GARY WILLIS: 1998 - 2002

The Myth of VOSS

Death By Landscape

School of Creative Arts

The Myth of VOSSDEATH BY LANDSCAPE

GARY WILLIS 1998 - 2002Foreword by Bernard Smith

BAILLIEU LIBRARY

5TH JULY - 27TH AUGUST 2004UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

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Special Thanks

Dr. Karmananda Saraswarti, Albert Kumara Bailey, Kenny Apetyarr Kunouth and the Aboriginal Communityat Urapuntja N.T.. The Myer Foundation, Morfia Grondas at the Baillieu Library, Associate Professor AngelaO’Brien School of Creative Arts, Professor Emeritus Bernard Smith, Gary Thomas, Director Indigenous StudiesUnit, University of Melbourne. Mary Morris in the Indigenous Culture Unit at Museum of Victoria, DanielPalmer at CCP, Polly and Arthur Boyd Trust, Bundanon, Penguin Group Australia, Ronn Morris, Max Pam,David Harley, Dr. Kate Challis.

Printed - Arena Publishing - Fitzroy Melbourne

©2004

Gulag Publishing6 Jenkin St.

Brunswick East, Melbourne.

National Library of AustraliaCataloguing-in-Publication data:

Willis, Gary, 1949 -

The myth of Voss: death by landscape; Gary Willis.

For tertiary students.ISBN 0 9752130 0 8.

I. Willis, Gary, 1949 - Exhibitions. I . Baillieu LibraryII. Title

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The Myth of VOSS_________________________________________________________________________________________

Contents

VOST: Ubermensch - Ronn Morris 8 - 9Foreword - Bernard Smith 10 - 11

Sorry Business 14 - 19The Disappearance of Ludwig Leichhardt 20 - 27The Myth of VOSS 28 - 37Mytho-poesis and the Antipodean School 38 - 43

Unless otherwise stated, all paintings are in oil by Gary Willis.

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Footnotes ; Image reference Page : 37

1. Of course, Nietzsche’s Übermensch reference post-dates Leichhardt’s death. Callit poetic licence.

2. From Lawrence Felinghetti’s poem ‘In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See’.3. Any reader of Francis Webb will note a borrowing from his title ‘Eyre All Alone’.4. Written in a letter home from Berlin in the late 1830s where, against his family’s

wishes, Leichhardt had begun medical studies.5. From Anton Chekhov’s story “Lights”. The larger quote reads: When a man in a

melancholy mood is left tête-à- tête with the sea, or any landscape which seemsto him grandiose, there is always, for some reason, mixed with melancholy, aconviction that he will live and die in obscurity and he reflectively snatches up apencil and hastens to write his name on anything that comes handy.

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Vost : Übermensch1 - RONN MORRIS

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It’s like that Ferlinghetti poem: ‘In Goya’s Greatest Scenes’ we seem to seeThe people of the world exactly at the moment when they first attainedThe title of ‘suffering humanity’.2 Only in this painting of Leichhardt, all alone,3

The explorer kneels with paintbrush in mouth,And speaks, with this non-tongue, his death.

Silence is a grammar. This man, with the Golgotha eyes, says,My life streaks the horizon and will fade in a swirl of stars.Once, he recalls, I wrote to that hard man, my father,Saying, I am on top of a mountain overlooking landscapeWrit large where formerly I had crawled through narrow valleys.4

Was I to know all Antipodean summits are old and small? That they leach the will,Becoming Mount Hopeless, Mount Disappointment, Mount Desolation, Mount Despair.I have become a man who lives and dies in obscurity.5

This ruinous flatland speaks cleanly as it obliterates me. Its heat fires me,It darks flesh and ripens the heart. It says, Herr Docktor, Herr Fraud, the life is bitter; your blood tastes sweet.

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Foreword - Bernard Smith________________________________________________________________________________

The Myth of Voss is not only an important contribution to contemporary Australian Artit also provides a significant insight into the way myth has contributed to the lives of all of uswho live here. It is an exercise in the aesthetic and moral imagination in the cause of reconciliationbetween the indigenous inhabitants of this land and those of us who have long assumed legalityfor our own interests on the presumption that indigenous people have had no claim to this land.

