The big book of Australian history

Portrait of Nellie Melba.

This artwork in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, is a memorial to all Indigenous people who died between 1788 and 1988.

Miranda Coney, The Australian Ballet, and Albert David, Bangarra Dance Theatre.

Entertaining abroad

At the end of World War II, Australia’s population was about 7.4 million. At that time, a lot of Australian entertainers made a living playing in theatres around the country. By 1960, the population had grown to around 10.4 million, but the audience for entertainers in theatres had dropped, mainly because of television.

A single act that would normally keep an artist in work for months travelling around Australia could now lose its impact overnight with just one performance on television, which obviously reached a much wider audience. This meant that artists had to either keep coming up with new acts or find new audiences.

Succeeding overseas

Dame Edna Everage in her ‘Cockatoo Dress’ in 1997.

In the 1950s, many people followed the sea-lanes and air routes that led to Britain and Europe. They were the natural places for up-and-coming artists to go, though very few of them could afford air travel then. Some went to make their names in Britain, while others just wanted to experience the opportunities that they could not find at home.

In the postwar period, Australians abroad usually stayed in one of two or three areas that were frequented by other Australians. One of these was Earls Court in London, which was then commonly known as ‘Kangaroo Valley’. There, they could find other Australians who thought and spoke as they did, and shared their sense of humour.

One of the most successful members of the Australian contingent in London at that time was actor and comedian Barry Humphries.

Peter Allen performing at the opening of the Sydney Entertainment Centre, 1983.

Humphries was successful in both Australia and Britain, and later in the USA. His main character was suburban Australian housewife ‘Edna Everage’, who Humphries developed into international ‘megastar’ Dame Edna Everage. While living and performing in Britain, Barry Humphries emphasised and exploited his ‘Australian-ness’ in his act.

Humphries also created the very over-the-top Australian character ‘Bazza’ McKenzie. An uncouth larrikin, McKenzie first appeared in 1964 in a comic strip in the British satirical current-affairs magazine Private Eye. The first McKenzie film, made in 1972, was based on a book of the comic strips that was banned in Australia. However, Prime Minister John Gorton supported the making of the film, and Prime Minister Gough Whitlam appeared in the 1974 sequel, in which he made Barry’s aunt, Mrs Edna Everage of Moonee Ponds, a dame.

Rupert Murdoch at a media conference in 1990.

Germaine Greer at the National Library of Australia in 2005.

Other outrageous characters created by Barry Humphries included Sandy Stone and ‘cultural attaché’ Sir Les Patterson, but Dame Edna was his greatest success. She showed the world that Australians could definitely laugh at themselves.

Other Australian arrivals in Britain in the 1960s who became internationally successful included Germaine Greer and Clive James. Greer, an author, academic and feminist, is best known for her controversial, bestselling book about feminism, The Female Eunuch (1970). Clive James became a popular author, poet, humourist and television presenter.

Rupert Murdoch followed in his father’s footsteps as a media tycoon and became one of the best-known Australians in Britain. Murdoch was dubbed ‘the dirty digger’ by the British media, who found his business tactics less than honourable. Murdoch’s media empire spread to the USA, and in 1985 he became a US citizen so he could own television stations in the USA.

Comic actor Paul Hogan arrived later on the international scene. He was known in Australia for playing larrikin Aussie characters, and he made his name overseas playing Australian outback ‘hero’ Mick Dundee in the highly successful film Crocodile Dundee in 1986.

Another Australian ‘export’ was singer and dancer Peter Allen, who also had a successful career in the USA in the 1980s. He composed and sang a number of songs about Australia, including I Still Call Australia Home, which continues to resonate with Australian expatriates.

Many of Australia’s international stars find a home on the world stage but continue to call Australia ‘home’.

Winning the Nobel Prize

Fourteen people with Australian connections have won the international Nobel Prize in their field of endeavour. Only one has been in the area of literature.

Author Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 for producing ‘an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature’—in other words, for bringing Australia to the world through books like Voss and The Tree of Man.

While White came from an Australian ‘squattocracy’ background—his family had settled in the New England region of New South Wales in the 1850s—many other Australian Nobel Laureates have migrant or international backgrounds.

Science

William Lawrence Bragg shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics with his father, William Henry Bragg. Both father and son were knighted for their efforts, but to avoid confusion the father was called Sir William and the son Sir Lawrence. Lawrence Bragg was the grandson of Sir Charles Todd, South Australian Postmaster-General and Government Astronomer, who oversaw the building of the Overland Telegraph. Bragg senior was professor of physics at Adelaide University until the family returned to Britain in 1909. Together, they invented a technique called ‘X-ray diffraction’.

