet the image works. It conveys both the social constraints and the essential optimism of the time, suggesting by the bright-eyed way in which the men look into the distance that, those social constraints notwithstanding, the future is open.

John Tanner’s Workers at the BHP Steelworks (1956). National Archives of Australia

While the emphasis is on the vitality of youth, the relatively fewer images of older people treat them with an amused affection. In Jim Fitzpatrick’s Fruit Connoisseurs Assess the Produce (1968) three elderly women in complementary hats look balefully at a display of apples, determined not to be fooled by anything less than the best, while in Keith Byron’s Veteran Punter Outsmarts the Flies (1969) the veteran of the title, with netting draped over his hat, conveys a similarly robust resourcefulness.

It is Byron’s work, along with Mervyn Bishop’s, that most stands out among these resonant images; Bishop’s for his ability to capture both social disadvantage and genuine spontaneity in his pioneering photographs of First Nations people, and Byron for his instinct for unshowily combining documentary and art. Byron’s Tensions Run High Among Brokers at the Melbourne Stock Exchange (1968), with its multiple visual cross-references, is one to keep coming back to.

Given that the national stock of photographs is almost unimaginably vast, it is not realistic to think that more than a very small proportion can ever be displayed on the walls of cultural institutions. Just as we are all photographers now, so we are being encouraged to become curators too, exploring and researching the national collections for ourselves.

We don’t yet know where artificial intelligence is taking the practice of photography itself but, as Martyn Jolly points out, AI can already assist immeasurably in productive searching, finding links and illuminating correspondences that might otherwise emerge only by chance. Whatever its implications for the future of photography, when it comes to getting the most out of the photographs we already have, AI could well be a good thing. •

Photography: Real and Imagined
The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, until 4 February 2024

Shot: 400 Photographs, 200 Photographers, 3 Centuries
State Library of New South Wales until 3 November 2024

Focus: Australian Government Photographers 
National Archives of Australia until 10 June 2024

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My Damascene conversion came only recently, and it occurred at Bega, a dairy town on the NSW south coast near where I now live. Far from the urban smog and traffic jams and celebrities, the south coast celebrates its own distinct cultural vibe. It has just reopened its art gallery — mid-town, gem-like — with an exhibition of the 2023 Archibald finalists.

Like any collective venture in regional Australia, the gallery needs volunteers. I put my hand up, and since the gallery opened I’ve spent several full days as a gallery volunteer prowling around in the silent presence of the fifty-seven portraits. It’s been a full-immersion experience, and now, like any new convert, I’ve become a zealous proselytiser.

What is it about the Archibalds? Since childhood, we’ve learned to appraise the people we meet by looking at their faces. We learn their age, their experience, their character; we understand whom we can trust. Show us fifty-seven faces on the walls of an art gallery and it’s the same: we’re all experts.

So people feel comfortable walking into the Archibalds — this is as true in Bega as it is in the city — and expressing strong opinions about what (that is, who) they see. Greeting them as familiars, paying them rapt attention, glancing at them sideways or dismissing them with a shrug.

Inevitably the popular portraits are of popular people. The winner of the People’s Choice award in Sydney was Noni Hazlehurst, who appears in Jaq Grantford’s portrait as a wise friendly spirit peering at us through a misty window — the epitome of trustworthiness, with fond memories of Play School thrown in for those of a certain vintage.

The challenge for the artists is to reveal the inner character of their subject by displaying their external appearance — their face, clothing, posture, location. And the challenge for the viewer is to decipher the inner life by inspecting that external paraphernalia. There’s a dual level operating, and we zoom backwards and forwards as we go.

Zoe Young’s portrait of NRL star Latrell Mitchell captures this best. It is actually two paintings, both larger than life. On the left we see the public footballing star, isolated mid-game under artificial lights, his Rabbitohs jumper covered with logos; he’s further objectified because we can only see him via the medium of a TV screen. On the right we see the private man, stripped to his waist, holding his child, under natural light in the natural landscape of his Country. Each Latrell is looking towards the other, across the frame of the paintings, but neither is connecting; one wonders how the man keeps both sides together.

It’s a profound moment, and when the school group came through the Bega gallery last week, they spent more time talking about Latrell than about Noni.

Being able to host an exhibition of this scale is a big deal for Bega. Sydney is a six-hour drive up the highway, so having the Archibald come here provides connection and stimulation. Tourists like having something different to do, school kids appreciate it, but the locals love it most of all. They feel respected, as they should, and treat the occasion seriously.

One of the little tricks portraitists can use is to give their sitter a prop — something distinctive to hold or wear or sit on — which helps us identify and understand them. This can be wonderfully subtle, as in the portrait of journalist Katharine Murphy. She looks just as we know her from Insiders — except here, as she serenely sits for Judith Sinnamon, she’s actually listening to a podcast through an ear bud. She’s busy, right?, and won’t waste a moment.

Without doubt the best prop in the show, not at all subtle, is an oversized crown made out of shiny colourful baubles and dolls’ heads and other tinselly things, worn with style by the late lamented comedian Cal Wilson. You can’t look at it without smiling. (Andrea Huelin’s portrait won the Packing Room prize in 2023.)

So, props are great. My pet peeve is text. I’m a text person, but to me, too much text defeats the purpose of a visual image and weakens the emphasis on the face. (And I note that none of the previous winners employs text.)

The question I get asked most frequently by visitors, as I stand around waiting to be asked questions, is: who won? Because ultimately the Archibald is a competition, and we need to rank what we see against everything else on display and come up with a favourite.

I point our visitors to the last portrait they’ll see before leaving the exhibition: Julia Gutman’s painting of singer-songwriter Montaigne. It’s a beautiful evocation, in oils and embroidered textiles, of a young musician’s dynamic creativity, with the excellent title Head in the Sky, Feet on the Ground. Some of the visitors grumble about textiles not being “appropriate” but most are delighted with the choice of the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales…

… except, in the Archibald sprit of everyone being entitled to their own opinion, I think it’s a shame they overlooked Natasha Bieniek’s Self-Portrait — tiny, exquisite, a microscopic universe of light and vegetation. And not a celebrity. •

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Beckett took up painting seriously only in her mid twenties, and died at forty-eight. She painted mostly the streets and beaches of her suburb, Melbourne’s Beaumaris, and never travelled outside Victoria. She had her supporters, certainly, even among the art critics; but after she died, she was largely forgotten. If not for the persistence of one young woman a generation later, she could have disappeared from memory altogether.

A blockbuster exhibition of 150 works by this unique artist, Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment, now in its final month at the Art Gallery of South Australia, shows what a loss that would have been. (For those who can’t get to Adelaide before the exhibition closes, Marcus Bunyan provides a very good guide on his website, Art Blart.)

Fifty years after Rosalind Hollinrake resurrected her work, critical opinion sees her, in the words of exhibition curator Tracey Lock, as “one of Australia’s most important painters of the interwar period, critically acknowledged for her own individual form of modernism.”

October Morning, painted in Melbourne circa 1927. Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter/Art Gallery of South Australia

Some go further. John McDonald of the Sydney Morning Herald says that he was so overwhelmed by the scale and diversity of the exhibition that he returned to see it three days in a row. “I’m wary of hyperbole and reluctant to play the game of declaring any artist to be ‘the best,’” he concludes, “but for me this retrospective of what remains of Clarice Beckett’s work has propelled her way ahead of more celebrated painters such as Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith.” Beckett has been dismissed as another “Meldrumite,” he adds, “but neither Max Meldrum nor any of his tonalist disciples ever painted anything as poignant as the work in this exhibition… If this show were being staged at Tate Modern or the Museum of Modern Art, Beckett would be hailed as a figure of world renown.”

For what it’s worth — not much, since I’m no art critic — I had a similar experience. I’ve loved Beckett’s work for twenty years, but like McDonald I was inwardly fearful that seeing a lot of it together might lead to a disappointing sense of repetition. Far from it: each new viewing led to new discoveries, as works overlooked the previous day turned on their own magnetism.

Yet the paintings haven’t changed since they were excoriated almost a century ago by the ageing Arthur Streeton and other critics. They remain the same misty, often melancholy mix of colours, fuzzy outlines of people, trees and buildings, usually painted lightly, seemingly in great haste, and rarely reworked. Trundling her painting trolley around Beaumaris and up the coast of Port Phillip Bay, Beckett produced thousands of them: according to her sister Hilda, as many as five in a morning’s work. All of them different.

How did one young gallery owner rescue her from the oblivion to which she had been consigned? And what did Streeton and the art world of her time miss that today’s art world acclaims?

