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00:00A place of golden beaches and bodies, barbecues and bikinis, endless empty land.
00:18Sydney Harbour. But art and culture?
00:22Australia's been my home for over 30 years, and I've often thought about the first settlers
00:33who landed here on this fatal shore over two centuries ago.
00:39To these strangers, this place seemed utterly devoid of civilisation.
00:47Of course they were wrong. But how could these often reluctant arrivals make a new life,
00:55let alone come to feel at home in an empty, disturbing and distant wilderness?
01:03I want to explore how art and artists play their roles in this unfolding drama.
01:10From early settlement till today, I'm taking a trip deep into the art of Australia.
01:19This is one of the great icons of Australian art.
01:23I'll be looking at the work of significant artists, both past and present.
01:29What is it with this lurid, lurid yellow?
01:33Their work reveals much about Australia's identity and how it's evolved.
01:40She's going up and she's going down.
01:42For me, Australian art has always been a big part of the quest to make sense of this vast continent and our place in it.
01:51Its haunting landscapes. Its ever-present dangers.
01:56Its dramatic and controversial history. And, of course, its great beauty.
02:12Australian art reflects the development of a unique and incredibly diverse culture.
02:25It's a great story. This is my journey into how it all happened. The story of the art of Australia.
02:55I left London in the late 70s and spent over 30 years here as the director of the art gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.
03:08When I arrived, I had to embrace the dilemma all migrants face. How to find your way. How to fit in.
03:17And one piece of modern art that expresses this dilemma says it all for me.
03:30It's called Longing Belonging.
03:40In 1997, Hossein Valamanesh, an immigrant artist born in Tehran, left his home in Adelaide and journeyed deep into the Australian bush.
03:53He brought with him a Persian carpet.
04:06He'd been in Australia for 24 years.
04:10But the carpet was still a powerful and comforting connection to his previous life in Iran.
04:23And once Valamanesh had laid it out on the ground, he did something extraordinary.
04:34He set it alight and then photographed it.
04:38What was he up to?
04:45Did he mean to burn it?
04:48Purify it?
04:50Or simply get rid of it?
04:53Was it about remembering or destroying his past?
04:58Or both?
04:59I've always loved this work.
05:08It is so surprising and so unexpected and so incongruous.
05:13But above all, it's about the dilemma of the migrant.
05:16About making a new life in a new country, but without abandoning your past.
05:22Like Valamanesh, the early Europeans were strangers in a strange land too.
05:31And art would help them develop a new distinctive identity.
05:35In essence, to become Australian.
05:39And for me, becoming Australian meant getting to know Australian art.
05:44When I first started here all those years ago, I have to admit that what I knew about the art of Australia could be written on the back of a very small postage stamp.
05:56So I used to come down here every day and look at all the paintings and really get my eye in.
06:02And I shall never forget the first time I saw this little gem of a painting of Sydney Harbour.
06:07It has such wonderful freshness, such clarity, such breeze, such air, such colour, which gives it a wonderful sense of optimism.
06:18And I looked at it and said, well, that's a sort of impressionist picture.
06:22And for me, I suppose, impressionism meant French.
06:29But of course, it isn't.
06:31This is the most wonderful example of Australian impressionism.
06:37Arthur Streeton's Sirius Cove from 1896 was just one of the many surprises that awaited me as I immersed myself in the question of how art reflected Australia's extraordinary transformation from convict colony to cultured nation.
06:58I'm in good company here.
07:01This is a land of migrants.
07:03One in four Australians are born overseas.
07:05But when the British set up a penal colony here in 1788, they were oblivious to any indigenous culture and simply brought their own.
07:15Among the 165,000 murderers, social misfits and thieves that the British transported, some were artists.
07:29The most prolific was Joseph Lycett.
07:30He was a London engraver sent to Australia for forgery in 1814.
07:44Artists and con-artists in equal measure.
07:46Lycett was transported here to serve 14 years in Sydney's penal colony.
07:54But he just couldn't break the habit of a lifetime and soon he was at it again.