Aleksandr Prokhorov shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on lasers and masers. Born at Atherton in Queensland in 1916, his parents were Russian revolutionaries who had fled to Australia to escape persecution by the Tsarist government. In 1923, when the turmoil of the Russian Revolution was over, the family returned to Russia and Prokhorov studied physics there.

John Cornforth was educated in the New England area of New South Wales and then in Sydney, before he and his future wife both won scholarships to Oxford University in Britain. He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Vladimir Prelog. Cornforth also did some work on penicillin, the wonder drug that had brought Australian scientist Howard Florey to prominence and won him a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945.

John Harsanyi, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994, lived in Australia for only a short time. His Jewish parents owned a pharmacy in Budapest, but Harsanyi’s interests lay in philosophy and mathematics. However, in 1937, with war looming, he studied pharmacy, as he thought this would be a safer profession in a time of war. When Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, Harsanyi was placed in a forced labour unit, and later sent to a concentration camp in Austria.

Harsanyi escaped, and a Jesuit priest sheltered him in a monastery until the war was over. He then completed a PhD and settled down to teach in Hungary. He realised that, as a non-communist, he had little future there, and so he and his future wife fled, via Austria, to Australia. They arrived in December 1950 and were married three days later. Harsanyi worked in a factory for three years while studying at night for a Master’s degree in economics. After he graduated, they spent just three more years in Australia before moving to the USA for the rest of their lives.

Brian Schmidt was born in Montana in the USA. He grew up there and in Alaska. Schmidt shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other scientists, Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess. They won the award for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. While he was studying at Harvard University in the USA, Schmidt met Jennifer Gordon, an Australian PhD student in economics. They moved to Australia in 1994, and Schmidt began work at the Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra in 1995.

Physiology or Medicine

In 1963, Sir John Eccles shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his complicated work on neurophysiology—the study of how the nervous system works.

The other Australian Nobel Prizes were all won for the category called ‘Physiology or Medicine’, a broad term that leaves the judges room to select the best of the best.

Sir Howard Florey shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with two other scientists. They worked on the challenge of developing a poisonous product, made by a common mould, into a drug that could kill deadly bacterial infections—what is now known as the antibiotic penicillin. Within a year of the award, germs had developed that were able to survive penicillin, mainly because people misused the drug. This made the work of future Nobel Prize winner John Cornforth all the more important.

Sir Howard Florey helped a medical revolution with his work on the antibiotic, penicillin.

Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet shared the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with a Briton, Sir Peter Medawar. Burnet spent most of his life in Melbourne, where he worked as an immunologist and virologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, which is the oldest medical research institute in Australia. Burnet also spent two years—1926 and 1932—working in London.

In 1963, Sir John Eccles shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his complicated work on neurophysiology—the study of how the nervous system works. The other winners were Andrew Huxley and Alan Lloyd Hodgkin. Eccles was educated in Warrnambool and Melbourne. He spent 12 years in Britain, before returning to Australia.

Sir John Eccles, Nobel Laureate, 1963.

Peter Doherty shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Rolf Zinkernagel. Trained as a veterinarian, Doherty studied the way in which ‘killer T cells’ identify infected cells in the body and destroy them. He grew up in Queensland and got his first degree there, then completed a PhD in Edinburgh in Scotland. He then returned to Australia, where he carried out his prize-winning work at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University.

Barry Marshall and Robin Warren shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for proving that stomach ulcers were not caused by stress or high acid levels in the stomach, but by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori. Warren was born and trained in Adelaide, and he then moved to Perth. Marshall was born in Kalgoorlie and educated in Perth, where he met Warren.

Marshall and Warren began to suspect that H. pylori caused ulcers, but their tests on piglets failed to prove it. Then, in 1984, when Marshall was 33 and in good health, he underwent careful medical checks before swallowing a culture of H. pylori. A few days later, an endoscopy showed massive inflammation in his gut, along with an infection of H. pylori. A few days after that, he cured the infection and stopped the inflammation by taking antibiotics. He had proved his theory in a very spectacular and convincing way!

Elizabeth Blackburn shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for work on telomeres, an important part of the chromosomes that carry our genes. Blackburn grew up in Tasmania and gained an honours degree at Melbourne University, but she has spent her working life in Britain and the USA.