Rosalind Hollinrake was in her late twenties, and married to Barry Humphries, when she was startled by one moody, haunting painting, and then another, signed only “C. Beckett.” She asked around, but no one in Melbourne in the late 1960s knew of any artist of that name. She thought Beckett might be an American.

She called the journalist Keith Dunstan, whose daily “A Place in the Sun” was Melbourne’s most widely read newspaper column, and he asked his readers if they could shed light on this mystery. Two days later, a well-dressed older woman walked into Hollinrake’s gallery and unwrapped some small paintings, clearly by the same artist. The visitor was Hilda Beckett Mangan: the painter, she said, was her late sister, Clarice. And there were thousands more of her works stored in a farm shed near Benalla.

Evening, After Whistler, painted in Melbourne circa 1931. Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter in memory of Elizabeth through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2019, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

When Rosalind and Hilda went to the farm, though, they were almost too late. The paintings had been stashed there for decades, and the shed was open to the weather on three sides: in that time, rain and possums had destroyed most of them. Only 369 works could be salvaged from the more than 2000 stored there. McDonald calls the loss “one of the great disasters of Australian art history.”

Hollinrake picked out a few dozen works and put them on exhibition at her Melbourne gallery. It was a success: the young Patrick McCaughey, as art critic of the Age, hailed Beckett as a “remarkable modernist… The advanced is never the prerogative of the announced candidates. It sneaks up behind you and raps the knuckles of your taste.” James Mollison, director of the new National Gallery of Australia, bought eight of the paintings on the recommendation of Fred Williams.

Eight Beckett exhibitions followed in a decade, spreading to Adelaide, Sydney and Canberra. Hollinrake published a biography, which soon sold out. Eventually the National Gallery of Victoria bought its first Beckett — although in recent years, in my experience, it is rare to find any of her works on its walls. The main galleries interstate, as well as in Ballarat, Bendigo, Castlemaine and Benalla, all had classics of her oeuvre. Group exhibitions — notably the nationally touring exhibition Clarice Beckett: Politically Incorrect (1999) and the South Australian gallery’s Modern Australian Women (2001) and Misty Moderns (2008) — widened and deepened her following.

Australia owes a great debt to Rosalind Hollinrake. It is largely thanks to her that, in all, about 600 paintings have been preserved. As McCaughey wrote in 2014 in his book Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters, “Without the exhibitions that Hollinrake mounted in her gallery and later curated for tour in public galleries, Beckett would have perished as an artist and the loss to Australian culture would have been immense.”

Clarice Beckett was born in 1887 into a relatively well-off family in western Victoria. Her father was a bank manager with the Colonial Bank of Australasia, which later merged into what is now NAB. He was later promoted to run the Bendigo branch, and then to head office in Melbourne. Clarice spent her childhood mostly in country towns: Casterton, Bendigo, at boarding school at Queen’s College, Ballarat (now merged into Ballarat Grammar), and finally a year at Melbourne Girls’ Grammar. In 1905, the Argus reported that the eighteen-year-old had won a first prize of three guineas in a competition for the best essay on the moral lessons of A Girl’s Cross Roads, then playing at the Theatre Royal.

But where her own road took her next is not clear. As curator Tracey Lock laments, “We know little about her. There are few extant letters and no diaries or journals.” But she clearly decided to become an artist, despite parental misgivings and all the obstacles in the way of a woman taking that path. In 1914 she and Hilda moved to Melbourne to begin drawing classes under Frederick McCubbin at the National Gallery art school: in view of her later nonchalance in drawing the human body, it is interesting that Clarice was runner-up for the prize for best drawings of hands and feet.

A life-changing decision saw her move on in 1917 to study with Max Meldrum, the charismatic theorist of tonalism, whose break with the traditionalists was to divide Melbourne’s art world in two. Meldrum disdained literal painting of human and natural forms and sought to capture instead “the great story of Nature’s colour, tone, proportion, sound and rhythm.” A “Meldrum group” formed around him, with Clarice Beckett as one of its leading members. Their works, overwhelmingly landscapes, rejected sharp lines for fuzzy edges, their blurred images reminding more literal minds of photos out of focus. Many in the art world just didn’t get it.

Beckett pushed the boundaries furthest of all. In her seascapes and suburban street scenes, forms became indistinct, humans became blobs on the beach or footpath, headlights became splotches in the fog or rain, poles were only roughly straight, and one colour merged into the next. She was indomit-able: the more the critics attacked her lack of “form,” the further she moved from what they wanted her to do.

One of the finest works of this exhibition, Tranquility (1933), shows that capturing the mood of nature, not its literal detail, was what mattered to her. Birds are rarely seen in her seascapes. Trees are suggested rather than precisely rendered. In the catalogue of a 1924 exhibition, she wrote that she sought “to give a sincere and truthful representation of a portion of the beauty of Nature, and to show the charm of light and shade, which I try to give forth in correct tones so as to give as nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality.”

Tranquility, painted in Melbourne circa 1933. Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter/Art Gallery of South Australia

The test is whether the viewer of the work senses it to be “an exact illusion of reality.” In her own generation, many did not. While her paintings of cut flowers in vases were universally popular, some critics, all of them painters themselves, disparaged her landscapes, either by ignoring them or by merciless criticism — often for choosing humdrum subjects such as street scenes and cars driving in fog and rain.

“This artist,” Streeton wrote sarcastically in the Argus, “appears to limit her vision to one particular expression of Nature — the misty lightness one sometimes encounters before the sun has risen high enough for its light to separate one object firmly from another. This may be an experimental stage in the study of this artist and when she chooses for a change a subject with hard edges, such as crockery, cutlery or cut glass, she should lend a welcome variety to her exhibitions.”

Yet Beckett was pushing the boundaries — just as Streeton himself had done almost half a century earlier — to create a new genre that would express different emotions. Did the old man remember how his 9 by 5 exhibition with Tom Roberts and Charles Conder in 1889 was savaged by the Argus critic of that time? “The modern impressionist asks you to see pictures in splashes of colour, in slap-dash brushwork, and in sleight-of-hand methods of execution leading to the proposition of pictorial conundrums, which would baffle solution if there were no label or catalogue,” wrote James Smith. “In an exhibition of paintings you naturally look for pictures, instead of which the impressionist presents you with a varied assortment of palettes.”

What distinguishes Beckett’s work so strongly from that of the other members of the Meldrum group, or of her contemporaries Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith, is its appeal to the emotions. As one viewer aptly put it, “her works ache with feeling.” This is as true of her sunlit paintings — the Castlemaine gallery’s Boatshed, Beaumaris (1928), for example, or the privately owned Sunny Morning (1933) — as of those grey melancholy skies and mists she is best known for.

In short, Clarice Beckett was ahead of her time; decades later, the rest of us have gradually caught up. And not only about painting: these days there is nothing unusual about a concerned woman writing to her newspaper about an act of environmental desecration by officialdom. But I suspect that Beckett’s letter to the Argus, published on 7 June 1934, a rare glimpse into her thinking, was likewise ahead of its time:

“Allow me to plead for the protection of the foreshore. The beautiful cliffs of Beaumaris are undergoing what I believe the Sandringham council would call a ‘tidying-up’ process. This process consists of tearing up every native plant and creeper and leaving a trail of turned-over sods and black smouldering ashes where the plants and creepers have been cremated. In the summer we are certain of a plentiful crop of weeds, thistles and Cape weed to replace the native growths. The shallow roots of the tea-tree are left unprotected, and at the first gale of wind are uprooted and blown over. Why cannot the council realise that the chief charm of Beaumaris to residents and visitors lies in the native untouched beauty of the foreshore? Surely the council can find more useful work for the unemployed than in perpetrating such an act of vandalism.”

Fortunately, Beckett has had not just her critics but also her champions. After Rosalind Hollinrake, the Art Gallery of South Australia has been the most active in recent decades. In 2019 it negotiated to buy twenty-one of Beckett’s paintings from Hollinrake using a generous donation from businessman Alastair Hunter. This exhibition is their public debut; some, such as The Red Sunshade, are among Beckett’s finest.

The Red Sunshade, painted in Melbourne in 1932. Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter/Art Gallery of South Australia

Even in her own time, Beckett had supporters. The Age’s Alexander Colquhoun understood her work well, and explained it to readers repeatedly in his columns. Percy Leason, a close friend and colleague in the Meldrum group, was unstinting in his praise as art critic of the Herald’s upmarket weekly, Table Talk. In 1933, a letter to the Age berated the National Gallery of Victoria for refusing to buy any work by this Victorian artist “whose work, as a woman painter, is not surpassed, and possibly not even equalled, by any other woman living in this world.”

And in October 1932, two days after Herald art critic Blamire Young had disparaged her new exhibition — if not as rudely as in his previous review, where he described her paintings as “mist, telegraph poles and service coaches… served up in the Meldrum manner remorselessly to our continued grief” — the paper published a contrary view from its folksy columnist, “The Rouseabout.”