08:01Flooding Sydney with forged five shilling promissory notes.
08:04So he was sentenced again to three years hard labour in another penal colony, about 150 kilometres north in Newcastle.
08:18Newcastle had a reputation as a hellhole.
08:25Its coal mines were a brutal punishment for the most dangerous criminals and re-offenders.
08:31But Lycett discovered that the Commandant had other plans for him.
08:35Hard labour meant exploiting Lycett's talents.
08:38He designed a church for the jail and was rewarded with a conditional pardon.
08:45With his new-found freedom, he accepted commissions, painting pictures that show not only a well-run prison, but a place ripe for settlement.
08:56Lycett was a competent illustrator.
08:59But for me, his pictures are not really emotive.
09:03They are descriptive, almost decorative.
09:05They feature the indigenous people going about their daily lives.
09:11But for him, they are just part of the strange flora and fauna.
09:16Noble savages in a novel land.
09:23His work as an artist eventually won Lycett a full pardon.
09:27He returned to London, one of a handful of prisoners ever to do so.
09:31There he published what amounted to a promotional brochure for the colony, an enticing book, Views in Australia.
09:41Now, at this time, few Brits, if any, had actually seen anything like this.
09:48And even fewer had actually been here.
09:49So when these pictures were first seen in Britain, it was something of a revelation.
09:56It was a little bit like receiving postcards from another planet.
10:00The introduction boldly asserts the dens of savage animals and the hiding places of yet more savage men have become transformed into peaceful villages or cheerful towns.
10:16Sadly, Views in Australia was not the success that Lycett had hoped.
10:29And shortly after the publication of this volume, he went back to forging banknotes and was caught yet again.
10:36But in this very volume in the Mitchell Library in Sydney is a note that tells his fate.
10:46Barely legible, it says,
10:49He was seized by police in his own house, cut his throat, was conveyed to the hospital under a surgeon, then recovering, tore open his healing wounds and died.
11:05Lycett chose death instead of returning to Australia's darker realities.
11:13Despite his own propaganda, this strange land still had no cultural identity.
11:20It was still just a convict colony.
11:28Lycett's art lives on in Joan Ross's work.
11:31Let me hold it for you, yes.
11:35She uses it as the starting point for her video art.
11:39Many contemporary artists like Ross are preoccupied with the art of the past and the impact of colonisation.
11:48In this work, Lycett's landscape is invaded by Europeans and high-vis safety wear.
11:56It's called Barbecue This Sunday, BYO.
11:58When the Colonials arrive on their magic carpet, they're actually coming with all the necessities of the barbecue.
12:04But from my point of view, it's the Aboriginals that are...
12:07They're hosting it.
12:08They're hosting it.
12:10I wanted to reconfigure colonisation to some degree and give the Aboriginals more authority in the work.
12:19Even though I felt Lycett used, depicted Aboriginal people in quite a sensitive way most of the time, I still wanted the work to be a little bit of a turnaround.
12:30What is it with this colour, this lurid, lurid yellow?
12:39I'm using the high-vis fluoro as a metaphor for colonisation.
12:43Why is yellow that colour?
12:44Well, actually, this colour has started to invade our lives through safety jackets and an obsession with safety.
12:54The thing about that colour is that when you wear it, you can have control over land.
12:58But ultimately, you've still got a bit of sympathy for Mr Lycett, don't you?
13:05I have a soft spot for Lycett.
13:08He was a forger, he couldn't help himself to forge again.
13:12There's a certain empathy with people who want to turn against authority, I think.
13:17Actually, I think you just nailed it.
13:18I think that's what it is.
13:31Another of Ross's cheeky works is the claiming of things.
13:36In this video, it's the colonial artist John Glover, whose painting gets colonised.
13:42Glover was one of a new generation of free settlers who came to Australia.
13:46Unlike Lycett, he wanted to stay, and his landscapes are painted with great affection and sensitivity.
14:06By the 1830s, the colonists were still grappling with this strange land,
14:12but were settling in ever greater numbers.