Scientific research involves cooperation, and so it is not surprising that it is often an international endeavour. It is impressive that so many scientists with connections to Australia have been honoured in this way.

Sharing Australia’s stories

Some books about Australia were written before white settlement in 1788. William Dampier and James Cook both wrote bestsellers, describing their journeys to the Great South Land. Later, Governor Arthur Phillip, marine officer Watkin Tench and Lieutenant-Governor David Collins wrote about their experiences in the new colony.

George Barrington, an Irish pickpocket, was sometimes claimed as Australia’s first creative writer, but his ‘writings’—including the book published under his name, A Voyage to Botany Bay (1795)—were probably actually compiled by journalists. People believed that he had also created the memorable lines that opened the first theatre performance in Australia in 1796:

True patriots all, for be it understood:

We left our country for our country’s good.

But, now, these lines are thought to be the work of English playwright Henry Carter.

Establishing an Australian voice

During the colonial period, several poets’ work emerged. Judge Barron Field, for example, created some of the first verse compositions, focusing on the country’s distinctive fauna and flora, to appear in Australia in book form, in 1819. Francis MacNamara, known as ‘Frank the Poet’, wrote ballads about his experiences as a convict in Australia. The first Australian-born poet was explorer, landowner and statesman William Charles Wentworth. He is mainly remembered for exploring the Blue Mountains with Gregory Blaxland and William Lawson in 1813, but his poem, Australasia, won a poetry prize in Britain in 1823.

From the 1830s, Charles Harpur published poems on the beauty and solitude of the Hawkesbury country, where he had been born, and on political liberty. Later, from the late 1850s, Henry Kendall wrote lyrical verse describing various kinds of landscapes.

Australian literature developed further in the late nineteenth century. In 1874, journalist Marcus Clarke’s powerful and compassionate novel about convict life, For the Term of His Natural Life, was published. Robbery under Arms, a bushranging story set in the goldfields, written by Rolf Boldrewood (whose real name was Thomas Alexander Browne), was released as a serial in The Sydney Mail in the early 1880s, and then as a book in 1888.

The urban murder mystery, Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), by Fergus Hume, provided a vivid description of life in the fast-growing Melbourne of the 1880s. When it was first published, it outsold English author Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first book to feature his famous detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Born and bred in the bush, Henry Lawson wrote short stories and poems about bush life which helped to provide the emerging nation with a distinctly Australian voice. He belonged to the ‘Bulletin school’ of writers and artists whose work was also strongly nationalistic. Lawson’s first collection of stories, While the Billy Boils, was published in book form in 1896.

Other authors whose work was published in the Bulletin magazine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included poet Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson and novelist Miles Franklin. Banjo Paterson wrote what have become iconic poems about life in the Australian bush, including Clancy of the Overflow (1889), The Man from Snowy River (1890) and Waltzing Matilda (1895). Miles Franklin’s best known novel, My Brilliant Career (1901), was based on her childhood in the Brindabella Ranges near Canberra.

Henry Lawson in 1896, ready to go ‘on the wallaby’ (wandering the bush).

‘Banjo’ Paterson wrote Waltzing Matilda for a tune, written down here by Christina Macpherson, about 1895.

Australian fiction took another direction in the novels of Ethel Florence Richardson who, like a number of women authors, wrote under a man’s name—Henry Handel Richardson. Despite their Australian settings, her work emphasised self-discovery and memory of personal loss. Her coming-of-age novel, The Getting of Wisdom, published in 1910, was greatly admired, as was the tragic three-part novel, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, which she wrote while living in England.

Christina Stead, considered to be one of Australia’s finest writers, wrote 15 novels in her career spanning 50 years, many years of which she lived outside Australia. Her best known work, The Man Who Loved Children (1940), was largely based on her experiences as a child and young woman growing up in Sydney.

Although only one Australian author, Patrick White, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is awarded for a body of work rather than a specific novel, other Australian authors have won an impressive array of national and international awards.

One of Australia’s finest writers is David Malouf, who has won 15 Australian and international awards since 1974. He has written novels, short stories, poetry, plays and a memoir. Malouf first made an impact with Johnno (1975). Now a classic, this novel explores the issue of male identity during the 1940s and 1950s in Brisbane. More recently, Ransom (2009)—Malouf’s masterly retelling of part of Homer’s Iliad—focuses on the themes of revenge, change, redemption and fate.

Peter Carey has won the Man Booker Prize, the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Author of 12 novels, many short stories, two screenplays and books for children, Carey has spent much of his literary life overseas, as did Randolph Stow, who was the author of eight novels for adults, as well as the entertaining children’s book Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy (1967).