The exercise began when Willis found himself at Urapuntja, in a landscape drenchedwith myth and mourning. Its inhabitants having destroyed their own dwellings and fled. It wasexplained that he was in the midst of what the Aboriginal people called ‘sorry business’. Willishad arrived back in Australia to explore the origins of Patrick White’s myth of Voss, in thedisappearance of Ludwig Leichhardt, but found himself in the aftermath of the rituals by whichAboriginal people mourn their dead. He had been moving around Central Australia painting thelandscape and some of the Aboriginal elders standing before their own sacred sites in a plein-airstyle. The style in which Leichhardt would have seen the country he travelled through, seekingto see the landscape as Leichhardt himself might have done. But Urapuntja, trashed and desolate,

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shocked him back into the present time. He recorded what he saw in a brilliant series ofphotographs.

He also began to see The Myth of Voss as a form of ‘sorry business’ played out throughthe death of Leichhardt, first in ghost stories, then in two novels published before Voss (1957),followed by Richard Meale’s opera Voss (1988), a Jungian analysis by David Tacey (1995) and anessay by Roslynn Haynes in her The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film (1998). Heconcluded that Voss is a myth about ‘whitefella sorry business’. For both black and white, theAustralian imagination has its endemic subject of mourning. To support his claim Willis quotesthe Antipodean Manifesto of 1959: ‘The emergence of myth is a continuous social activity. Inthe growth and transformation of its myths a society achieves its own sense of identity’.

It is of course creative artists like Patrick White and Gary Willis who take it uponthemselves to bear the burden of our own sorry business. In the Antipodean exhibition of 1959it was Arthur Boyd and his brother David who took on that burden, as Australia slowly began toshed the self-righteousness of its colonial terra-nullus assumptions. David Boyd devoted five ofhis nine paintings to the tragedy of Truganini, while Arthur exhibited six paintings on his themeof the Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-caste. We have far to go yet, in order to exorcise ourown guilt and shame - our own sorry business. The Myth of Voss may help us along the way.

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Sorry Business___________________________________________________________________________________

The day I was supposed to arrive at Urapuntja, the whole community had gone intoSorry Business. By the time I got out there, a couple of weeks later, the Urapuntja mob hadmoved off to Ingkwelay, Kurrajong Bore, about 30 kms down the track. All that was left of theold camp was the rubbish blowing about in the dust. It appeared twenty or thirty gunyas,whurlies and humpies had been torn apart, stripped of anything useful and abandoned in respectof the dead. I never found out what sparked the boy’s impulse to top himself, the Alyawarr andAnmatyerr people don’t speak of the dead.

It was later, through reading Baldwin Spencer, that I came to understand what Aboriginalpeople call Sorry Business was a very serious matter which involved; public mourning, the opendisplay of grief, ritual self-mutilation and blood letting, the systematic eradication of all traces ofthe presence of the deceased including burning down their camp and finally shifting the entirecommunity to a new location. Not attending to any of these details properly could have severeconsequences for the relatives and the community in general.

I‘d been painting my way through the central Australian landscape, transmuting thecountry into the language of 19th century plein-air painting. In preparation for a body of paintings

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Baldwin SpencerPhotograph: 1901Sorry BusinessPhotograph reproduced courtesyMuseum Victoria.

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on Patrick White’s myth of Voss, I began painting some of the traditional landowners in thelandscapes of their own sacred sites, that dreamtime bond which confers sovereign title in centralAustralia, in a bid to glean insight into Ludwig Leichhardt’s experience of the never-never.

The Kngwarrey’s hold the sacred title for much of the land around Utopia;Amengernterenh, Arlperr, Arawerr, Ingkwelay, Arnkewenyerr. Tommy and Johnny KngwarreyJones and I were painting out on the dry riverbed of the Sandover River, when I first noticed aseries of raised horizontal cicatrices, what appeared to be decorative scarring cut across histriceps.

Those scars Johnny, what are they for? That’s Sorry Business, he answered with ademonstration, as if with a knife, a disinterested yet committed slashing at his shoulders, firstone side and then the next and over again. There was a time when every adult male would havehad these scars. They evidence the son-in-law having correctly acquitted his responsibilities to adeceased father-in-law. Not doing so, could incur the wrath of the spirit of the Kuruna, hisfather-in-law, which could avenge him in a number of ways at any time, for instance by takingaway his wife. As Baldwin Spencer points out, when the eye goes the Kuruna, eventually comesout of the body and disappears in the form of the Chichurkna, a whistling bird. This spirit bird isan image Patrick White references in Voss; I saw a white bird fly out of the bones of death, itswings opening like hands. It is considered vital to enable the Chichurkna, its proper passage. If

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these rites are not attended to correctly there can be trouble with the evil-minded spirits, such asthe Eruncha or the Kudaitcha man, Old Feathery Feet as he is colloquially known. Following adeath the first level of Sorry Business goes on for two weeks and then twelve months or so laterthere is another process which signals the end of the mourning period. These rituals lay the spiritof the dead to rest, settling accounts, making amends, redressing the balance and gracing thecommunity with a peace.