14:14Short on skilled labour, the colony was offering free passage to migrants.
14:20These new settlers soon outnumbered convicts, setting Australia firmly on a course to becoming a free society.
14:28They pushed into new frontiers, beyond the mainland, into the wilds of Van Diemen's Land, present-day Tasmania.
14:39You know, when you're in Tasmania, you do feel sort of remote.
14:43Somehow, you're always conscious of the fact that it's an island.
14:47The first thing they tell you is, there is nothing between this and Antarctica.
14:55John Glover arrived in Australia 17 years after Lycett.
15:10He docked here in Hobart in 1831 on his 64th birthday, with a reputation back in England as a classical landscape painter.
15:20Keen to follow his immigrant sons, he had given up his old life, resolving to make a new home on the other side of the world.
15:34While Lycett came to Australia at his majesty's pleasure, Glover came of his own free will, was granted this land and made this his home.
15:47He called it Patterdale, after the small town close to where he lived in England's Lake District.
15:56And he painted it with all the love and attention you'd expect of an artist making a new Arcadia.
16:03He arrived hoping to find a beautiful new world and declared there is a graceful play in the landscape in this country which is more difficult to do justice to than the landscapes of England.
16:25His paintings reflect a new comfort with the place. The process of colonisation had moved on. Glover's Tasmania is fertile and productive, with contented cows and cosy homesteads.
16:42Glover's paintings have real feeling. You can sense his engagement with the landscape. In my Harvest Home, he celebrates the first wheat harvest on his property.
17:01Glover's convict labourers happily toil as the sun sets. There's no hint that the workers are convicts, aside to Glover's farm by one of the most cruel and oppressive penal colonies on the planet.
17:20It's a terribly optimistic picture, a statement of British triumph over an alien environment.
17:26John Glover was a professional artist, so less pictorial, more interpretive.
17:34And when he saw these eucalypts on his land, he painted his trees with wonderful twists and curls.
17:42To me, they look rather like elegant tentacles.
17:50This was the artist imposing his imagination on the landscape.
17:54Yet this was a British vision, one still tied to the classical ideals, traditions and depictions of Europe.
18:11Like Lycett, Glover painted the original inhabitants in many of his landscapes.
18:16But while Lycett included the indigenous people he'd actually seen in Tasmania, Glover's depictions were a fantasy.
18:26There were no Aboriginal people in his land.
18:30White settlers had been attacked, and in reprisal, there were brutal massacres.
18:35He arrived in Tasmania at the back end of the Black War.
18:46Literally thousands of Tasmanian Aboriginal people had been killed or hunted down.
18:52And now the rest were being shipped off the island.
18:58Glover's land was empty of indigenous people.
19:00It had been forcibly cleared.
19:01The architect of the clearance policy was a government official, George Augustus Robinson.
19:15Ironically, he bore the title protector of Aborigines.
19:19To end the bloodshed, he brokered peace between settlers and indigenous people.
19:29Glover was a close friend of Robinson's, and a supporter of his policies.
19:34In this work, commissioned by Robinson, Glover said he wanted to paint the natives at a corroboree,
19:47under the wild woods of the country, to give an idea of the manner in which they enjoyed themselves
19:53before being disturbed by white people.
19:56Whilst Glover was painting fanciful pictures of a lost world,
20:07the terrible reality of Robinson's clearance policy was still becoming clear.
20:13In the 1830s, his peace plan meant moving hundreds of indigenous people to Waibelina,
20:21on Flinders Island, 20 kilometres off the coast of Tasmania.
20:28They arrived on the promise that they'd soon be returned to their homelands.
20:36Ricky Maynard is a documentary photographer and a direct descendant
20:41of the Aboriginal people of the region.
20:44Hi, Ricky. How are you, mate?
20:46Great to see you again, mate.
20:48He lived on Flinders Island and photographed its landscape as an act of remembrance,
20:56to restore the forgotten history of what happened here.
21:02This place here at Waibelina was established by force removal from our traditional lands
21:08in the northeast of Tasmania.