Award-winning Western Australian author Tim Winton has also written across a range of genres from novels such as Cloudstreet (1991) and The Riders (1994), the Lockie Leonard books for children to his collection of short stories The Turning (2004). A strong advocate for and an active member of the Australian environmental movement, his contribution is acknowledged in Wilderness Society and Environment Awards.

Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark, centred on the holocaust in Germany during World War II, won the Booker Prize in 1982. Later adapted by director Steven Spielberg into the film, Schindler’s List, it received seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, in 1993. Many of his other award-winning novels, including The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), are based on Australian historical events. Kate Grenville is another writer who interprets Australia’s colonial past in her fiction, including the much acclaimed The Secret River (2005).

Author Thomas Keneally signing books at the National Library of Australia, 22 October 2006.

New Zealander Ruth Park arrived in Sydney in 1942, aged 25. Like other Australian writers, she also used historical backgrounds in her fiction. Her adult novel, The Harp in the South (1948), provides a harsh but realistic account of life in the poorer suburbs of Sydney during the Great Depression, while her children’s fantasy novel, Playing Beatie Bow (1980), explores the past in The Rocks area of colonial Sydney.

Writing for children

Children’s authors, like Park, often shape how younger readers understand Australia and, in the end, how adult Australians understand their land.

Ethel Turner arrived in Australia from England in 1879, aged nine. Her classic children’s book, Seven Little Australians, set in the rural outskirts of Sydney in the 1880s, was an immediate success, probably because she was writing about what she knew.

The cover of Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding, 1918.

Dorothy Wall’s human-like koala characters in her book, Blinky Bill, 1933.

Illustrator May Gibbs, creator of the ‘gumnut babies’, was also born in England but, when she moved to Australia as a young child, she fell in love with the animals and flowers of the Australian bush. Her gumnut babies first appeared in an illustrated heading for a serialised version of an Ethel Turner story in The Sydney Mail in 1913. In 1918, they became the central characters in the much-loved classic, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, which Gibbs both wrote and illustrated.

Also in 1918, established novelist and controversial artist Norman Lindsay published another Australian children’s book which has become a classic—The Magic Pudding. In part, Lindsay wrote the book to win a debate with his friend Bertram Stevens at the Bulletin about whether children preferred reading books about fairies or food. Lindsay’s food-based book has now been in print for over 90 years. He was obviously right!

While Lindsay wanted to make children happy, author-illustrator Dorothy Wall wanted to make them more caring. She had come to Australia from New Zealand in 1914 at the age of 20, and in 1933 she wrote the first of her three Blinky Bill books about a cheeky little koala. Her aim was to make children fall in love with the cuddly creatures so that they would fight against the shooting of koalas for their fur.

Also in 1918, established novelist and controversial artist Norman Lindsay published another Australian children’s book which has become a classic—The Magic Pudding.

Colin Thiele, initially a teacher before concentrating on writing fiction for children, also reveals a concern for protecting the environment in his many books, especially in his moving novel, Storm Boy (1963), which tells the story of a pelican called Mr Percival and is set on the South Australian Coorong. Patricia Wrightson, who began writing in the 1950s, often featured Aboriginal mythology in her novels, including the very popular The Nargun and the Stars (1973). Wrightson also championed the importance of the natural environment in her books. She was recognised internationally in 1986 when she won the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing. That same year, Australian illustrator Robert Ingpen, who had illustrated Thiele’s Storm Boy, won the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration.

Mem Fox is another internationally recognised Australian children’s author. Born in Melbourne, Fox grew up in what is now Zimbabwe in Africa. Like The Magic Pudding, her picture book Possum Magic (1983), illustrated by Julie Vivas, celebrates and showcases food and Australian animals and remains the best known picture book in Australia.

Sonya Hartnett has also gained international recognition for her writing. Hartnett, who writes for both children and young adults, won the prestigious and lucrative Astrid Lingren Memorial Award in 2008. Author-illustrator Shaun Tan won the same award in 2011, as well as winning an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2010 for The Lost Thing, based on his picture book of the same name. Other Australian author-illustrators with significant international profiles include Graeme Base and Bob Graham.

Writing in verse

Since colonial times, Australia has also produced many successful poets, including Dorothea Mackellar and Dame Mary Gilmore who, like Miles Franklin, Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson and Norman Lindsay, were part of the ‘Bulletin school’.

