Rethinking Australia’s Art History: The Challenge of Aboriginal Art

Abstract

In Rethinking Australia’s Art History, Susan Lowish makes a discursive history of Aboriginal art out of the writings of explorers, ethnographers and enthusiasts during the nineteenth century. The quality of the monograph is to put early writers on the subject into a coherent story and context. There are some familiar names here but many of these nascent scholars are little known outside small circles of Australian specialists. Lowish makes the case that their varying accounts of artefact making and rock art laid the groundwork for the collection and exhibition of Aboriginal art in the twentieth century. Aboriginal art is a notoriously difficult concept, one that created more problems than it solved as it defined generations of artists by their race rather than their work. Lowish’s historiography takes a step back from both artists and work in order to think about Aboriginal art as a ‘variation on a period style’ but one that is ‘not defined according to style or iconography’ (13). Periodisation has been unfashionable since the New Art History of the 1970s, its generalisations about sweeping swathes of time all too implicated in the big man histories that once dominated schools and universities. Here Lowish wants to rescue the term, but in a careful excavation of writings by men on pith hatted expeditions and wearing Church collars. These were the men who laid the foundations for the reception of Aboriginal art by arranging spears and shields into exhibitions and diagrams of development. The result is an art defined by evolution and speculation, in lives imagined to be close to rudimentary nature. The writing and collecting of personalities such as George Grey and Baldwin Spencer play a powerful part here, and yet for all of their impact they were more interested in other things. Grey was doing a survey of north-west Australia, while Spencer’s ardent trade for bark paintings, coolamons, shields and everything else he could parley for has left a largely undocumented collection. He never quite got around to writing the book he once imagined on Aboriginal art, and in this he is typical of most of these early writers as they dabbled rather than focused on the topic. Yet it was this dabbling that set into motion the conversations and discriminations that constituted Aboriginal art’s coming of age in the twentieth century. It is a wonder that Aboriginal art gained any traction at all with the Australian public after some of the oddball analyses Lowish describes here, most notoriously Grey’s theory that the Wandjina rock art was painted by people from beyond Australia’s shores. This set into motion a series of misinterpretations of the visual culture of the north-west, including pastoralist Joseph Bradshaw’s reading of the