“Though I had biked, hiked and motored along Beach Road around Beaumaris Bay a hundred or more times,” he wrote, “I did not fully recognise the beauty of the place till I looked in at Miss Clarice Beckett’s exhibition of oil paintings at the Athenaeum today. This Bendigo girl, pupil of Max Meldrum, has caught cliff and water in all moods of light and weather and season, revealing that there is not one Beaumaris Bay, but a score.

“I am indebted to Miss Beckett for a sharp lesson. There are bathing boxes in Beaumaris beach the sight of which I shunned unless nymphs happened to be guarding the doorways; petrol pumps on the road which inspired only a thought of the price of the juice they contained; telegraph poles put there, apparently, just to annoy artists.

“But she has courageously brought the boxes, pumps, and poles, as well as motor cars into the picture, and lo! we see that the sun loves to play about them. So I really saw Beaumaris for the first time.”

No name was attached, but around that time the Rouseabout was C.J. Dennis, beloved author of The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. He understood what his fellow artist was showing him. This woman doing her own thing — this painter of moody, misty landscapes — produced paintings that delight, resonate and, in their silence, speak to our emotions in a way few other Australian artworks have done. •

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One of the powerful engines driving this branding has been the blockbuster exhibition. And so, just as our pandemic gloom has begun to lift, we’ve been offered two generous helpings of this cultural comfort food. The Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Streeton was thronged right up to its closing in mid February. And now an even larger show, She-oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism, has opened at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Why can’t we get enough of the iconic paintings of Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and their followers? The legend of the movement’s origins in Heidelberg, its defiant birth in the 9 by 5 exhibition of 1889 and its adoption as a signifier of Australian national identity certainly has something to do with Australian impressionism’s hold on our imagination. The very notion of Australian impressionism implies that here at last was a style we could call our own, combined with a cheeky assertion of kinship with the glamour of Paris.

But the legend’s deepest anchor lies in the paintings themselves, specifically the landscapes of Arthur Streeton. As the historian Keith Hancock observed nearly a century ago, Streeton’s pictures were already a “national habit,” a vision of an unchanging Australian Arcadia. Part of the works’ continuing enchantment is that, as Paul Simon once sung about “Kodachrome,” they still give us “the nice bright colours,” the “greens of summer,” and make us think that “all the world’s a sunny day.” And who would not want to have some of Streeton’s sunshine in their lives at this moment?

Australian impressionism is also an enduring paradigm of Australian art history, one that was firmly established in Bernard Smith’s seminal book, Australian Painting, 1788–1960. During the past six decades our art historians have offered many refinements and reassessments of the origins, character and significance of the work of Streeton, Roberts and their contemporaries, including in recent years Clara Southern, Jane Sutherland and other female artists. There’s even been a prolonged and productive debate about whether it’s meaningful to speak of their style as impressionist.

Yet for all their passion and erudition, the starting point for most scholars of the period 1885–1900 — including Australia’s social and cultural historians — remains a focus on the usual suspects and their most favoured medium of oil on canvas.

But what if we shifted the angle of vision on this most fabled era in Australian art history and saw it through the eyes of a less familiar figure?

This is what I’ve been doing for more than a decade as I’ve researched the art and life of one A. Henry Fullwood (1863–1930). Fullwood (like most British-Australian artists prior to 1900, including Tom Roberts) was English-born and trained before immigrating to Sydney in 1883. From then until 1900 he was probably the most viewed artist of his generation thanks to his work as an illustrator for the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, the Sydney Mail, the London Graphic and the Bulletin.

A close friend and ally of Roberts and Streeton, Fullwood was also regarded as a leading impressionist painter. Indeed, the critic and artist David Souter went so far as to assert at the time that Fullwood was “the most Australian of all our Australian painters.” Between 1900 and 1920 Tom, Arthur and “Remus” — as Fullwood was known to his mates — decamped to London, becoming honoured members of the Chelsea Arts Club before working as medical orderlies and official war artists during the Great War. All in all, Fullwood was a well-known and highly respected artist.

A. Henry Fullwood’s Prince Regent’s Glen, Wentworth Falls (1888). Denis Savill Collection/Macquarie University Art Gallery

So why has his star so waned while his friends have gone on to become icons of Australian art? Put briefly, his art and career don’t easily align with the legend, paradigm or brand of Australian impressionism. If only he had been born in Australia, worked in Melbourne, and camped with Roberts and Streeton in Heidelberg, Remus might still be more widely remembered today.

But it’s not just Fullwood whose contributions to Australian art have been marginalised. The neglect extends to all of his fellow artist-illustrators working in Sydney at that time, including the estimable Julian Ashton and Frank Mahony. Apart from their misfortune not to have been Marvellous Melburnians, their status as “artists” has been anachronistically diminished by their well-paid work as “illustrators.” Their ephemeral black-and-white art has been largely ignored or devalued, and even their distinguished work as watercolourists, printmakers and painters is seen as of secondary importance to the now-iconic oils of Roberts, Streeton and their circle.

What difference would it make to our understanding of Australian art in the Heidelberg era (including Australian impressionism) if we enlarged our field of vision to include the contributions of Sydney’s art-workers who, in Bernard Smith’s judgement, helped to make Australia “one of the most important centres of black-and-white art in the world” during the second half of the nineteenth century?

This is the question at the heart of A Nation Imagined: The Artists of the Picturesque Atlas, an exhibition that recently opened at the National Library of Australia. Produced in partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the NLA show highlights both the Atlas as a landmark moment in the history of Australian art and the contributions of three of its settler-colonial artists — Ashton, Fullwood and Mahony — to the advancement of what journalist James Smith described in 1887 as “a distinctive school of landscape painting.”

A Nation Imagined, which I co-curated with Natalie Wilson, begins by foregrounding the role of the illustrated press’s wood-engraved art in shaping the visual culture of the Victorian era. The high point of this art form was The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia. Produced between 1886 and 1889 in forty-two parts, it brought to Australia a small army of American artists, engravers, cartographers, printers and salesmen who collaborated with local authors and illustrators to create possibly the most beautiful book ever published in Australia.

The chief selling point of the Atlas was its 800 original engravings which, combined with its text and maps, offered a proudly settler-colonial view of Australia’s history, achievements and prospects. The Atlas consolidated a distinctive iconography whose landscapes, seascapes and townscapes emphasised the productivity as well as the beauty and pride of an emerging nation. Its heroes were the men — governors, explorers, miners and pastoralists — who made Australia. While the Atlas’s writers and artists marginalised the history and suffering of First Nations peoples, they ignored altogether the contributions of convicts and white women.

On the strength of its settler-colonial iconography, the Atlas was acknowledged in 1300 newspaper articles between 1886 and 1889 as marking “the birth of art beneath the Southern Cross.” Compared with the prolonged attention lavished on the Atlas’s artists, the 9 by 5 exhibition was a mere flash in the pan. Visitors to A Nation Imagined will have the chance to judge for themselves the aesthetic interest of the many original sketches and engravings on display.

The Atlas transformed Ashton, Fullwood and Mahony almost overnight into three of settler-colonial Australasia’s most famous artists. Ashton used his fame and considerable political skills to take over the Art Society of New South Wales. Between 1889 and 1898, as a trustee of the National Art Gallery of NSW, he successfully lobbied for £500 to be spent annually on the purchase of Australian art. Sydney was now well on its way to becoming Australia’s art capital.

The younger Fullwood and Mahony also went from strength to strength, even collaborating to produce art for both the illustrated press and private patrons. Fullwood was appointed a staff artist for both the Sydney Mail’s Illustrated Supplement — the forerunner of today’s Good Weekend — and the London Graphic. Mahony became the Bulletin’s premier artist of outback life and humour, illustrating the books of its leading writers, including Henry Lawson and Steele Rudd. He was a fine painter of animals, and Sydney’s National Gallery purchased several of his paintings, along with those of his good mate Fullwood.

Not content with these local successes, Ashton orchestrated the placement of Australian art onto the world stage, initially at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and, five years later, at the first exhibition of the work of the “Australian school” in London. Ashton was far and away the most influential champion of Australasia’s settler-colonial artists, and in A Nation Imagined it’s at last possible to weigh up his distinctive artistic contributions alongside the sketches and paintings of his fellow Atlas artists, Fullwood and Mahony.

Two other beneficiaries of Ashton’s growing influence were Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, who came to Sydney in the early 1890s as economic refugees from Melbourne. The National Gallery of Victoria refused to buy their works, but its NSW counterpart was prepared to do so. The two Victorians soon became active members of Sydney’s burgeoning artist colony, finding in Fullwood a fellow impressionist who was glad to share with them his networks, patrons and tradecraft. This was the context that enabled Roberts and Streeton to produce some of their most iconic works.