Other later poets who have told the Australian story through their verse include Adam Lindsay Gordon, Kenneth Slessor, A.D. Hope, Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson, David Campbell, Les Murray and Mark O’Connor.

Making music

Australia has produced a number of world-class singers, as well as notable musical performers and composers.

Singing superstars

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, operatic soprano Dame Nellie Melba was considered a superstar. She was born Helen ‘Nellie’ Porter Mitchell in Melbourne in 1861, and she chose the stage name of ‘Melba’ after her hometown.

Melba became an international star. Her name is linked to four Australian recipes— the dessert Peach Melba, sweet Melba sauce, the chicken and mushroom dish Melba Garniture, and Melba toast. Her name also lives on in the Australian saying ‘to do a Melba’. This refers to the many ‘final’ farewell performances she gave. Of course, this international stage and recording star obviously deserved to be farewelled in more than just one town or country!

Melba’s series of farewell concerts began at the impressive Covent Garden theatre in London in June 1926, after she had announced her Australian farewell to grand opera in October 1924. Her very last farewells to the opera stage took place in Sydney on 7 August and in Melbourne on 27 September 1928. Then, in Geelong in November 1928, she gave her very last Australian concert.

‘Madame Melba’: Dame Nellie Melba as she appeared on a coloured, glittered postcard.

Melba understood the risk of being displaced by a better singer, and over her long career she ‘saw off’ more than one competitor. A wealthy woman, she found herself isolated in Australia when the Great War broke out in 1914, so she devoted herself to fundraising to support the war effort. She undertook three fundraising tours of North America, but she always returned to Australia.

Melba died in 1931 of complications from facelift surgery, having inspired a generation of Australian singers.

Australian composer Percy Grainger said of Melba, ‘Her voice always made me mindsee Australia’s landscapes’. Melba died in 1931 of complications from facelift surgery, having inspired a generation of Australian singers.

Dame Joan Sutherland was also a world-famous Australian operatic soprano, whose career was at its height from the 1950s to the 1980s. The quality of Sutherland’s voice and her performances earned her the name ‘La Stupenda’. She attracted appreciative audiences wherever she performed, and the Opera Theatre, in the Sydney Opera House, was renamed the Joan Sutherland Theatre in 2012.

Joan Sutherland singing the title role in Handel’s Alcina, which she performed all over the world.

Like Melba, singer June Bronhill took her name from her hometown. Born June Gough in Broken Hill in 1929, she found that some people had trouble pronouncing her surname, which is not a good thing for a performer. She abbreviated her hometown’s name to give herself the stage name ‘Bronhill’ in 1952. This also allowed her to thank the town which had helped raise money to send her overseas to pursue her love of singing.

As Bronhill herself said, she cheekily pushed her way into roles in opera, while overseas. She performed mainly in light operas, operettas and musicals, and made the lead role in The Merry Widow her own.

Bronhill had a larrikin sense of humour that often endeared her to her audiences during the 1970s. On one occasion, the tiny singer tripped on the hem of her dress. A stagehand asked, ‘Is the dress too long?’ Bronhill replied, ‘No, my legs are too short!’ While Bronhill was not made a dame, like Joan Sutherland, she was much loved.

Australia’s other leading women singers include pop stars Helen Reddy and Olivia Newton-John, but Australia’s most successful pop princess is Kylie Minogue. Minogue started her career as an actor on the television series, Neighbours, during the 1980s. The soap opera was very popular in Britain and in other countries, as well as in Australia. From there, Minogue launched her highly successful international singing career.

Kylie Minogue wows the troops in the Tour of Duty Concert at Dili Stadium, East Timor, 1999.

Popular stars

Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, of the pop group, the Bee Gees, were born in Britain but grew up and got their start in the music industry in Australia before becoming famous in Britain.

Australian Nigel Westlake has composed music for well-known films such as Babe and Miss Potter, the story of author-illustrator Beatrix Potter.

Gurrumul, an Aboriginal singer from North East Arnhem Land, has become an international star through his songs about his culture.

Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, at Kings Cross, Sydney, about 1970.

‘Classical’ Australians

Like our scientists, many Australian classical musicians have international connections. Composer and pianist Percy Grainger grew up in Australia but, from 1885, at the age of 13, he lived in Germany, England and the USA, with short visits back home. Many of his possessions and memorabilia are preserved in the Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne, in the city where he was born.