In the Baldwin Spencer photographs of 1901, we see an Arrente Widow, pictured atthe end of Sorry Business. Her entire body is painted with white ochre and ash, her head andface are covered with a headdress known as a Chimurillia, which is made of small bones, fur,hair, feathers and looks a bit like dreadlocks. Twelve months after her husband’s burial, shewears her Chimurillia to his grave, accompanied by the female contingent of her family andfriends. Following further violent acts of self-mutilation, she will throw her body onto the graveof her husband and be danced into the dirt of his tomb by the other women, before burying herChimurillia with her blood, her sorrows with the bones of her husband, bringing her period ofmourning to an end.

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The Disappearance of Ludwig Leichhardt_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There is considerable conjecture as to the circumstances of Ludwig Leichhardt’s fatefuldisappearance into Central Australia but no conclusive evidence as to where or how he died.Since his last citing in 1848 a number of trees have been discovered with the letter ‘L’ carved intothem. They confirm a route through the northern river system of western Queensland; severalon the Barcoo River where the Thompson River meets Cooper Creek, one on the DiamantinaRiver; and another on the Georgina River, of which the Sandover River is a tributary. The SandoverRiver, which runs through Arawerr, Soapy Bore in Utopia, starts in the McDonnell Ranges aroundArltunga where last of the ‘L’ trees, has been sited. A rifle butt inscribed Ludwig Leichhardt -1848 was found about 370 km south west of Alice Springs. This had taken me out along theMcDonnell Ranges to Hermannsburg, Areyonga, Kings Canyon, Uluru, KataTjuta and thePetermann Ranges where Lassiter’s grave is marked next to a cave toward Docker River. Muchhad changed in the 150 years since Leichhardt disappeared into the never-never, but rather lessthan I might have imagined when I left Berlin to return to Australia in 1998.

Leichhardt, often seen around Sydney with his chimney-pot hat garlanded with vinesand flowers and the occasional insect specimen pinned to the rim, had difficulty fitting into thecolonial society of the 1840s. He had studied philosophy at Berlin University, reading Kant,

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William NicholasDrawing: 1847Ludwig Leichhardt

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Schopenhauer and Hegel, before making a critical shift to the natural sciences. Later, the youngGerman went onto study medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in London and at theHopital de la Charité in Paris, at the same time reading natural history at the British Museum,London and the Museum of Natural History, Paris. Eventually Leichhardt sailed to Australia as anaturalist. On his arrival in Sydney in 1841, Leichhardt lectured on geology and botany withaspirations to become the director of the National Museum but such positions were not on offerto the young German nor were the Colonial Office grants almost exclusively given to the Britishexplorers to chart the continent’s rural and mineral resources.

Thus, the eccentric German began his expeditions without financial support. On hisfirst trip, Leichhardt travelled from Sydney through the Hunter Valley district and on up to MoretonBay, not far from what later became Brisbane, studying flora, fauna and geology. His nextexpedition managed to raise a small private subscription of £130; compare Eyre’s proposedbudget of £5,000 for the same journey. This time Leichhardt set off with a handful of men fromMoreton Bay for Port Essington; a colonial outpost since overtaken by the jungle north of whatis now Darwin. After a few months of hardship, two of his party returned and a third was killedin an Aboriginal attack. Two years later, after Leichhardt was widely believed to have perished,he sailed triumphantly back into Sydney harbour aboard ‘The Heroine’. Having made what wasto be the longest expedition in the history of Australian exploration at the time, a journey ofsome 5,000 kilometres, Leichhardt became known as the Prince of Explorers. His Journal of an

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Overland Expedition in Australia won him the Annual Prize of the Geographical Society, Parisand the Patrons Medal from the Royal Geographical Society, London and finally securing himfunding from the Colonial Office for his most ambitious proposal yet: To cross Australia east towest.