When the narratives of the NLA’s A Nation Imagined and my work on Fullwood are combined with those attached to the legend, paradigm and brand of Australian impressionism, the result will be a richer and much-enlarged story about this fabled era in Australia’s art history.

For a start, we can begin to see that Australian impressionism was part of a much wider settler-colonial art movement that embraced both Melbourne’s painters and Sydney’s artist-illustrators. Whatever the medium, their work reflected dominant views of Australia’s history, achievements and identity, their pictures defined by their celebration of whiteness, masculinity and settlers’ claims to indigeneity by virtue of their possession of Australia’s sunburnt country. What remained outside their frames were the dispossession of First Nations’ peoples and the lives and labour of settler women.

In addition to sharing a common iconography, Sydney’s and Melbourne’s artists fed off a similar set of artistic influences, largely emanating from London and reinforced by the English-born and -trained artists who dominated these colonial outposts of Britain’s imperial art world. These would include such French-inflected British art practices as plein air painting and tonal realism. In other words, we might start talking about British-Australian impressionism and its distinctive contribution to British art history.

From this perspective, Roberts, Streeton and Fullwood’s move to London can be seen as not the ending but the completion of Australia’s settler-colonial art movement; its homecoming to the heartland of British art. The art they created in England was integral to both their cultural and imperial identities and their artistic development.

The movement ultimately culminated in these artists’ wartime service. It was particularly fitting that Australia’s war art scheme drew on the skills of painters like Streeton but still more heavily on artist-illustrators like Fullwood, whose pictures proved perfect illustrations for Charles Bean’s creation of the Anzac legend — yet another enduring evocation of a settler-colonial worldview.

But my suggested reframing of Australian art history will only work if the art of illustration is accepted as an essential component of how we tell its story. This will involve much debate and research, including the publication of a biography of Julian Ashton that does justice to his multiple roles in shaping Australia’s settler-colonial art movement.

Meanwhile, lovers of Australian art and history have the unique opportunity to compare the work of Sydney’s and Melbourne’s settler-colonial artists, which will be on view, respectively, at the NLA in Canberra until 11 July and the NGV in Melbourne until 22 August. Let the conversation begin! •

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Elizabeth Gertsakis’s exhibition Outrage, Obscenity and Madness (currently showing at the Geelong Gallery) and Sarah Sentilles’s book Draw Your Weapons offer new ways to consider how the values of our times shape our responses to troubling content. Both the book and the exhibition offer some coordinates for plotting our responses to the deluge of troubling images.

Elizabeth Gertsakis’s digital paintings and works on paper reinterpret the illustrations accompanying reports of crimes and misdemeanours published in newspapers edited by Richard Egan Lee in Victoria the 1870s. Her exhibition and accompanying essay examine and revive the visual punch of images that populated newspapers with names like Police News, Citizen Press and Banner of Truth.

“A Farmer’s Daughter Saved from Outrage by a Brave Dog,” from Outrage, Obscenity and Madness.

Gertsakis discovered this body of awkward and brutish images during a fellowship at the State Library of Victoria. Partially motivated by concerns about censorship, she set out to understand what made Egan Lee’s images so unsettling and compelling. Exhibiting little skill and refinement, the prints crudely depicted current events. As Gertsakis told me:

I was moved by this material which was drawn, combined, collaged, patched together and then given a dramatic, often volcanic and confronting sense of the violence or tragedy of the initial event. It made me think in more emotional ways about the suffering of the poor and the unlucky and vulnerable at a time when there was no support other than highly limited “Christian Charity.”

Egan Lee, obsessed with crime and calamity, was also a reformer who wanted his stories to draw attention to the plight of women and children in order to improve their circumstances. The established media, polite society and the law did not take kindly to what they regarded as the shocking imagery that accompanied his stories, and Egan Lee found himself the subject of multiple slander and obscenity cases. Each time he was found guilty, he was jailed and his paper shut down, but on release the resilient editor would simply start up under another masthead. Egan Lee was finally silenced when the media barons of the time convinced parliament to amend Victoria’s censorships laws so that distributors and publishers, as well as editors, could be sued for obscenity. These censorship laws remain in place today.

“Melancholy Suicide in Geelong Cemetary – Verdict of a ‘Christian’ Jury,” from Outrage, Obscenity and Madness.

The original illustrations confronted pictorial and social aesthetics of the time and ran alongside Egan Lee’s tabloid stories about rape, abortion and the scandalous behaviours of politicians. In an early precursor to citizen journalism — though more a response to budgetary constraints than a democratic gesture — Egan Lee invited members of the public to submit their drawings of news stories. Arriving at the newspaper as amateur line drawings, they were worked on by Egan’s “combiner,” who removed some of the irregularities in the originals by copying, collaging and borrowing from the techniques of the master printmakers of history. Such was the pull of these images that Lee’s publications sometimes outsold the Age. Was it the awful content of the stories or the impact of the grotesque imagery that drew such an enthusiastic audience? Perhaps their technical deficiencies were part of their dramatic and authentic power?

In the same way, unpolished amateur photography often activates today’s debates about atrocities and suffering. The unadorned brutality of the Abu Ghraib torture images was the catalyst for Sarah Sentilles’s Draw Your Weapons, which recounts the author’s engagement with two men. One was a young student called Miles who served in the US military as a guard at Abu Ghraib; the other, Howard Scott, suffering from the onset of dementia, had been a conscientious objector during the second world war. The catalyst for each relationship was photographic imagery. There were the snaps by the soldiers who humiliated and tortured the Abu Ghraib prisoners, which caused Sentilles to abandon her studies to be a priest and eventually led to a discussion with students in the class Miles attends. And there was a photo of Scott being presented with a violin on his eighty-seventh birthday — a violin he had started making while imprisoned for refusing to serve in the US military.

“Fatal Accident to a Child, During the Late Gales,” from Outrage, Obscenity and Madness.

Sentilles combines fragments of narrative, memoir and journalism to plot a peripatetic path through contemporary debates about war and suffering. She considers whether it is possible for art- and image-making to re-engage viewers who feel overwhelmed or apathetic, while restoring dignity to those affected by conflict. In a book with no images, Sentilles interrogates many photographic works that depict violence and suffering, to grapple with the question: do we look or look away?

Sentilles’s description of artist Josh Azzarella’s doctored images of Abu Ghraib provides a way out of the cycle of yes, no, yes. In these reinterpretations, the spaces that held the hooded man, the men on leashes, the line of naked men are now empty. The victims are absent. The people who were the subject of our gaze have vanished and their erasure enables us to avoid participating in their indignity and suffering. Only the grinning perpetrators with their thumbs-up signals remain. But our engagement with the event is not necessarily changed.

Photographer and writer Teju Cole amplified this concern in a conversation with Sarah Sentilles at Adelaide Writers’ Week last month. The most troubling photos of all, he said, are the ones that never emerge. The images we don’t see are obscured by the ones we do. Absence, as much as presence, is the problem.

“Trevarrow, After His Second Flogging, on Pentridge Green,” from Outrage, Obscenity and Madness.

Sentilles argues that the suffering doesn’t go away just because we don’t look. The really important question is not whether we look, but what we do with what we see. What is our responsibility when confronted? She builds on Susan Sontag’s seminal arguments in On Photography to argue that empathy is insufficient. She urges us to ask ourselves what the wishes of the person who is being viewed would be. She anticipates that they would want us to see so that we will then do something — and that something would be political action of some kind that works to restore the dignity of the subject.

Media images generated by amateurs were the catalysts for these two different but parallel enquiries into the power of the image — one contemporary, the other historical. Each of them provides pertinent insights into societal values and responses to violent and disturbing images. Each illustrates how creative works can prompt a re-engagement with injustice and suffering. Both suggest that art can breach indifference and provide a conduit to a new understanding that ends in action.

The Melbourne Establishment in the 1870s thought they could erase the stories of suffering by jailing the image-maker. This suggests we should hold our fire before condemning a publication as gratuitous for showing us something we don’t want to see — and then redirect our indignation into an action that may help restore the victim’s dignity. ●

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The Australian War Memorial has wrestled with this dilemma for decades. A towering influence in the political and public domain, the institution’s conservative roots have placed it at the forefront of heated debates about the country’s past. Perhaps the most controversial debate has revolved around the AWM’s refusal to formally recognise the frontier wars (1788–1930s) as part of Australia’s military history by way of a permanent gallery – or, as one historian has suggested, an entire wing. Even as the orthodox foundation story of European progress and peaceful settlement has been undermined elsewhere, the AWM has resisted pressure to formally recognise a violent narrative of invasion and dispossession.