Composer Elena Kats-Chernin migrated from Uzbekistan to Australia in 1975, when she was 18, while the composer of Australia’s first opera, Isaac Nathan, was born in England and was 51 years old when he arrived in Sydney in 1841. It is said that Nathan was the grandson of King Stanislaus II of Poland, and that he was a secret agent for both George IV and William IV of England. Nathan came to Sydney after the British Prime Minister refused to pay the £2,000 that the government owed him.

Australia has produced many other internationally acclaimed composers of classical music, including Ross Edwards, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Miriam Hyde, Richard Meale and Peter Sculthorpe.

Australian conductor Simone Young was the first woman to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as the first woman to conduct all of Richard Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle, which involves four operas played over four consecutive nights, taking approximately 15 hours.

Like science, the world of music is international and includes many outstanding Australian performers.

Picturing Australia

Colonial artists

In colonial times, Europeans were fascinated by Australia, with its strange creatures and alien landscape. Because it was difficult to transport animals and plants on the long sea voyage from Australia to Britain, and photography was not yet fully developed, many people relied on paintings and sketches to show them what the animals and plants of Australia looked like, as well as what life was like in the new colony.

Eugene van Guérard’s picture of tree ferns in the Dandenong Ranges, Victoria, 1867.

For this reason, artists were very much in demand from the earliest days of settlement, and the work of colonial artists often provides important historical records. Significant and interesting artists from this time include John Glover and Eugene von Guérard, both of whom captured the Australian landscape, and in particular its plants and trees. In fact, von Guérard had such an eye for detail in his paintings that botanists have been able to use them to study plant life in colonial Australia.

Capturing the Australian landscape

The Heidelberg School was the first significant art movement in Australia. It was represented by a range of artists from the late nineteenth century who followed the Impressionist practice of painting landscapes, bushscapes and streetscapes while outdoors, rather than in a studio. It included artists such as Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Charles Conder and Frederick McCubbin, whose work captures both the life and spirit of that time.

Later artists also concentrated on the distinctive Australian landscape. Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira painted watercolours of the unique Central Australian landscape, and his work was very popular during his lifetime. German-born Hans Heysen also made a name for himself painting the Australian landscape, especially his portrayals of the Australian gum tree.

Fred Williams, who is acknowledged as one of the most important Australian artists of the twentieth century, emphasised the abstract qualities, luminous colours and vastness of the Australian landscape.

Representational art is not the only way to capture a landscape. Fred Williams, who is acknowledged as one of the most important Australian artists of the twentieth century, emphasised the abstract qualities, luminous colours and vastness of the Australian landscape.

As well as depicting the landscape, Sidney Nolan popularised one of Australia’s most iconic stories in a series of narrative paintings depicting the activities of bushranger Ned Kelly and his gang.

Twentieth-century artist Arthur Boyd also had a unique way of portraying both the Australian landscape and Australian stories. His homage to the colours and shapes of the Australian bush feature in the tapestry, based on his painting of the bush in the Shoalhaven region of New South Wales, that is hanging in the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra.

Painting people and places

Other Australian artists present urban rather than rural or bush landscapes. One of these artists is Jeffrey Smart, whose paintings feature precise, bold, geometric images of apartment blocks, roads and construction sites. The images of artists like Sali Herman, Russell Drysdale and William Dobell also capture Australian streetscapes, people and places.

A self-portrait of Grace Cossington Smith, painted about 1951.

Other significant male artists include Conrad Martens, William Piguenit, Louis Buvelot, John Olsen and Brett Whiteley. Important women artists include Grace Cossington Smith, Margaret Preston and Margaret Olley.

Aboriginal art

Aboriginal artists often have a unique way of seeing and depicting the Australian landscape and their place in it. The important Aboriginal art centre of Papunya Tula is based at the Aboriginal settlement of Papunya in the Western Desert area of the Northern Territory, about 240 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs.

In the early 1970s, art teacher Geoffrey Bardon supplied the people of Papunya with art materials and encouraged them to express themselves in paint. The distinctive designs, earthy colours and strong cultural elements in their work have led to world-wide recognition, especially for artists such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, expert wood carver and acclaimed ‘dot artist’, 1989.

Another Aboriginal artist who achieved similar international recognition was Anmatyerre elder Emily Kame Kngwarreye, from Utopia in the Northern Territory, who only started painting in her seventies.

One of the most important Indigenous art works is The Aboriginal Memorial at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. The memorial is an installation of 200 hollow log coffins from Central Arnhem Land which commemorates all the Indigenous people who have lost their lives defending their land since white settlement of Australia in 1788. The decorated logs, which are designed to be walked among, feature the work of 43 artists from a number of clans and reflect their traditional imagery. It is a moving tribute to their people.