21:10Waibelina was titled The Friendly Mission, which in fact became a death camp.
21:15A death camp.
21:16That's why I made this picture of death in exile, which happened to our people.
21:25In this church, Robinson, the pious Methodist, tried to convert the people to Christianity,
21:34and educate them in the ways of civilised Europeans.
21:38But the island was soon rife with disease.
21:48Within four years, half the population had perished.
21:53Hundreds were buried here, in unmarked graves.
21:59People died not only of disease and the brutality of the soldiers themselves, but they also died of broken hearts.
22:13In this evocative image, broken heart, Ricky imagines himself as one of Robinson's victims,
22:32looking due south to his homeland.
22:34His work exposes not only the terrible realities of what happened here, but also celebrates the extraordinary survival of his people.
22:52After the demise of Waibelina, one of the few survivors was Traganini.
23:09She became a macabre poster girl through the extinction of the entire population.
23:15The so-called Last Tasmanian Aboriginal.
23:22And see, this is where the great Western myths begin.
23:29The myth of Traganini is the last Tasmania, which of course is just absolute nonsense.
23:34Around all these islands in the strait, we had many communities.
23:36But history doesn't want to deal with all that.
23:43It wants to deal and create the myth of the Aborigine dying off as a dying race.
23:48The reason why I do my work is not only to tell the journey of deaths in exile of our people,
24:04it's so we are telling the truth of our history.
24:11Today, Ricky's art puts Aboriginal Tasmanians back in the historical picture.
24:16In the mid-19th century, however, Aboriginal people were fading fast from Australian art,
24:22just as the white population was about to soar.
24:29In 1851, Victoria split from New South Wales, and eventually there would be six self-governing colonies.
24:38Victoria would become the richest.
24:40When prospectors discovered gold near Melbourne, the population swelled rapidly to four times its size.
24:49At its peak, two tons of gold flowed into Melbourne's treasury building each week.
24:56Shipped back to the Motherland, it enabled Britain to pay off all her foreign debts.
25:01One of Victoria's fortune hunters was the Austrian artist Eugene von Gerard.
25:10He didn't strike it rich, but spent his time painting.
25:13Like this view of the newly founded gold town of Ballarat.
25:19He was part of a new breed of artists, arriving from all over Europe, who were influenced by Romanticism,
25:34an art movement that embraced emotion and the sublime power of nature.
25:43Part painters, part explorers, they pushed deep into the countryside to record the vast untouched wilderness in rich detail.
25:51In 1855, von Gerard headed over 250km west of Melbourne to paint this dramatic landscape, an extinct volcano, its crater filled with water.
26:05These volcanic lakes, he said, reminded him of the landscape in Germany around where he studied art.
26:14He was a romantic.
26:16He believed it was the job of the artist to reveal the beauties of nature.
26:21Von Gerard had an unerring eye for the details of the natural world.
26:27He was both meticulous and symphonic in his art.
26:31Like Glover, von Gerard included indigenous people in his work.
26:41But again, they're idealised.
26:43They appear as tiny, made-up foreground figures, dwarfed by the vast panoramic landscape.
26:50At least here, though, Aboriginal people were actually present.
26:56In fact, one young man sat next to von Gerard.
26:59His name was Johnny Conquertong.
27:04I think von Gerard believed that the Aboriginal population was rapidly disappearing.
27:10He wanted to capture this image before it was too late.
27:14And so he produced this tender, intimate, thoughtful portrait.
27:19What's so surprising is that then Johnny turned round and did a drawing of von Gerard sketching.
27:29And it's a totally different drawing.
27:33It's almost a modern drawing.
27:34He's given colour to the coat and the boots and the trousers and the hat.
27:40And it's fascinating to see the two side by side.
27:45Two completely different ways of seeing things.
27:50After this picture, indigenous people featured less and less in Australian painting.
27:55By now they were largely settled on reserves or missions.
28:00And from now on would be seen mainly in photographs as objects of scientific study.
28:06In the huge panoramas von Gerard and other romantics, people are incidental.