Only now are there signs that times are changing. Over the past six months, two actions by the AWM have suggested a shift in its interpretation – the opening of the exhibition For Country, for Nation and the unveiling of Ruby Plains Massacre 1 by Rover Thomas. For Country, for Nation, which has barely been given a sideways glance by historians outside the AWM, could well be the first, long-awaited response to the academic and public critique that has persisted against the institution for decades. Certainly, the display of Ruby Plains Massacre 1, a 1985 artwork that tells the story of the killing of several Aboriginal men who were found butchering a cow at a cattle station in the Kimberley, represents a conscious and public gesture by the AWM’s council and its director, former federal minister Brendan Nelson, to acknowledge a far deeper narrative than the one they have previously committed to telling.

For Country, for Nation opened in the AWM’s Special Exhibitions Gallery in September last year. Designed to “commemorate Indigenous service men and women,” its inclusion of more than sixty works of art from thirty-two artists reflects some of the most extensive consultation undertaken by the institution in recent times. Indeed, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders and knowledge-holders played a central role in the creation of the exhibition.

For Country, for Nation tells an unfamiliar narrative, both in style and format. Abandoning the chronicling so often treasured in the AWM’s permanent galleries, the exhibition is structured around a series of thematic spaces. As the rhythmic drumming of the Wiradjuri Wagana echoes through the three corridors, visitor movements through the space take an entirely new and refreshing form, emphasising a freedom (rather than order) of movement. Indeed, the six themes – “We Remember,” “The Warriors’ Strength/The Diplomats’ Patience,” “All Heroes/Our Stories,” “Communities on the Front Line,” “Human Rights and Social Justice,” and “Our Cultures Continue” – reflect the curators’ efforts to resist a single dominant narrative. This is by no means an easy accomplishment in the context of Australia’s continuing obsession with Anzac.

Tony Albert, Coloured Diggers, 2013. Australian War Memorial, ART96531

In telling a history of Indigenous service, the curators have also been careful to respond to other critiques of the AWM’s permanent galleries. Men and women stand alongside each other in For Country, for Nation: the legacy of Reg Saunders, the first-known Aboriginal soldier to rise to the rank of captain, accompanies that of Marjorie Anne Tripp, the first-known Aboriginal woman to join the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service. And the stories of the battlefront are balanced with those of the home front: the exhibition covers figures like human rights activist Margaret Lilardia Tucker, who was forcibly removed from her parents under the assimilation policies of the twentieth century but subsequently dedicated much of her life to the home-front war effort during the second world war.

While there is much to be admired in For Country, for Nation, some visitors will find it bittersweet. Not only is the first exhibition at the AWM to honour Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander military service temporary, but it once again adheres to a decades-old idea that Australia’s most eminent military museum (as well as shrine and archive) is not the right place to tell the story of the nation’s first and longest war. 

Some elements of For Nation, for Country do resurrect past and continuing concerns surrounding the Anzac legend and an aggressive, militarised Australian nationalism. For example, army reservist Gareth O’Connell sees continuity between the frontier wars and the role of Indigenous soldiers in Australia’s overseas wars: “Anzac is a modern incarnation of that spirit in defending our country.” Though O’Connell speaks as an Aboriginal man, not everyone would agree that the Anzac legend – the exclusive national myth that still underpins the AWM’s resistance to formally recognise the frontier wars – is an honourable extension of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ military history. 

Shirley Macnamara, Memoir, 2015, Australian War Memorial, ART96854

But there is more to For Country, for Nation than might first meet the eye. The exhibition is saturated with comments and images that hint at curators’ disillusionment at, and perhaps even resistance to, the conservative interpretation that has previously defined the AWM’s galleries. Indeed, the exhibition clearly recognises a far darker past. Overt references to the frontier wars appear several times. Shirley Macnamara’s beautifully woven spinifex crucifix, Memoir, “reminds us of the battles fought at home” as well as in “a distant land.” Brodie McIntyre’s didgeridoo honours “his ancestors, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died and haven’t been so far.” Beautifully decorated boomerangs, shields and spears adorn the eastern corridor, and a declaration by Reg Saunders is inscribed on the wall:

I don’t owe any allegiance or loyalty to the Queen of England; they tried to bloody destroy me, and my family, my tribe, my people… We were the first defenders of Australia – the English never ever defended Australia at all; we did and we suffered very badly for that – decimated to hell.

Then there is the recent permanent installation of Ruby Plains Massacre 1 by Rover Thomas, which is prudently positioned on the western side of the hallway immediately outside the gallery. As journalist Karen Hardy commented, “The first thought is to ask why such a painting even has a place in the Australian War Memorial.” The painting, as Hardy rightly points out, directly contradicts director Brendan Nelson’s claim that the institution is not the right place to tell the story of the frontier wars.

Even if the display of Ruby Plains Massacre 1is intended as nothing more than an effort to give context to For Country, for Nation, its unveiling is important. In its acquisitions, the AWM has often been forward-looking, and Thomas’s painting is certainly not the only piece of this type in its collection. Curators and acquisition staff have been giving careful attention to items and artefacts associated with the frontier wars for years.

Perhaps the defining difference between the unveiling of Thomas’s painting and For Country, for Nation lies in who curated them. Where the inclusion of the painting might have been intended as a conscious and public gesture by the AWM, For Country, for Nation is part of a centuries-old struggle by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to maintain, even reclaim, agency over their own story. For those who look carefully, it will be the words of Aboriginal man Gabriel Nodea, inscribed on the western wall of the gallery, that will carry the potential to redefine the exhibition: “The most important thing I would like to make clear to the rest of the world is our art centre is our last line of defence.” For an exhibition driven by art, this is no idle inclusion; it refers directly to the continuing struggle experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples against the legacies of colonisation. For Country, for Nation is part of that struggle.

As I sat on the small white platform beneath the screening of the Wiradjuri Wagana by Kaa Kaa Wakakirri, two young children in a nearby gallery slipped away from their father’s side and came to crouch beside me. Only a moment passed before they became captivated by the dancers on the wall before us. When the screening finished, the children settled down for a second look. We were only halfway through when their father found us, ready to direct his children back to the gallery they had wandered away from. But like his children, he too stopped to watch the dancers. Moments later, he turned to wander the corridors of For Country, for Nation. When I left the exhibition a few minutes later, the children were still sitting and watching the dancers twirl.

It would be easy to dismiss For Country, for Nation, and the unveiling of Ruby Plains Massacre 1 as empty gestures by the AWM. But that would be a narrow reading of the two actions. Though they might not represent a shift in the AWM’s official remit, they do reflect a willingness to acknowledge the very first war fought “for country, for nation.” •

Our thanks to the AWM and the artists for agreeing to let us publish reproductions of Coloured Diggers and Memoir.

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And there is little doubt that the exhibition is a landmark event. This is the first time the British Museum has staged a major exhibition devoted to Indigenous Australia, a fact that Neil MacGregor, the institution’s soon-to-be-former director, acknowledged more than once. He also observed what an anomalous and unacceptable state of affairs this was, given that Indigenous Australians are considered the “oldest continuing civilisation” in the world and the British Museum is an institution dedicated to telling the stories of the world’s great civilisations. Promises have been made to remedy the situation, with a permanent display of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and history one possibility. It is late coming, but it is a start.

Indigenous Australia has been skilfully curated by Gaye Sculthorpe, a Palawa woman whose ancestors were from northeast Tasmania. Sculthorpe, who led the development of the Bunjilaka Gallery at Museum Victoria before spending a decade or so with the National Native Title Tribunal, is responsible for the Oceania part of the museum’s Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. She was enticed to the British Museum in 2013 by another Australian, Lissant Bolton, who heads up the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas (or what is sometimes dubbed “the rest of the world”); by the time she arrived, the decision to mount an Indigenous Australia exhibition had already been made.

Since around 2007, the National Museum of Australia and the British Museum have been slowly developing a partnership that has included staff exchanges and collection research. Some foundational research was undertaken by Ian Coates from the National Museum of Australia, and that work, which had an emphasis on the collectors and the conditions under which objects were collected, has been bolstered by Sculthorpe and others since. This partnership eventually led to a successful Australian Research Council grant application for a project called “Engaging Objects: Indigenous Communities, Museum Collections and the Representation of Indigenous Histories,” led by anthropologist Howard Morphy, involving the British Museum, the National Museum of Australia and the Australian National University. Along with anthropologist John Carty, also from ANU, I have been involved in the project since it commenced in late 2011.