Despite the historical debate about the Mad German’s common sense, he hadundoubtedly learnt his bushcraft from encounters with his Aboriginal friends. If necessary, hecould survive on bush tucker, a food source spurned by other explorers. In spite of Leichhardt’sproven resilience, strength of will and good fortune, a trip from Brisbane across central Australiato the Western Australian coastline then down to Perth would prove a highly speculative venture.Even by today’s standards it would be considered virtually impossible on horseback. Followinghis departure from Mount Abundance, on the Fitzroy Downs in 1848, neither he, nor, any of hisparty were ever to be seen again.

In vanishing into the mythic never-never without a trace, Leichhardt left behind a blankslate. His fate became the subject of great speculation and inspired a whole host of ghoststories and a couple of novels before Patrick White’s Voss. The Yuwungggayai rock paintingwhich depicts fully clothed European with animal head holding a gun like a spear is believed tohave been inspired by Leichhardt’s party. George Chaloupka’s 50,000 year history of AboriginalRock Art of Arnhem Land dates two interesting developments concurrent with Leichhardt’s

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appearance in the top end; the first images of Europeans and the beginning of what he calls theSorcery Paintings. The Sorcery Paintings developed in direct relation to the need for treatmentsfor a wide range of fatal diseases; influenza, leprosy, syphilis and men with guns. These abstractedglyphs of convulsing bodies are often shot through with spears, magical plants pressed intovarious orifices. The Sorcery Paintings are markedly different from other cave paintings, in thatthey are usually saturated in the resins known to be used for theurgical purposes. The conflict ofcultures and interests between the Aboriginal people and the colonisers had begun. Daisy Batesdocuments the demise of the entire Kallaia tribe during the laying of the transcontinental railwayacross the Nullarbor. First seduced off their magic water hole at Ooldea, these Emu people werethen policed out as their sacred water source was pumped to its dry clay pan.

The colonising spirit, with its historically-informed instinct for war and its romanticisednotions of enlightenment; in effect a triumph of the will, was pitched against a primordialAboriginal culture, which had little history of organized warfare, with disastrous consequencesfor Aboriginal people. Until the advent of Colonial culture, Aboriginal people were noted as ahealthy race, which had prospered under rule of their own sacred law.

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YuwunggayaiRock Painting: Circa 1846Believed to have beeninpired by the presence ofLudwig Leichhardt’s Party

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The Myth of Voss___________________________________________________________________________________

Patrick White had described the genesis of Voss in the disillusionments that came oftraipsing around the Egyptian deserts during the Second World War. He saw Voss as embodyinga critique of those colonising instincts, which knew no boundaries; what had at first seemed abrilliant, intellectual, highly desirable existence but eventually became distressingly pointless andparasitic. Voss was first published in 1957, White was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize inLiterature and to this day he remains the only Australian to have been awarded the prize.Technically, White’s Voss is not a myth, but a novel. A myth, begins as a traditional story with anuncanny resonance and develops as a consequence of the basic tale being retold. In 1988 TheAustralian Opera performed Richard Meale’s Voss with a libretto by David Malouf. David Taceypublished his Jungian analysis of White’s novel in the seminal essay The Demonic Interior in Edgeof the Sacred (Melbourne, 1995). Roslynn Haynes published her critical analysis of The AustralianDesert in Literature, Art and Film entitled Seeking the Centre, with a central chapter, TransformingMyths, devoted to the myth of Voss (Sydney, 1998). What we recognise here is the hermeneuticreprocessing that signals a developing mythology.

Like a luminous dream which bubbles up from the subconscious, the myth contains asupreme truth more profound than reality, a truth capable of maintaining its veracity across

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Sidney NolanDrawing - 1959Book cover - Voss, 1962Reproduced with the kind permmission ofthe Penguin Group, Australia.

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time. Mircea Elaide’s essay Toward a Definition of Myth (Chicago 1993) suggests the mythinvolves the supernatural embodiment of natural phenomena and popular ideas, but unlikefiction, fairytale or fable, the myth is an allegory which contains sacred knowledge about theorigins of our condition which concerns the listener directly. Its knowledge is not merely semanticbut also mantic; that is divined through ritual performance. To re-enact a myth, is to rememberthe hero’s sacrifice and in doing so gain magical power over the source of the subject of themyth. Through mantic re-enactment its ontology is entrusted back into the collective unconscious.When boiled down to bare bones, the myth of Voss is fundamentally different to other explorertales. Voss is a myth of sacrifice, in which the colonizing ego is offered up to the law of theunconscious, embodied in the indigenous notions of Dreamtime.

