Recent Acquisitions of Australian Prints

Since 1981 when a Curator of Australian Prints was appointed to the Department of Australian Art, over three thousand prints, posters and illustrated books have been added to the Collection. This exhibition features some of the prints and draws attention to themes which have engaged Australian artists during the last two centuries.

For the early navigators Australia was a promised land. They saw the plants and animals as exotic and the indigenous people as a noble race surviving from a more innocent time. Sketches of Aborigines drawn by amateurs such as Lieutenant-Governor King were taken to England and made into prints by professional engravers like William Blake. In A family of New South Wales, Blake endowed the Aborigines with Greek and Roman attributes.

The convict artist Charles Rodius working in Sydney in the 1830s continued this tradition. His dignified portraits of Aborigines wearing their blankets in Roman toga style were far from the truth; the reality was far more like that depicted by William Baker in 1840. European settlement had already destroyed much of the local tribal life and the Aborigines lived in the shadows of a convict colony wearing cast-off European clothing.

The landscape was most often seen through rosy glasses, the bush and rivers unspoilt by European civilization. John Skinner Prout presents the Tasmanian landscape as an English park. The artist sits and sketches in a fern valley, his folio leans against an ancient fern, his top hat close by. Eugene von Guérard also depicted a fern glen, but his lithograph is informed by his Romantic German art training.

His valley is a sanctuary imbued with religious awe, the foliage is drawn with botanical accuracy while the lyre birds, male and female, perform their ritual mating dance.

Occasionally an artist such as Jessie Traill would describe the destruction pre-requisite to farming the land. Yet the promised reward of bountiful harvests was not always realized: Christina Asquith Baker shows the earth scorched by the hot sun, the fields barren and the stumps of dead trees a reminder of the original vegetation.

The years preceding Federation saw romantic and often literary tributes to the past. The young Lindsay brothers, Norman and Lionel, were working as journalists during the 1890s when they executed their first woodcuts and etchings which included fanciful images of pirates. Blamire Young's woodcut pays tribute to John Fawkner, one of Melbourne's founders and its first printer, while Rupert Bunny takes a subject from classical mythology for his monotype of 1898.

By the 1920s Bunny was less concerned with mythology. His uninhibited celebration of pattern and colour foreshadowed the decorative prints produced in Sydney in the 1920s and 30s.

Flowers became a fashion. Thea Proctor spent hours in flower shops choosing the right bloom for her Japanese floral displays. Margaret Preston championed the beauty of Australian native flora and Adrian Feint and Eirene Mort produced Art Deco inspired arrangements. All these prints were bright and gay, easy escapes for a society on the brink of the Depression.

In 1935 Oswald Hall portrayed a street singer appealing for money outside the Victoria Markets in Melbourne. Theo Scharf, an Australian working in Munich, sympathetically depicted burglars practising their profession—robbing the rich.

War quickly followed depression. Amie Kingston's still life of a gas mask and bare trees strikes out at the obscenity and barrenness of war. In Dorrit Black's The wool quilt makers the women work together to produce blankets for the soldiers at the front, while later Alan Sumner records the post-war return to the land.

Many Australian artists went abroad at the end of the war. Stacha Halpern worked in France, Margaret Cilento in the United States and Fred Williams in England. Their shared subjects were ordinary people, whether Aborigines, workers or outcasts. This theme was also explored in the prints of artists like Charles Blackman and Harry Rosengrave who worked in Melbourne in the 1950s. Hertha Kluge-Pott, a migrant from Germany, sensitively describes the plight of 'new Australians' displaced from a war-ravaged Europe

The 'good life' of the sixties is captured by Noel Counihan in his satirical drypoint of an overweight beach beauty and his colour linocut of two sharply dressed larrikins (latter-day Jimmy Governors) on a street corner.

In his double portraits Richard Larter ‘takes off’ the slick media images of women. Barbara Hanrahan draws on folk and childrens' art to produce prints of disarming simplicity which express her concern for the inequality of the sexes, while Deborah Walker uses the same devices in depicting the urgency of sexual desire.

The wish for a peaceful world has been a prominent theme in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, but as Tony Coleing points out, war has been with us since the beginning of 'civilization' and little has changed.

The multi-cultural nature of contemporary Australian society is reflected in the classically decorative Shell vase by Vicki Varvaressos and in The distance between smiles by Nick Nedelkopoulos, in which he fuses the Greek images from his 'homeland' with the experience of living in Melbourne. English artist Conrad Atkinson, who visited Australia in 1982 sees our art and politics with clear eyes in his etching Australian handscape.

Johnny Bulun Bulun and England Bangala, tribal Aborigines, have translated the painted images of their traditional cultures into lithographs. Raymond Meeks on the other hand, from a younger generation, lives in Sydney and combines Aboriginal motifs with his art school training.