The Australian Academy reinforced the position of the late nineteenth century, Melbourne-based Heidelberg landscape tradition, with shearers and bushrangers and other iconic figures, as the national art form. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Arthur Streeton’s works were promoted as perfect examples of fine art, and as somehow an encapsulation of the Australian nation.
Modernism was attacked on moral grounds, and as a suspect foreign influence. Art critic and personal friend of Menzies’, Lionel Lindsay, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘The Australian public is perhaps yet unaware that modernism was organised in Paris by the Jew dealers, whose first care was to corrupt criticism, originate propaganda and undermine accepted standards.’ In his 1942 book Addled Art, Lindsay argued that the pure tradition of Australian painting, represented by ‘Streeton, [Tom] Roberts, Lambert and [Hans] Heysen, was vulnerable to attack from ‘the same aliens, the same corrupting influences that undermine French art, both supported by powerful propaganda . . . forced on a defenceless public’. Matisse could not draw, said Lindsay, and so he needed to mess around with surfaces. Chagall was plagued by morbid passions. Klee was mad from meningitis. Miró and Dalí were sexual obsessives (an interesting label for the brother of lusty Norman Lindsay to apply to others) and sadists. Modigliani’s figures were negroid and arose from his alcoholism. And so on. The book’s cover could be argued to have an anti-Semitic image of an ape-like figure in an Orthodox Jewish hat slouching away after having thrown muck at the Venus de Milo. Like many art conservatives, and like his friend Menzies himself, Lindsay did not see modern art as just bad art but as viral. And behind the virus lay the Jews. In 1946, Menzies wrote that he had just reread the book and was ‘convulsed with mirth . . . I would regard ninety per cent of the artists as rank imposters: some of the refugees who have discovered the art racket since their arrival in Australia and who have become executants without first becoming students’. He criticised ‘a Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, [which has been] done by some victim of oppression from Middle Europe. What an astonishing old dame she must be, with one eye distended like that of Cyclops and the other scarcely fitting on the same plane.’ (Menzies was referring to the artist Sali Herman’s portrait of his mother. Herman was Swiss-born, yet had joined the AIF in 1941 and served as an official war artist. He had won the Sulman Prize for his striking painting of an Australian soldier being carried by New Guinean stretcher-bearers.)
The modern-art defenders were from CAS, founded in Victoria in 1938, with Evatt and his American wife significant allies of the society and its founder. Evatt encouraged CAS’s endeavour to make international connections and to show work from overseas within Australia and to export Australian works overseas. He commented at an art launch in 1936 that ‘our national galleries are controlled by men who suffer from an intense abhorrence of anything that has been done since 1880’.
Evatt’s interest in Australia’s place in all international affairs, including art, was consolidated when he became president of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1948. He and a fellow Australian, Peter Bellew, were instrumental in organising Nolan’s first overseas exhibition, held at UNESCO in Paris in 1948. He supported radical painters such as Tucker, who argued that Australian painting should not be restricted by the pastoral landscape tradition. Artists who drew upon European modernist ideas, said Tucker—and proved it with much of his work—produced art that was uniquely Australian but also engaged with the rest of the world.
It was a debate that would not soon be finished. Historians have argued that once the Australian Academy collapsed in 1946, the conservative old guard of which Menzies was part lost their power and influence in the arts. However, since the government had a monopoly over artwork selection for official overseas exhibitions, Menzies’ view on art continued to have a profound impact on Australia’s modernist artists after his return as prime minister in 1949, and remained eloquent as a sign that politics and the arts are not as separate as they have tended to be interpreted to be in Australian history.
In 1958, the issue of Australia’s first official representation at the Venice Biennale caused a second split between modernists and conservatives. A few Australians, including Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale, had been seen already at the Biennale, but this was the first time Australia as a country and an artistic community had been asked to exhibit. What was to be chosen for Venice proved so inappropriate that in a sort of embarrassment, Australia rejected an invitation to exhibit at the 1960 Biennale and would not show in Venice again until 1978. Australia thus would begin, from 1958, a twenty-year absence from the world’s premier exhibition of international artists.
The Commonwealth Arts Advisory Board still existed, after being formed in 1911 to advise on what artists should be allotted to paint which prominent Australians. Gradually, the board took on the responsibility of choosing artworks for the national collection, and from 1955 was responsible for choosing works for embassies, as well as for official exhibitions of Australian art overseas. Now they became the selectors for the work to be sent to Venice in 1958. The board’s members included the highly sympathetic and popular portraitist William Dargie, former Victorian schoolteacher and multiple winner of the Archibald Prize; watercolourist, Douglas Pratt; Daryl Lindsay, artist and director of the National Gallery of Victoria; watercolourist Robert Campbell; and the chairman of the board, Sir William (Will) Ashton, a Sydney painter.