I will cross this country from one side to the other, I know it with my heart, it is mineby right of vision, declares Johan Ulrich Voss in the opening scene of David Malouf’s libretto.What transpires is a slow strangulation of the explorer’s hubris, as the law of the land graduallygrinds the entire expedition to dust. Realizing they are beyond the point-of-no-return, his partymutiny when they understand Voss has no intention of turning back but rather intends a sacrifice.To quote from White’s novel:

…in the presence of the whole congregation the old black fellow, a guardian or familiar,placed a whole witchetty grub into the white man’s mouth, the solemnity of the act

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was immense… the white man… mumbled the white grub around his tongue … beforeattempting to swallow it, at once struggling with the little white wafers of his boyhoodwhich absorbed the unworthiness in his hot mouth and would not go down…

For his transgressions against the law, Voss is subjected to the traditional punishment;the ritual spearing of the legs. The primacy of will endemic to the European enlightenmentamounts to an irredeemable crime against the constitution of the unconscious. The elderseventually pass the responsibility of Voss’ beheading to his Aboriginal guide, Jackie.

‘Tell your people…blackfellow white man friend together’. ‘Friend?’ asked Jackie …his throat full of knots, ‘Blackfella dead by white man’. The blood of Voss soaks intothe dust. ‘White maggots’, called out one blackfellow who was a poet, every bodylaughed. …. They then began singing in soft reverential tones, for it was still the seasonof the Rainbow Serpent, … ‘White maggots drying up … White maggots drying up’.

Voss, the opera, focuses on the traditional subject of opera: love, both romantic andspiritual. In spite of them only meeting three times, the relationship between Johan Ulrich Vossand Laura Trevelyan is central to the novel and also to the operatic account of its myth. Laura,like Voss, is another prickly intellectual outsider within the materialism of the colonial communityin which she has found herself. Voss’s anti-heroic struggle in face of the relentless and merciless

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landscape is echoed in Laura’s daily coping with the minutiae of domestic detail. As the narrativedevelops Voss and Laura counterpoint gender responses to this mythic journey into the centre oftheir own being. Although the opera and the novel share the theme of annihilation of the will- Meale’s opera foregrounds the triumph of transcendental love, as the ego is broken, giving riseto a mystic union, ... eventually exhausted by celestial visions of cascading yellow stars sheunderstood ...

Tacey’s Jungian analysis of White’s novel is a little more circumspect. Ultimately, he seesWhite’s anti-hero as being under a demonic illusion, which betrays a national blindness andcatches Voss in a self-destructive act of ritual suicide as a consequence of his inability to embracethe healing principle of feminine spirituality. The myth of Voss, argues Tacey, is in accord withthe darker side of the Australian psyche, that is the nihilistic impulse to abandon the inauthenticcolonizing will and become one with the healing properties of the landscape and the eternalfeminine. That is, an impulse traditionally at play within the bonds of the mateship and is arepressive instinct, which transforms the redemptive power of the feminine into the all-devouringdemonic anima, who delights in enticing men to their ruin. In this context Laura becomes whatJung refers to as the black lady. A siren whose only interest is to seduce Voss away from life withthe promise of a heroic unity in death, leading him toward the grim reality of becoming a humansacrifice to the bloodthirsty earth.

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In post-colonial terms, Roslynn Haynes reminds us that Voss plays out all the Europeanattitudes to the land: The presumption of superiority and the implicit right to conquest anddomination, whether scientific, geographic or outright ownership. Haynes’ metaphor is, theconquest of the virgin. She writes: he entered in advance, that vast expectant country, whetherstone deserts, veiled mountains or voluptuous, fleshy forests, they were his. But first his soulmust experience, as if by some spiritual ‘droit de seigneur’, the excruciating passage into itsinterior. For Haynes, Voss ultimately subverts colonial notions of mapping and possession ofterritories becoming - a precursor to the revisionist and particularly feminist geographies whichcontest the authority of the surveyor’s grid as the arbiter of title. Voss, she notes, respects theauthority of his two black guides… very particular sound their bare feet made upon the earthwhich, to the German’s ears at once, established their ownership.