The future dimly glimpsed in 2007 has arrived. On taking up the position at the British Museum, Sculthorpe was immediately faced with the considerable task of pulling together an exhibition in a reasonably short time with limited labour and resources. Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation is largely due to her energy, unfailing efforts, and ability to bring people together. Early in the process, she developed a strong vision for the exhibition, which she envisaged would present an account of Indigenous Australia spanning 40,000 years and incorporate a component dealing with the almost 250 years since Captain Cook.

Her commitment didn’t falter, even though it was not common for British Museum exhibitions to deal with such “recent” history and even when early audience research indicated that some museum-goers didn’t want to be reminded of the terrible deeds done in Britain’s name. At the same time, Indigenous Australians were adamant that the truth should be told about violence on the frontier. The exhibition would need to be not only clear-eyed about the violence of that encounter and the dispossession and destruction it caused, but also attentive to Indigenous people’s agency, resilience and creativity. It is this doubled perspective that is captured in the exhibition’s subtitle, “enduring civilisation,” which signals the remarkable persistence of Indigenous Australian civilisation even as Indigenous Australians endured the imposition of European civilisation.

Since the media in Britain and Australia were told back in January that the exhibition was to be staged this year, much of the discussion in print, especially in Australia, has focused on the issue of repatriation of museum objects to Indigenous people. While few gainsay the repatriation of human remains, when it comes to “ethnographic” or cultural objects the matter is less clearcut. For those advocating immediate return, some familiar themes have been rehearsed, including the portrayal of the British Museum as an unreconstructed and irredeemable imperialist institution and its collections as little more than colonial loot.

Indeed, over lunch recently, Gaye Sculthorpe told me that the first review she read the morning the exhibition opened to the public was written by Zoe Pilger (daughter of Australian film-maker and writer John) for the Independent. In a blustering piece, Pilger the younger criticised the exhibition in rather simplistic terms as little more than a piece of colonial denialism, described the objects as stolen and called for their immediate return, and was indignant about various other matters on Aboriginal people’s behalf. Huffing and puffing about the inclusion of a larrakitj (memorial pole) by Gawirrin Gumana, which incorporates an image of both Barama and Captain Cook, and objecting to the wall text describing the object as “a gesture of historical and political generosity,” Pilger asked, “But why should the artist be generous?”

A righteous, moralising anger on behalf of Indigenous people has sustained the Pilger family output for some time. In a thoughtful rebuttal of the “review,” art critic Jeremy Eccles suggested in the online forum Aboriginal Art Directory that the comments demonstrated very little appreciation of “the remarkable Yolngu capacity for generosity in the face of white rapacity.” Instead of grasping the subtle politics of generosity and exchange within which much Indigenous art production is embedded, Eccles wrote, “Zoe oppresses them with a simplistic binary obsession with race and her assumption that Yolngu philosophy is as racist as her own.”

Generosity was much on display during the week of festivities surrounding the exhibition’s opening. In attendance were the young film-maker and director Ishmael Marika and the artist Wukun Wanambi, director of the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Arts Centre, who are both from northeast Arnhem Land. After visiting the British Museum and its collection in 2013 and seeing the crowds of people swarming around the Reading Room in the Great Court, Wukun Wanambi produced a remarkable memorial pole, or larrakitj, covered in his ancestral designs of fish. “The fish are swimming from creek to creek, river to river, searching for their destiny,” he explains. “Just like all these people from all over the world coming to the British Museum here. Everybody is searching for their own story.” This pole is on show in a small room (Gallery 3) off the main entrance of the British Museum, complementing the larger exhibition, which is upstairs in a gallery carved out of the old Reading Room. Ishmael and Wukun were present throughout the week of the opening, welcoming VIPs and others with song and music, patiently introducing them to their art and culture and thanking the British Museum for showing it to the world.

Ceremonies involving wearing masks of turtle shell were an important part of traditional life on Mer in the Torres Strait. British Museum

Few of the reviews of the exhibition that followed, and there have been many, have endorsed Zoe Pilger’s views. Sculthorpe was relieved that the second she read was by the Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones (not to be mistaken for the Wiradjuri artist of the same name). He gave the show five stars, appreciating a focus on Indigenous art and culture that doesn’t shy away from history and politics. Acknowledging the ever-present repatriation debate, Jones ended by saying that “the only thing to be said for museum ownership is that it makes it possible to put on an exhibition as enlightening as this.”

Other reviews that appeared around the same time engaged more directly with the section of the exhibition that deals with history since Captain Cook. The Times’s reviewer noted, for instance, that “Indigenous Australia represents more than just a fascinating jumble of artefacts. It sets out to present a wider, more subtly nuanced picture of the relationships between Aboriginal people and their colonisers… Even as it presents a confrontational history of fierce resistance to the relentless advance of the occupiers, of bloody attacks on settlers followed by even bloodier reprisals, it also speaks to two cultures coming together, attempting to understand one another.”

It is easy to criticise an interpretation of Australia’s colonial history that conceives of it as a “shared” or “entwined” history. (Pilger fulminated at the use of metaphors like this in the exhibition.) Some believe that it risks playing down the larger structures of colonial authority and domination that intruded into almost every aspect of Indigenous Australians’ lives, and within which Indigenous people were ultimately powerless. Yet, an overriding emphasis on dispossession and destruction also has limitations, playing down Indigenous people’s agency as they sought to engage with the colonisers, to persuade them of the value of their own civilisation, and to seek redress for the destruction of their rights and freedoms. These twinned historical themes are covered in the exhibition – but not, of course, to everyone’s satisfaction.

It is no easy task to negotiate the intricate politics of history and memory when it comes to Australia’s colonial past, and critics and visitors can sometimes underestimate the challenge. One way in which the curatorial team led by Sculthorpe has sought to tread the thorny path between telling histories of domination and histories of determination has been to work with the dynamism that is so often produced by putting together the old and the new. Contemporary art becomes especially powerful here.

There’s a corner (literally) of the exhibition where this works, in my view, in particularly productive ways. I might not be impartial here, because it is a “module” focused on the encounter between Captain Cook and Indigenous Australians, about which I have written a great deal. The display occurs at a pivotal point, where the exhibition’s narrative moves into a section covering post-contact history. It draws together an assemblage of objects that are all associated in some way or another with Captain Cook – the memorial pole, which Pilger mentioned; the shield believed to have been used by a Gweagal man in defence against Cook’s landing party at Botany Bay in 1770; a copy of Cook’s original chart of Botany Bay and the drawing made by the Ra’iatean man Tupaia (who had joined the voyage in Tahiti) showing three Gweagal people fishing with hand lines and spears from two canoes; and two other contemporary artworks: Michael Cook’s photograph Undiscovered #4, which shows an Aboriginal man dressed as Captain Cook standing on the beach with his ship behind him, and Vincent Namatjira’s painting, James Cook – With Declaration, in which the “proclamation” Cook writes to take possession of the territory appears as an extension of his naval uniform.

In various clever and subtle ways, each of these “objects” works to destabilise the meanings embedded in other pieces and to enrich and multiply the possibilities for the interpretation of this history. Tupaia’s sympathetic drawing, for instance, points to interactions other than the violent one (which the shield symbolises) that occurred during the Endeavour’s time in the bay in 1770. Michael Cook’s photograph and Vincent Namatjira’s painting draw attention to the historical myth-making that Cook, as settler foundational figure, has come to represent. Gumana’s pole, by contrast, acknowledges Cook’s law, but shows that it did not displace Barama’s law in Yolngu country. It is not possible to convey all of these potential interpretations in the space of the exhibition, but nonetheless the exhibition provides the resources for interpretative work of this kind. Later this month, I have the opportunity to present a lunchtime lecture at the British Museum on Indigenous Australian interpretations of Captain Cook in which these ideas and arguments can be presented more fully.

So, for all of their educative qualities, exhibitions can only do some of the work of communicating complex ideas and difficult histories to audiences. They are constrained by limitations on the amount of text that can be included, the size and shape of the room (in this case an awkward dogleg) and other contingencies. The book accompanying the exhibition compensates to some extent by providing greater detail and contextual discussion. But other forms of interpretation and dialogue, and other forums, also play their part. Indeed, what is often overlooked in critiques of exhibitions is what goes on around them, and the ways in which they work to provide occasions – and create spaces – for other kinds of history-telling and history-making to occur. This includes, it must be said, the history-making and claim-making that occurs as part of discussions about repatriation that exhibitions like this one provoke.

Among the activity that took place in and around the Indigenous Australia exhibition during the week of the opening are some powerful examples of this expanded sphere of historical interpretation and debate, and these contributed to my growing sense that something momentous was taking shape. A number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had travelled to London to participate in the festivities, including members of the National Museum of Australia’s Indigenous Reference Group and many of the artists whose work is included in the exhibition.