The Biennale was designed to show new, contemporary art. However, the prime minister, whom the board advised and could be overruled by, was still set against modernist painting. So were many Australian artists, and one of them, H.R. Krohl, said: ‘The bright young things of the studios boast that their works reflect their minds. By God they do! They blaspheme the Olympians—the Streetons and the Lamberts—and sacrifice filth upon the altars of the new gods they serve.’ In any case, Menzies believed his middle class, his ‘forgotten people’, had the right to see the Heidelberg vision presented to the world as an expression of the true Australia and its real values. On the other hand, Bernard Smith, Sydney art critic and historian, considered the Biennale as ‘the most important international exhibition in the world’, where artists exhibited had the chance to enter the new pantheon. New art should be sent.
The CAS was profoundly distressed by the conservatism of the ultimate choice. The dispute was made bitter by the fact that it was the society that had negotiated to have Australia invited to exhibit at the Biennale in the first place. In a presidential speech at a CAS meeting in 1957, the Parisian–Australian artist Georges Mora argued that ‘we must break down this prejudice in the world that Australia is an artistically backward country. There is only one solution: that is the pushing of Australian artistic achievements into the world and to bring the world’s artistic achievements into this country.’ He was backed by his wife, Mirka Mora, and at a distance by the Italian Gino Nibbi. Nibbi had emigrated from Italy to Melbourne, and in his print shop in Bourke Street, opened in 1928, prints of works by Modigliani, Cézanne, Picasso, Rouault, Chagall and Dufy could be bought. By the time of the Biennale he had gone back to live in Rome because the lease on his Melbourne store had been cancelled. There he organised Italian exhibitions of Nolan’s work. Nibbi had fought hard for Australia to be represented at the Biennale, writing to Casey, Minister for External Affairs, visiting the general secretary of the Biennale on CAS’s behalf and so on. But now that his wish regarding the Biennale was met, Nibbi had been unable to give CAS the right to select artworks—Biennale rules required that nations represented be officially supported by their respective governments, not by art bodies.
The Australian ambassador in Rome, Paul McGuire, a cultivated South Australian writer and diplomat, and the secretary of the Biennale, Rodolfo Pallucchini, also assumed that CAS would be primarily responsible for selection (subject to Menzies’ veto). Georges Mora wrote to the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, ‘Nothing would be more fatal, we feel, for the prestige of a
n advancing Australia in the field of culture than to send a mediocre and conventional show to Venice.’
In the end, however, the board chose fourteen Streeton landscapes and eight early Arthur Boyd landscapes, one of them—The Hot Road, painted in 1896—belonging to R.G. Menzies. None of Boyd’s works of the 1940s or early 1950s were chosen. The inclusion of contemporary figurative painter Robert Dickerson was successfully opposed because, as one of the board said, ‘his figures looked like moronic monsters . . . and I can imagine people saying Australians are like these’.
America’s pavilion at the 1958 Biennale exhibited Mark Rothko alongside the works of thirty-four other artists. Seen against that background, the Australian selection was mocked as contrary to the very meaning of the Biennale. McGuire, the Australian ambassador, concluded sadly that ‘it was felt that the exclusion of avant-garde artists gave an impression of backwardness, and unflattering comparisons were made between Australia and the Soviet pavilions’, which were also stuck in traditional though more propaganda-based art of booming industrial and agricultural scenes.
The board did consider the possibility of Australia’s representation at the Venice Biennale of 1960, but decided that by now even the newly popular Drysdales, Nolans, Bracks and Dobells would be flayed as the last offering had been. Foreign minister Casey was warned in these terms by a new ambassador in Rome, E.J. Bunting. This denied a chance for new artists such as John Howley, John Passmore and John Olsen, who had already been exhibited overseas and would benefit further from the Biennale. But Menzies still argued ‘against the sending out abroad of modernistic stuff that meant nothing and was, in many cases, painted by New Australians like Michael Kmit. This is not Australian art. It could have been painted anywhere.’
Ironically, Kmit, born in Ukraine, had become, through World War II’s mercy, a stateless person and then an Australian, and he had won the Sulman Prize in 1957. His experience as someone without a community and his training under Fernand Léger were factors that made him incapable of painting in the traditions of Australian landscape. And the idea that someone whose soul had been formed anywhere outside Britain or Australia was fit to represent Australia overseas was felt to be deeply undesirable. In reply, CAS pointed out that the Americans were proud of Rothko even though Rothko’s work was not in any way identifiably American.
