ABSTRACT
Australia’s vast tracts of land and low supply of rural labour caused many nineteenthcentury migrants to see the country as a pastoralist ‘Arcadia’. The agricultural base grew rapidly, however, so that by 1885 J.S. Jeans could claim that ‘Of the total wealth of Australia, £258,000,000 are in land, and only £112,000,000 in manufactures, &c’.1 Cattle grazed its rough natural pasture before these were improved to allow sheep farming and valuable sheep exports to London, rising per annum from 60,000 tons in the late 1860s to 400,000 tons in the late 1920s.2 Whilst Australia’s population was predominantly urban, this agricultural base and the pastoral myths that could be cultivated upon it produced a nostalgia for countryside ways. The Dangar family, for example, were not only involved in shipping but also possessed a diverse business portfolio which included land. The ‘English’ countryside played on migrant minds in different ways. Artworks could help heal a sense of a distant ‘home’. William Lionel Wylie’s Our River (1882: acq. AGSA, 1882), for example, was believed to be ‘like meat and drink to a traveller long separated from London. The eternal din, the dusky sky, the vast clouds of smoke . . . things that – strangely enough perhaps – a Londoner longs for when he cannot get them’.3 Louise Mack’s heroine in An Australian Girl in London (1902) was no doubt a conduit for the author’s own anti-climactic impressions of the British countryside – ‘less green than the impossible verdant-tinted things our imagination had pictured away in sun-scorched Australia’ – and the visible effects of drought – for ‘You did not think that grass could get browned in England? Neither did I. Ah, me! it was only one of the many Colonial Delusions’.4 Lionel Lindsay and J.S. MacDonald were staunch proponents of the landscape tradition, with the latter arguing for the ‘maximum of flocks and the minimum of factories’ in Australia.5 If eyewitnesses dispelled the Blakean vision of a green and pleasant land, this chapter explores whether British landscape painting fared any better in the acquisition strategies between 1860 and 1953, exploring the potential ideological and psychological impact of such work on the selectors and audiences of the Australian national galleries.