Whichever way you read it the myth of Voss maintains a resonance, which centres ona critique of the colonizing instinct. In this regard Voss stands as a marker of our own culpability,pinpointing what David Tacey calls the defining trope of the Australian psyche - colonial guilt. Inritually replaying the presumptions of subjugation and marking out our patterns of territorialabuse Voss opens up the unmarked territories of our own unconscious along with the sacredbusiness of indigenous authority. What is contained in the myth of Voss is ultimately whitefellaSorry Business with Voss becoming an antipodean scapegoat, sent out into the desert as asacrificial offering, marked for death by landscape.

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Mytho-poesis and the Antipodean School_____________________________________________________________________________________

The Antipodeans and The Angry Penguins shared a number of members and a few basicprinciples. The Antipodean Manifesto, written in 1959 by Bernard Smith, signed by CharlesBlackman, Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Bob Dickerson, John Perceval and Clifton Pugh,laid out their case quite clearly; … we are not, of course, seeking to create a national style … wedo seek to draw inspiration from our own lives and the lives of those around us … to the ancientsthe antipodes was a kind of nether world, to the people of the Middle Ages its forms of life weremonsterous … for us, Europeans by heritage, but not by birth, much of this strangeness stilllingers. We live in a young society still making its myths … the emergence of myth is a continuoussocial activity. In the growth and transformation of its myths a society achieves its own sense ofidentity. The ways in which a society images its feelings and attitudes in myth provides us with oneof our deepest sources of art.

At stake was both image and idea in art. C.I.A backed and buttressed by McCarthy’scommunist witch hunts, Clement Greenberg’s post-war American push toward InternationalAbstraction had provincialised content in art, both at home and abroad. Today ...we believe theexistence of painting as an independent art is in danger ... read The Antipodean Manifesto in

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defence of image in painting, ...painting is more than just paint ... Art is, for the artist ... speech …destroy the living power of the image and you have humbled and humiliated the artist, made ofhim a blind and powerless Samson fit only to grind corn for the Philistines. The concern was thatpurist aesthetics had reduced painting to, decorative silence, which leads... after an Indian summerof decorative luxury, to the death of art.

Although art might not be dead, it is true that painting has become an endangeredpractice. The reductive processes of the Formalesque eventually stripped the art of painting ofimage and the painter of tongue, pushing the practice of painting toward inarticulate aestheticconcerns. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben makes his position on this matter clear in hisessay; The Original Structure of the Work of Art.(Stanford,1999) When the work of art becomesfor aesthetic enjoyment only its formal aspects are appreciated but the essence of art remainsuntouched and we are left in a self-annihilating desert of terra-aesthetcia, unable to cut throughtime. Today art has entered the era of Globalism where aesthetics have now been displaced byethics and the archaic technology of painting has been replaced by mass mediated technologies.We are now living in the age of trans-global biopolitics, announces Boris Groys in his catalogueessay for Documenta 11, where the emphasis shifts from artwork to art as documentation. However,what is overlooked in the incumbent death of painting is more than its aesthetic limitations butalso its power to evoke a truth capable of maintaining its veritas across the transience of time.More than mere aesthetics, the art of painting has a long history of ethical concern repressed by

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the reductive aesthetics of the High-Formalesque. A socio-political history which stemms from theFlamenco School of late Goya to early Picasso, where the haptic sensuality of image-based paintingtakes up the politics of humanist concerns. These were the painterly precursors to the GermanExpressionists whose work had impacted on The Antipodean School through the Russian andJewish refugees Danila Vassilief and Josl Bergner. This lineage whose compassionate concernsstand outside of any notions of nationalism, remain focused on the mythos of the human conditionfrom both personal and political perspectives, essentially a timeless practice.

Looking at the epistemology of Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan, whose work marks theco-ordinate points of this project, their interpretations of the landscape and its inhabitants, wereprefigured by field trips into the terrain. The mytho-poetic transfiguration was then done back inthe studio, often on the other side of the globe. For the Antipodean painters the virtuosicperformance of painting becomes, at best, dependant on the gift of poesis.

As a post-conceptual Australian painter who had been reworking Europeanmythologies for most of the 90s, my objective became to develop a series of paintings whichcontributed to the Antipodean myth of Voss. Extending the lineage of the Antipodean Schoolbeyond its period placement in a bid to locate its subject of our colonial guilt outside the aestheticpreoccupations of the self consciously contemporary into the timeless zone of the dreamtime hadbecome my busy work.

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Arthur BoydOil on Canvas - 1972Figure Chained and Bent TreeReproduced with the kind permission ofBundanon.

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Notes -

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