The way that people represent their world through art often says a lot about who they are and where they live.

Australian dance

Aboriginal people already had a strong culture of dance when white settlers arrived on their shores. It was an integral part of their corroborees. In her book, Dancing with Strangers, historian Inga Clendinnen explains that dance was the first way in which Aboriginal and white people communicated with each other. They danced together on 29 January 1788, even though, the day before, the Aboriginal people had been more hesitant.

One of the most popular performers during the gold rush period in the 1850s was Irish dancer and actress Lola Montez. Montez had already lived a scandalous life when she came to Australia in 1855.

According to Lieutenant William Bradley:

when the Boats put off, the Men began dancing & laughing & when we were far enough off to bring the place the Women were at in sight, they held their arms extended over their heads, got on their legs & danced.

While the Aboriginal people held their corroborees, the settlers also liked to dance. The main existing records of dance from the colonial period are found in paintings and sketches. The settlers often composed their own dance music. For example, when Ludwig Leichhardt reached Sydney in 1842 in the Sir Edward Paget, a composer named Stephen Marsh wrote The Paget Quadrilles to celebrate the ship’s arrival. It was published by Frederick Ellard, who composed and published many other dance tunes.

One of the most popular performers during the gold rush period in the 1850s was Irish dancer and actress Lola Montez. Montez had already lived a scandalous life when she came to Australia in 1855. At one stage, she had been married to two men at once, and she had also been the mistress of a king. Needless to say, she was not welcome in polite society, but the diggers at the goldfields loved her. Apparently, when Montez was dancing, she sometimes failed to wear ‘enough petticoats’. Her most famous act was called the ‘Spider Dance’.

Classical ballet

By the 1830s, ballet performances often featured in Australian theatres. The theatrical company of entrepreneur J.C. Williamson, often referred to as ‘The Firm’, employed ballet dancers from about 1874 onwards. In 1913, Williamson brought Adeline Genée and a full company drawn from the Imperial Russian Ballet to Australia. Their tour was a great success and, as Genée was leaving, a reporter declared that she had awakened a new artistic sense in Australia.

A souvenir program from Anna Pavlova’s appearances in Brisbane, 1929.

This paved the way for Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, who visited Australia in 1926 and 1929. Like Dame Nellie Melba, Pavlova had such an impact that the meringue-based dessert, ‘pavlova’, was named after her—although there are still disputes about whether it originated in Australia or New Zealand!

Pavlova and other Russian dancers inspired many Australians to take up ballet. In 1933, aged 24, theatrical dancer Robert Helpmann left for England, where he became a star of what is today called the Royal Ballet. He went on to become an internationally acclaimed ballet dancer, actor, choreographer and stage director.

In the 1930s, just before World War II began, Colonel Wassily de Basil’s Ballet Russes companies toured Australia three times. Their tours ended in 1940 and, because of the war in Europe, some of the dancers stayed in Australia. One of them was Czech-born Edouard Borovansky, who started his own ballet company in Melbourne in 1942 and helped to keep alive an interest in ballet in Australia until the 1960s—including commissioning works by Australian choreographers.

In 1962, English ballerina Peggy van Praagh became artistic director of a new national company, the Australian Ballet. In 1965, Robert Helpmann joined the company as co-artistic director. The new company encouraged Australian choreographers and composers, as well as providing an opportunity for Australian dancers such as Marilyn Jones, Kathleen Gorham and Garth Welch to pursue a career in ballet.

Robert Helpmann in Frederick Ashton’s ballet, The Wanderer, 1941.

Dancers of the Australian Ballet as cut-out dolls in Wild Swans, 2003.

At the age of 19, Australian ballet dancer Danilo Radojevic won a gold medal in Moscow and then joined the American Ballet Theatre in New York as a soloist. He later taught in New York. He returned to Australia in 1997, becoming the associate artistic director of the Australian Ballet Company in 2001.

Contemporary dance

As well as classical ballet, Australia also has a number of world-class contemporary dance companies. These include the Sydney Dance Company, which from 1979 featured the adventurous contemporary choreography of Graeme Murphy and his successors, and Stephen Page’s Bangarra Dance Theatre, an Indigenous performing arts company that successfully combines the spirituality of Aboriginal culture with modern forms of storytelling through dance.

Albert David and Miranda Coney in Stephen Page’s Rites, 1997.