28:12Their views, like Glover's, were framed by the world they'd left behind.
28:16They made the distinctive Australian landscape look distinctly European.
28:25Nicholas Trevalier was a Russian émigré who painted the Buffalo Rangers in Victoria as if they were the European Alps.
28:34This up here is completely weird.
28:37There's a whole lot of kind of iridescent green.
28:41God knows where that came from.
28:46Another romantic was William Pigony.
28:54Australian born, he was taught to paint by a Scotsman.
28:58When he painted the Upper Nepean Valley in New South Wales, it looked like the Scottish Highlands.
29:07It was as though these artists were looking at Australia through a distorted lens,
29:11by bringing their own familiarities to this unfamiliar place.
29:16But nonetheless, they loved that landscape.
29:18They embraced that landscape, its scale, its physicality, its sheer presence, its wilderness.
29:24The romantics reveled in the majesty of the landscape, but they were blind to its realities.
29:41Yet one artist who experienced the brutal fury of nature wasn't.
29:50He created a groundbreaking painting, Black Thursday, the first to really capture the human drama of life in Australia.
29:58The English artist William Strutt was a sensitive soul, educated in Paris.
30:13In February 1851, he experienced temperatures in Victoria soar to near 50 degrees and ignite the mother of all firestorms.
30:28By the end of Black Thursday, about a quarter of the state had been burnt out.
30:33At least 12 people had lost their lives and around 1 million sheep had perished.
30:42Even a ship, 20 miles offshore, had been covered in burning embers.
30:48These terrible events stayed with Strutt.
31:02He kept newspaper accounts of the day and captured the horror of the fire in an epic historical painting.
31:11This is a terrific picture. I love it.
31:13Right in the tradition of epic European history painting, full of detail and drama.
31:19I'm going to show you some of the amazing detail in the picture.
31:43Look down here, this bundle of dead birds and the old boot and the open book here.
31:52And then along here is a figure that really intrigues me.
31:57To me, it looks as though it's taken directly from Goya's 3rd of May.
32:03The figure just doing this.
32:07Along this end, I've always loved these horses.
32:10This one, leaping and bounding over the cattle here.
32:13And this one, that's a wonderful face.
32:15And that staring, glaring, fearful eye in the horse.
32:23Strutt depicted other human dramas, expressing the hazards and the hardships of colonial life.
32:29He painted a brazen highway robbery that took place in 1851, showing not only the anger and despair of the victims, but also, long before Ned Kelly, the figure of the bush ranger as popular hero.
32:46He also painted the burial of ill-fated explorer Robert O'Hara Burke, shrouded in the Union Jack, immortalised in a grand history painting.
33:01The irony is that these pictures were painted not in Australia, but back in England, and many years after the events.
33:12Black Thursday was painted 13 years after the fire.
33:17And the burial of Bourke, 50 years after the burial.
33:21They are great historical records, but they could hardly have spoken to Australians at the time.
33:31Wildfires, the bush ranger, Burke and Wills.
33:34These are all key elements of the Australian story.
33:38Parts of the country's creation myth.
33:41But these carefully composed paintings often struggle to find a home, either in Britain or Australia.
33:51Strutt had missed the boat artistically,
33:54unlike the next generation of artists who took Impressionism,
33:58the defining art movement of their time,
34:01and made it distinctively Australian.
34:11In the 1880s, the founding fathers of this revolutionary art movement,
34:18were students at the School of Art at the newly built National Gallery of Victoria.
34:23Arthur Streeton, whose nickname was Smyke,
34:27and Tom Roberts, known as Bulldog,
34:30both attended classes here.
34:33Roberts led a student mutiny,
34:36in the form of a letter to the newspaper,
34:38publicly rejecting the methods of their teacher,
34:42the Romantic painter, Eugé von Gerard.
34:47They thought that laboriously copying classical statues
34:51and the works of old masters was hopelessly outdated.
34:55Von Gerard soon resigned.