Early one morning midweek, we gathered, along with invited media, at the exhibition to witness a gift-giving ceremony the National Museum of Australia delegation had arranged. They presented the museum director Neil MacGregor with a beautiful glass-blown sculpture in the shape of a dilly bag, made by the award-winning Canberra-based artist Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello. The gift was an expression of the relationship that was growing with the British Museum, and mediated in no small way through the exhibition-making process. On receiving the gift, Neil MacGregor acknowledged not only its sheer beauty, but also its significance in commemorating the exhibition and marking the beginning of a new friendship.

There was obvious symmetry between this event, which was conducted with a powerful grace and reminded us yet again about the subtle arts of the diplomacy of generosity, and some historical episodes featured in the show. A good example from 1863 involves the Coranderrk people of Victoria presenting Queen Victoria and her family with a cache of gifts as part of their efforts to engage diplomatically with the highest authority in Britain. This early-morning performance served to animate such episodes, drawing them into the present and pointing towards continuities that are not so easily captured or appreciated, but are a crucial part of the multilayered idea of “enduring civilisation” explored by the exhibition.

Among the visiting dignitaries to London last week was Bunuba woman June Oscar, from the Kimberley region in Western Australia. The British Museum, with the support of the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at King’s College London, under the new directorship of Ian Henderson, brought Oscar over to help open the exhibition. On the evening before the formal reception, she delivered a powerful public lecture in which she took the audience on a journey into her ancestral country and people’s history by starting out from the place where we were. From the vantage point of the River Room at the university’s Strand campus, overlooking the Thames, she reflected on two histories of violence and impoverishment that come together on Australia’s many colonial frontiers. It was a masterclass in telling “entwined” histories.

Oscar treated the objects in Indigenous Australia – including a boomerang believed to have belonged to the Bunuba resistance fighter Jandamarra, and objects collected from “native camps” by the local policeman on that frontier and sent to the British Museum in the belief that they “might be of value and interest” – as mere props for her story. Here she reversed the usual order of things within exhibitions, in which objects take the privileged place. What was important in her lecture were the true stories of the frontier, the country that was Bunuba people’s museum, and the contemporary performances through which contemporary Bunuba keep Jandamarra’s memory and legacy alive.

Despite the depth of engagement, the sustained critical response, and the energy and excitement that is palpable around the exhibition, the Australian press has quickly become fond of saying that the exhibition has received “mixed” reviews. This is, it seems to me, a lazy assessment of the reaction to date. It is indicative of the ways in which the Australian media seems intent on finding controversy for the exhibition’s present run and for its upcoming iteration at the National Museum of Australia.

Rather than engage with the exhibition’s interpretative themes and arguments, the default position is to raise the spectre of repatriation. Calls for the return of cultural material will always attract more notice than other modes of engagement between Indigenous people and museums. As important as it is, and for some communities more than others, the preoccupation with repatriation in the Australian press is often at the expense of other issues and questions, not least of which are the interpretative challenges and possibilities involved in using a collection like the British Museum’s as a resource for telling true histories of the encounter between Indigenous Australians and British settlers in ways that reach new audiences.

Much important work went on in opening week, both at public events and behind the scenes. There have been meetings with the British Museum’s director and members of the Board of Trustees. There have been visits to the collection storeroom. There have been public lectures, a conference and various diplomatic and ceremonial performances. The British Museum has rung with the voices of a diverse group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, all with different views about it, and about museums in general. And many different statements about the repatriation issue were voiced, underscoring just how complex the issue is.

When, for instance, Ishmael Marika from Yirrkala was asked by an audience member at a panel discussion how he felt about his people’s things in the British Museum, he said that it meant that his culture and people were appreciated. For her part, June Oscar concluded her Menzies Centre lecture by suggesting that the objects in the British Museum, which speak to the shared history of Indigenous Australia and Britain, will be ready to return home only “when we have learnt from our mixed heritage and accepted our equal Indigenous and non-Indigenous nationhoods.” The idea that the objects will come home only when this mutual recognition of fundamental equality is achieved, and the continuation of Aboriginal law is acknowledged, in the way that Gumana’s memorial pole suggests, is a provocative one. Given the current state of affairs, it is hard to put a timeframe on it.

Peter Yu, a member of the Council of the National Museum of Australia and chair of its Indigenous Reference Group, also advocated for a go-slow approach to the issue. “Many Indigenous people and supporters demand that Indigenous property held by the British Museum be repatriated to the descendants of those who once owned it,” he said in a public presentation since published in the Australian. “I deeply respect that view and support the right of people to make that argument. But to move forward and advance the interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples requires sophisticated dialogue.” Moreover, he argued,

A mature discussion would appreciate that repatriation is sensitive and problematic. Contemporary Indigenous ownership of the material is often not clear and in all honesty we should not shy away from this; rather we should challenge ourselves on how to retrieve the situation. This reality must be recognised.

This diversity of viewpoints won’t satisfy those who call for the immediate and wholesale return of objects. It complicates and unsettles the simple approach taken by much of the press, as journalists continue to canvass the issue as simply a choice between “preservation” and “plunder.”

Museums are complex institutions and exhibitions are productive and provocative events. Occasionally, a museum exhibition is staged that does much more than present new interpretations and stories to new audiences. Sometimes, perhaps only rarely, such an exhibition can change how the conversation about relationships between Indigenous people, museums and collections is conducted. Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation might well be one of those. •

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Foodjects: Design and the New Cuisine in Spain is a small, cleverly put together exhibition currently showing at the Craft and Design Centre in Canberra. Curated by Martin Ruiz de Azúa (himself an established designer whose imaginative prototypes include an inflatable house for carrying around in your pocket) and supported by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the exhibition assembles various examples from the range of cookware, tableware and related products created by Spanish designers to complement and support the new Spanish style of cooking – a style indelibly associated with the master of “molecular cuisine,” Ferran Adrià. When put to their intended use, the “smooth organic shapes” of “Bliss,” a dinner set designed in 2003 by Gemma Bernal for Adrià’s elBulli restaurant, seem not merely to complement but to blend into the cuisine itself; as we are told in the catalogue, the individual pieces – plates, bowls, receptacles of various kinds – mimic the “ductile qualities” of the delicacies they hold and “the plates become a prolongation of the food.” It marks another step in the contemporary process of turning food into art; what began in the 1970s and 1980s with nouvelle cuisine, when those vast plates-cum-bowls acted as a kind of frame for a rose-pink quail breast and a few peppercorns, has now reached a point where the plate is not merely a frame, but an integral part of the picture.

You could say that things have come full circle. In medieval times, the plates were likewise inseparable from the food. In fact, they literally were the food, in the form of trenchers made from bread that could, theoretically at least, be set upon by unsatisfied diners looking to fill up the corners after the main dish was despatched. The difference now is not so much that the plate imitates the food it holds as that the food – the new Spanish cuisine that first began to be noticed a decade and a half ago and relies heavily on technology to transform it into something that is and is not the food we know – imitates the plate, taking on a designed and manufactured aspect that makes us wonder whether we should be eating it or simply admiring it, as we would a painting or a sculpture or an Eames chair.

As if taking this idea to its logical conclusion, there are a couple of objects in the exhibition that are fabricated to look and smell like food but aren’t food at all. A scented ceramic sponge cake and a virtual bonbon – the latter infused with natural cacao and Bulgarian rose essence – are “designed to be smelt only.” These faux foods call to mind the pièces montées of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, visual extravaganzas assembled by the great Marie-Antoine Carême and others out of a flour-and-sugar paste and designed to sit in the middle of the table, to be looked at, admired, but not eaten. The main difference being that the pièce montée was food got up to mimic something else – a Grand Chinese Summer House, for instance, or a Turkish Pavilion, both of which featured in Carême’s repertoire – whereas the virtual bonbon is something else, got up to mimic food. You could, if you were so minded, snaffle a piece of a pièce to eat afterwards, but it would be unwise, as that cautionary note in the Foodjects catalogue reminds us, to try tucking into a ceramic sponge cake or a virtual bonbon.

As a counterpoint to the virtual bonbon, the exhibition catalogue provides a recipe for a real one, made from olive oil. The bonbon is savoury this time, rather than sweet, and is given as an example of the kind of (edible) food that these “foodjects” are designed to accompany. Making olive oil bonbons is not for the fainthearted, involving as it does dropping a small amount of olive oil down a tube while ensuring that a thin film of melted isomalt remains adhered to the end, ready to encase the oil as it luges its way down to the bottom, turning it magically into a bright golden bauble. Well, that’s the idea, anyway. “If the first one doesn’t work, don’t be discouraged… Just try to do it faster next time,” says the recipe, reminding us in effect that the new cuisine retains quite a lot in common with the old: all that fun in the kitchen is actually hard work. In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the famously influential guide to the pre-nouvelle way of doing things first published in 1961, Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child sound a strikingly similar chord: if the egg yolks need to be beaten into the sauce drop by drop, then that is what you must do. “You may be slow and clumsy and first,” they say in their stern but encouraging preface, “but with practice you will pick up speed and style.”