Through dance companies like Bangarra, one of the oldest Australian art forms continues to be enjoyed by later generations.

Capturing Australia on film

The early film industry

Although Australia produced the first feature-length film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, in 1906, Australia’s film industry did not flourish. This was basically because Australia’s population was too small and Australia was in the wrong place—it was in the Southern Hemisphere, far away from both Europe and the USA.

By 1914, the Australian film industry had disappeared. State governments had banned popular movies about bushrangers because they made the police look clumsy, and overseas companies controlled the marketing and delivery of films to small, locally owned cinemas. The overseas companies also set up chains of theatres under a variety of names. These companies preferred showing cheap, mass-produced American and English rather than Australian films.

Part of the problem was the quality of Australian films. In 1911, an article in Perth’s Sunday Times called for a ‘Bureau for Burning Awful Bio. Films’—locally made ‘live motion’ pictures. The writer complained of ‘bush scenes’ shot in parks with English trees and ‘prison warders’ whose uniforms made them look like tram conductors!

Acting overseas

Peter Finch in The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, 1952.

When local Australian film production died out in the early twentieth century, Australian actors had to head to Hollywood in the USA if they wanted a career in film. One of the first successful Australian Hollywood actors was Errol Flynn, who had starred in the 1933 Australian film, In the Wake of the Bounty. It was the beginning of a series of swashbuckling leading roles, and an equally adventurous and troubled private life.

After serving in the Australian army during World War II, British-born actor Peter Finch headed back to England in 1948, where he started a stage career, before moving into British films. While he never settled in Hollywood, Finch is best remembered for his role in Network, for which he won an Academy Award for portraying crazed television anchorman Howard Beale, who was remembered for encouraging people to lean out of their windows and shout, ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’.

Actor Rod Taylor made his film acting debut in 1953 in King of the Coral Sea. He then appeared in the 1954 film, Long John Silver, before heading off overseas to take the lead in many Hollywood movies. However, at home, a number of Australian actors continued to get stage work and pick up support roles in British and American films shot in Australia. They included Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell, John Meillon, Bill Kerr and Ed Devereaux.

In 1966, They’re a Weird Mob took a new and rather quirky look at Australia’s multicultural society. It told the story of an Italian migrant learning Australian English, and provided good acting roles for Australians Clare Dunne and Chips Rafferty. By then, Australian television was also producing local dramas that provided both Australian actors and behind-the-scenes people—makeup artists, costume makers, editors and cameramen— with vital experience and exposure.

When John Gorton became prime minister in 1968, he introduced government support for the Australian film industry. This led to the ‘Australian New Wave’ of filmmaking when the Whitlam government continued the support in 1972.

One of the key films made at this time was Picnic at Hanging Rock, which was released in 1975. It was directed by Peter Weir and produced by Pat Lovell. This was the beginning of a series of films that showcased Australia and Australian filmmaking, including Mad Max starring Mel Gibson and Crocodile Dundee starring Paul Hogan.

Other successful films which unashamedly featured Australian subjects, characters and settings followed, including Breaker Morant and Gallipoli in the 1980s, and Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, The Castle and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in the 1990s.

Winning Academy Awards

In 1996, his performance as a mentally unstable but brilliant pianist in the movie, Shine, earned Geoffrey Rush an Academy Award for Best Actor, while Heath Ledger’s Hollywood career took off after his appearance in the 1999 movie, Two Hands. Eric Bana had his first film credit in the Australian comedy, The Castle, an endearing tale about a suburban family fighting the powers-that-be.

The poster for Picnic at Hanging Rock, filmed in 1975. This film changed how the world saw Australian cinema.

By 2012, Australians had won 34 Academy Awards in 17 categories.

By 2012, Australians had won 34 Academy Awards in 17 categories. These included Ken Hall and Damien Parer for ‘best documentary’ in 1942 for Kokoda Front Line!, and best actor and best supporting actor awards for Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Peter Finch, Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe and Heath Ledger.

Six Australian cinematographers have won Academy Awards (Oscars), as have six Australian costume designers. Mel Gibson took out an Oscar for best direction, while Kirk Baxter has won two editing Oscars. George Miller, Suzanne Baker, Adam Elliott and children’s author-illustrator Shaun Tan have all won Oscars for animated films.

While the Australian film industry did not flourish in its early years, it has certainly taken off since the 1970s, and it continues to make its mark on the world stage.

The poster for Crocodile Dundee, made in 1986, starring TV comedian Paul Hogan.