34:59Roberts, who had been to Europe and was inspired by French Impressionism,
35:04led the charge, out of the studio and into the bush.
35:08The spiritual home and nerve centre of Australian Impressionism was here,
35:22in Heidelberg on the outskirts of Melbourne.
35:28Smyke Streeton was given the run of a large abandoned farmhouse,
35:31and invited Bulldog Roberts and other young artistic men and women to share their summers here.
35:38They were young and ambitious, their art new and refreshing.
35:44They became known as the Heidelberg School.
35:53It was in a farmhouse on this very site that in 1888 the Heidelberg School was born.
35:59And thanks to Robertson Streeton, these views have become immortalised in their art,
36:08and firmly fixed in the Australian psyche.
36:11Finally, Australia had artists who found the harsh night, the strange trees and the parched land,
36:28beautiful, because they were painting a place they considered home.
36:44This is Streeton writing in a note.
36:58I sit on a hill of gold.
37:02The wind seems sunburnt and fiery as it runs through my beard.
37:07And I smile as all the light, glory and quivering brightness passes slowly and freely before my eyes.
37:13Now, this picture, Golden Summer by Arthur Streeton.
37:29This is the quintessential Australian Impressionist painting.
37:34The long shadows and the warm glows evoke the feeling of lazy summer afternoons.
37:41Colonial painting was the descriptive art of the European arrivals.
37:51But Streeton, he was born and bred here.
37:54He saw a beauty in this landscape that his predecessors had not.
37:59This is a welcoming place, a painting with atmosphere.
38:11By now, the country was keen to shed the memories of its convict past.
38:19And what better way to do that than with pictures of simple, honest folk toiling in golden pastures under blue skies.
38:27Soon, these artists began to spread their revolution further afield, depicting Melbourne's beaches, city streets and Sydney's harbour.
38:44색깔이 estates.
38:47MUSIC
38:54ушist Streeton and his good friend Tom Roberts came up to Sydney from Melbourne.
39:10Roberts came up to Sydney from Melbourne they wanted to paint Sydney Harbour and
39:15they came to this very spot they wanted to soak up the atmosphere to feel the
39:21light the color the breath of wind but they actually made quite a home of it
39:27they pitched their tents around here they had a dining tent and apparently
39:33they even had a piano they didn't want to be in the studio they wanted to paint
39:38out here in the open air and I think there's something wonderful about a
39:43painting that's done in the open air these paintings have a truth to them that
39:49could never be captured in a studio
39:58inspired by the French impressionists they worked quickly with bold brush
40:03strokes to capture fleeting moments
40:08Mossman's Bay by Tom Roberts has a wonderful luminous quality the water is
40:15still silent and deep moving clouds are caught in transient reflection
40:21yet these bohemians of the bush weren't quite as they seemed
40:35they were never really sons of the soil far from it their real home was the
40:42urbane world of marvellous melbourne
41:00the city was transformed by the 1850s gold rush into one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world
41:07by the late 1880s it had grown in stature boasting grand cultural institutions and a burgeoning social scene
41:19it was a world in which Tom Roberts was right at home
41:23he was a dandy who dressed in the latest fashions and befriended the smartest circles in town
41:30when he wasn't roughing it in heidelberg he worked in a studio in grosvenor chambers on fashionable collins street
41:40here he painted portraits of society's great and good
41:44Robert's was far more interested than street in making money and he suggested they put on an exhibition of their work
42:04what's become one of the most celebrated exhibitions in australian history
42:09Robert's had the thought of producing small paintings on the lids of cigar boxes
42:17which they could then sell to his friends for a couple of guineas each
42:21he actually got the idea from one of his artist pals louis abrahams who worked in his father's cigar shop
42:30they cut the lids off the cigar boxes and paint on the inside
42:35they were a standard size nine inches by five inches so it became known as the nine by five exhibition
42:45in 1889 these rough and ready pictures were exhibited on the first floor of buxton's rooms in the heart of melbourne
42:57it was the first time in australian art that a group of artists had banded together
43:02to present such a bold unified vision it caused a sensation and divided the critics
43:11a report in the evening standard encouraged readers to attend
43:15it said these daring young impressionists are making an effort to engage amateur art lovers by
43:22presenting for the first time in australia a series of their impressions