The style of the new Spanish cuisine derives from a paradoxical combination of the earnest and the cheeky. Two of the more intriguing objects in the exhibition, both of them designed by the Swiss-born, Spain-based Luki Huber in 2005, emphasise the cheeky by having fun with spoons. “Spoon with Pincer,” which looks pretty much like a peg with a teaspoon stuck on the top, “allows a diner to smell one thing and eat another,” by trapping something aromatic – a sprig of rosemary perhaps – in the pincer, leading the diner to smell it on the way to whatever is waiting in the bowl of the spoon, a game of sensory mix and match. In the case of the “Strainer Spoon,” the bowl is a miniature colander, ideal for those who, for example “like to eat the cereal first, then the milk,” or the vegetables then the broth. It is essentially an update of the slotted spoon, made for the eater rather than the cook. It facilitates an active deconstruction of the meal on the part of the person eating it, echoing the fashion for chefs to break down traditional dishes into their constituent parts and lay the workings bare. Huber, with his quirky spoons, hints at how the diner can be something more than a passive consumer of one spectacularly inventive and original dish after another. The chef may be the undisputed star, but the diner can be allowed a small supporting role.

The “foodjects” in this exhibition oscillate between naturalness and artifice, between the twin poles that characterise this cuisine for the technological age. They emphasise how the new cuisine, with its “deconstructed dishes, foams, spherications,” which may seem complex and fussy and just too damn clever, is in fact aiming for the essence of taste, for a direct connection with pure flavour. José Andrés, an early colleague of Ferran Adrià whose name is now closely associated with the international spread of “small plates” dining, is quoted in the catalogue enjoining us to listen to the ingredients we use. “Have you ever had a conversation with a carrot?” he asks. “Or a tomato? You should sometime. They have a lot to say.” This kind of new-age, I-talk-to-the-carrots-and-the-carrots-talk-to-me characterisation of cooking is intended to plug us straight into what we eat, but at the other end of the spectrum is the way in which the new high-tech cuisine intellectualises the business of eating, making the food in front of us and the plates the food sits on intriguing, amusing, fascinating, part of a game rather than something we must engage with in order to stay alive.

The contradiction is resolved, if it is resolved at all, by the idea that food is nourishment for both the body and the mind. Whatever makes us pause and think about food, about how it has been prepared, how beautiful or striking or odd it looks on the plate, about how the composition of the dish alludes to something else – a painting perhaps, or a scene from nature, as in some of the signature dishes of René Redzepi’s Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, where mock grass sprouts from mock soil that has been made out of breadcrumbs or hazelnut flour – contributes to our enjoyment of food and the benefits it confers on us. The new cuisine is not, as its critics would argue, about extravagance and self-indulgence, but is a genuine attempt to get us to think about one of the most important relationships we have, to the food we eat. It is here that the “asymmetric and somewhat unstable” cutlery, designed by Javier Mariscal in 2007, can help. The irregular borders of the soup spoon, for instance, complete with an attractive but otherwise unexplained bight cutting into the bowl, are intended to “make people think.”

ALL this inventiveness notwithstanding, there are signs in the wider world that the new cuisine is running out of puff, that the emphasis on the role of technology in preparing the food, and the role of the intellect in leading us to appreciate it, has gone too far. The dates attached to some of the designs in this exhibition – the earliest is from 1999 – are a reminder that the new Spanish cuisine is not so new anymore. A lot has happened since the nineties – to cooking, to Spain, and to our general confidence in experts practising arcane arts – and a new simplicity is, at least ostensibly, back in vogue. It can be seen, for example, in the rise of American cook and food writer Tamar Adler, who models herself consciously on the formidable M.F.K. Fisher and who is all for getting back to basics. An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace questions all this emphasis on technology and cleverness and on people trying to bamboozle us with complex formulae. Cooking, she says, “has in recent years become a complication to juggle against other complications,” whereas it is in fact “both simpler and more necessary than we imagine.”

By the reckoning of Adler and others like her, the intellectualising and the relentless inventiveness of recent years just gets in the way of enjoying good food cooked well. Do we really need all the new products like Lecite and Algin and Gellan and Kappa and Iota – sample tins of these and similar aids to the production of “hot gelatines, airs, melon caviar or spherical raviolis” are included in Foodjects – in order to eat well? “Most of us,” Adler points out, “already have water, a pot to put it in, and a way to light a fire.” Our batterie de cuisine need not run to a “plastic tube of 1.5 centimetres in diameter,” as advised in the recipe for making olive oil bonbons, when we can choose to skip these space age amuse-bouches altogether and instead serve, as Tamar Adler recommends for those occasions when friends drop in, “little halved radishes, chilled in the refrigerator, a dish of salt, and another filled with softened sweet butter.”

The problem is that freshly picked radishes in crisper drawers, lying ready to spring into action when the doorbell rings, belong as much to a world of culinary fantasy as do olive oil bonbons and pincer spoons. That is not to say that radishes aren’t at a given moment, somewhere in the world, being chopped in half and served with sweet butter and a pinch of salt to unexpected callers (a process made easier by the fact that unexpected callers, having texted ahead, are more generally expected these days). And equally there are people, not all of them commercial chefs and restaurateurs, who serve olive oil bonbons too, and who prepare them with speed and skill. But neither is a common or everyday practice, and it is unlikely that they ever will be. The real difference between what are, for most of us, two idealised and unattainable culinary worlds – the low-tech one of split radishes, and the high-tech one of golden globules – lies in the differences they represent between two profoundly different ways of looking at food and its place in our lives.

Sometimes, it is true, these worlds will happily combine. Adler is quite prepared, for instance, for her low-tech practice of instinctive cookery to include an electric blender, though she draws the line at microwaves. “Use yours as a bookshelf,” she counsels, “or to store gadgets you don’t use.” And it’s fine to keep tins of artichokes and tomatoes in the cupboard for those days when you can’t get out to the shops, just as M.F.K. Fisher was not above resorting to a packet of dried onion soup when supplies of fresh alternatives ran low. But these are occasional examples that don’t disprove the general rule, which is that the Adler and the Adrià approaches to cooking are based on radically opposed philosophical precepts and are unlikely ever to become, in the manner of tomato and basil, two complementary halves of the same flavoursome whole.

What these two approaches to cuisine really do have in common, though, is the idea of food – the making, the presenting, the eating – as performance, complete with the occasional allowance for audience participation. (“Let everyone spread the radishes with a smear of butter and sprinkle them with salt,” says Adler, or let them use a specially designed slotted spoon to start with the cereal and end with the milk. Either way, the diner can become, however tangentially, part of the creative process.) Cooking and eating also entail thinking and imagining and reflecting. And writing. “I like to read descriptions of food in books,” says Adler, but “I will only read a cookbook if it is one in which the poetry of food comes alive on the page.” By and large, she meets her own benchmark, demonstrating that characteristic of all successful food writers, an elusive and ineffable way with recipes that makes you want to try them, along with a nice line in useful tips, including a chapter on rescuing culinary missteps called “How to Snatch Victory from the Jaws of Defeat.” If anything, though, Adler can sometimes overdo the poetry bit; her characterisation, for example, of a “perfect solitary sybaritic breakfast of pasta eaten directly out of a cold bowl, in bewilderment and utter presence,” betrays rather a heavy hand with the lyrical seasoning.

Tamar Adler makes the case for writing and reading about food as being an integral part of the pleasure and satisfaction of cooking it and eating it. The Foodjects designers, as might be expected, take things a step further, from writing about food to writing with it and on it. Julia Mariscal’s 2006 design for a “Writing Spoon” specifically acknowledges that “eating is a creative act,” the point being that rather than depend on a trained and talented barista to draw a picture on your cappuccino, you can do it yourself, with your own writing spoon. It’s a joke, of course, but a clever and sophisticated one, touching on the contemporary need to participate in the creative process rather than simply to witness it, to take what we are given and mash it up (a curiously culinary term) so that it’s just the way we like it. The writing spoon, with its nib-like tip, can also be used to draw pictures with foodstuffs; there’s an oddly hypnotic clip on YouTube of a disembodied hand repeatedly dipping the Julia Mariscal writing spoon into a cup of black coffee and using it to build up a picture on a plain white table cover. Designing, looking; writing, reading; cooking, eating. They all go together. •

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