43:26persons interested in art should not fail to visit it and they did the exhibition was well attended by
43:36the public but melbourne's leading art critique james smith of the argus loathed it to him these weren't
43:44paintings but unfinished slapdash sketches
43:47here are some that have survived out of the 183 that were in the exhibition
43:56their little sort of intimate spontaneous cameos of the landscape of the cityscape and of people too
44:05and typically roberts made the best of a bad thing so he pasted that appalling review up at the exhibition
44:15people came in their droves bought the paintings and it was a great commercial success
44:21and then he wrote a response to the argus which then became a kind of impressionist manifesto
44:29he said it is better to give our own idea than a repetition of what others have done before us which
44:39could never help towards the development of what we believe will be a great school of painting in australia
44:50suddenly robert's commercial venture took on the status of a rebellion
44:56an attack on the stuffy conservatism of the old guard
45:06these pocket-sized paintings are now prized australian works of art
45:12they were crucial in redefining painting for generations to come
45:16and publicly launched the first school of truly australian painting
45:25the heidelberg paintings were very timely they were full of good decent people hard workers
45:32industrious settlers rugged individuals making a new home
45:47the art was an inspiration it spoke to the settlers and pioneers that they could make something of this
45:53this place and transform it into a nation for the first time artists weren't merely passive
46:01observers craving the colors and landscapes of home they were agents of change
46:101891 marked the end of a 40-year economic boom that saw australia rise from colonial outpost to modern
46:19society it was now colonized by factories businesses roads and railways
46:28arthur streeton traveled to the blue mountains west of sydney to paint one of the great engineering feats
46:34of the age the cutting of the lapstone tunnel
46:39this picture fires on with its vertical structure and high horizon is a radical departure for streeton
46:51it's a powerful image that shows intrepid men taming the landscape
46:58i feel hot i want to mop my brow as i look at this painting
47:01but then i go in and look more closely and i see something very different a real moment of human drama
47:14in a letter to roberts he reports all is serene as i work but now i hear fire fires on from the gang
47:23the navvy with me and watching says man killed then men nippers and a woman hurry down
47:40and they raise the rock and lift him onto the stretcher fold his arms over his chest
47:45and slowly six of them carrying him past me
47:56it's about the forging of a new nation it's about building it's about construction it's about the
48:01blood sweat and tears that went into the building of that nation and somehow streetens caught that
48:06moment and enshrined it in a great impressionist painting
48:10art was creating new heroes and sending a message this land is ours rightly or wrongly we have tamed it
48:26while streeten was captivated by the cutting of a railway tunnel
48:31roberts found another symbol that summed up the achievements of the nation sheep shearing
48:41by the late 1800s sheep with the new gold australia was the largest producer and exporter of wool in the
48:49world and the fleece from its merino sheep earned millions of pounds
48:58roberts traveled to a sheep station to pay homage to this great australian success story
49:04and described in his own words
49:06the hum of hard fast working the rhythmic click of the shears the spirit of strong masculine labor
49:17in 1888 roberts sought a subject that would sum up the 100 years since european settlement
49:25and he said to himself wool after all the wool industry was supporting the nation
49:31roberts was fascinated by the shearing of the rams they were the last in line
49:39so the end of the shearing season was in sight
49:42this is one of the great icons of australian art tom roberts shearing the rams painted over a
49:53two-year period from 1888 to 1890 it's a really studied composition he did over 70 preparatory drawings for
50:04this painting
50:08it's at the height of the impressionist period and it has impressionist moments
50:13and it was always thought it must have been painted in the studio but interestingly
50:19recent research indicates that he actually painted it pretty much in situ
50:24and i think it's that which gives it its quality of authenticity there's a sense of spontaneity in
50:34this kneeling figure here you know he was there he caught that the man drinking up here with a cup the
50:40size of a bucket but above all i love this little face here a nine-year-old girl
50:47so she's looking at mr roberts painting i'm reminded of any raphael painting in every raphael painting
50:56there's a figure looking directly at us the viewer and i think i think roberts picked that up
51:04from raphael that little trick but it's it's a wonderful moment of engagement
51:10it celebrates the wealth and optimism the wool industry was giving australia
51:25the irony is that by the 1890s things have moved on the click of the shears
51:33was fast being replaced by the clatter of machines
51:40within a year of this picture being painted the shearers went on strike
51:49but for roberts that wasn't the point the heroic rural worker had played a lead role
51:55in australia's coming of age
51:58ultimately this is a declaration of independence on behalf of a new country ready to stand on its own
52:16and two feet
52:31nationalistic fervor reached new heights in 1901
52:36when the six self-governing colonies came together here in the royal exhibition building in melbourne
52:42and formed the commonwealth of australia
52:50and who better to immortalize the opening of the first parliament in this huge painting than tom roberts
52:57it took two and a half years to complete the picture and he had to make 250 portraits of the great and the good and then place them all correctly
53:14all this took a huge toll on robert's health his eyesight suffered and his will was drained
53:22he once called it his 17-foot frankenstein
53:26it's a long way from the fresh air of impressionism
53:36as robert struggled with this stuffy record of the birth of a new nation australia came of age
53:43and art had helped it to do so
53:45the work of the impressionists resonated powerfully because they were the first artist to accept this strange land
53:58to see australia simply as home they were strangers no longer
54:07truly getting to know this vast continent remains central to australian art
54:12what it's like to experience the place in many ways is the great news for australian artists
54:34i'm obsessed with it the scale the color the atmosphere it's just an incredible environment to work in
54:40internationally acclaimed video artist sean gladwell is just as preoccupied with interpreting australia's
54:49unique environment as the impressionists were inspired by the desert and the famous film mad max
54:56gladwell's mesmerizing video interceptor surf sequence sees him take center stage as a daredevil stuntman
55:05to me it's like a landscape painting in perpetual motion it's always been a great interest of mine the
55:13composition of landscape painting and that sense of space that was always you know played out within
55:18the frame i actually think about painting all the time when i'm making video art but i i actually want
55:24to be in that landscape somehow the landscape here maybe because it's so empty it's very physical it's
55:31got a very strong physical presence to me is that is that something that you feel yeah absolutely
55:38i feel like as an artist i i understand it with my body but it's also a very humbling space physically
55:44because i i always relate the scale of my body to the scale of this environment
55:50i just cannot stop thinking about this space i cannot stop engaging it because it's such an ancient
55:58landscape but it's also layered with you know cinema art history but also the the myth that's been
56:04generated from this space it's just so incredible i i feel like we we all have something to owe this
56:10space in terms of how we've constructed our national identity
56:14keep peddling
56:30you've got a long way to go sean's work is driven by the ongoing need to forge a relationship with the
56:38australian landscape by federation australia had grown from a penal colony into a fully fledged nation
56:49with its own character myths and icons its own national identity
56:58license propaganda glover's idealism and von gerard's romanticism
57:04had been replaced by homegrown impressionists like streeton and roberts who painted australia as it really was
57:17but the vision of australia they created was moving on it was fast becoming an industrial power
57:25a nation of miners factory workers and city dwellers
57:29of the turn of the 20th century nearly one-third of the population lived in cities
57:37and that number was set to rise
57:45the impressionist paintings of arcadian landscapes were now of another era
57:50of course they still had great emotional appeal they still do
57:54but after federation the focus was firmly on the future australia was marching into the 20th century
58:07it would take another 50 years and the upheaval of two world wars before australian art would come of age
58:15and when that moment comes the results are violent dramatic and utterly bewitching
58:37to bring out the area of the entire world which is the thousand year old there were for a loss of strength
58:40i believe i will tell you that from one point coming of age
58:58i have a sense that i have a good heart here because i have a good heart now i have a good heart and a hard heart
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