Yet another Australian ambassador to Italy, H.A. McClure-Smith, was horrified at the board’s rejection of the Biennale invitation in 1960. He wrote to them that Australia would be ‘probably the only country with a vigorous contemporary school of artists that will be absent from the Biennale . . . in Italy, particularly, where countries are perhaps judged more by their cultural standards than is the case in other parts of the world, the effect upon our prestige can hardly be other than deplorable’.
FISSION, FUSION AND AUSTRALIA
Australia’s participation in the struggle against Communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia was based on Canberra’s belief in future atomic conflict. Australian planning provided for professional RAAF personnel to fly missions with high-technology weaponry in a war that would be over in hours.
In June 1946, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee said he was most anxious to have the ‘fullest possible cooperation’ between Commonwealth members on the construction of large-scale plants for the production of fissile material. Attlee recommended that dominion scientists should work at Britain’s first experimental reactor at Harwell in Oxfordshire, which was to begin research and development in atomic energy in 1947. An Anglo–Australian Joint Project began developing rockets at Woomera in South Australia in 1946. The problem with the Empire atomic program was that the United States was not prepared to lend its support. The US Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (known as the McMahon Act) banned American assistance of the British atomic effort.
When the US State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee considered proposals for giving classified information to Australia, it decided that there was no overriding military reason that justified release of top-secret information to Australia and New Zealand. The committee graded countries according to their capacity to serve the United States’ national interest. Group 1 was those nations most closely allied with US national interest and included Canada and Great Britain. Group 2 was composed of ‘potential allies’. Australia and New Zealand were listed in Group 3, along with fifteen other nations, including Afghanistan, Yemen, Estonia, Burma and Liberia. So when in July 1947 the Australians requested information from Britain about an experimental reactor, the Americans strongly resisted the idea that Australia should be allowed into the nuclear club.
Indeed, on 18 May 1948, as the Australians were about to send the first of a number of scientists to Britain, the Americans banned the supply of intelligence information to Australia. The ban was extended towards nations of the British Commonwealth in general. Menzies was confident that he could alter this arrangement once he was elected, but Attlee made it clear that Britain ‘had difficulties’ as a result of the ‘tripartite agreement’, that is, its agreement with the United States and Canada that progress in the field of atomic energy could be patented only in those three countries; hence if an Australian scientist made a discovery in nuclear energy, it would have to be patented in the United Kingdom.
Now Australia desired a Pacific equivalent of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that would protect it from both Communism and Japan. Percy Spender, a perceptive Minister for External Affairs, informed the US Assistant Secretary of State, John D. Hickerson, of this ambition for a SouthEast Asian Treaty Organisation. Menzies was more realistic and ultimately dismissed the envisaged but never realised Pacific pact as ‘an attempt to erect a super structure on a foundation of jelly’. For the Americans did not want the ANZUS Treaty of 1951 to resemble NATO. According to Australian Embassy advice in September 1953, the Americans decided there would be ‘minimum’ defence production based in Australia. The focus was still on northern Europe.
In March 1954, the Australians secured an exchange of notes that would allow scientists to work in British atomic establishments with a view to subsequent possible operation in Australia, especially with regard to work on plutonium, heavy water and fission products. Menzies was scared that the elimination of nuclear weapons in Asia would leave the West exposed to the Chinese: ‘Preoccupation of the major powers with Europe and the defence of the American continent may cause less than due attention to be given to the growing significance of Chinese manpower in the strategic balance of forces.’
Australia had wanted to have its own nuclear arsenal to use in its defence of Malaya ‘in the event of nuclear weapons being employed’ by China, which was supporting the Chinese guerrillas in Malaya. Canberra wished to produce these bombs in Australia with the idea they could be used against Communist China, even by the planes of the ANZAM (Anglo, New Zealand, Australia and Malaya) forces, including the Australian Lincoln bombers, and by the United States against the same enemy. Canberra’s desire for the bomb showed its conviction that the Chinese Communist insurgents encamped in the Malayan forests were the forerunners of renewed Communist advances south of Bangkok. It believed that the Americans would take action and send troops too.
There was an assumption too that Australian forces would be equipped with nuclear weapons in Malaya. The campaign in that peninsula, now nearly forgotten, took on a massive importance in Australia’s planning throughout the 1950s. But the problem was to enlist American support for Australia’s nuclear ambitions. After they were rebuffed by the Americans, the Australians, including the Joint Intelligence Committee, came to believe that they would get more help from their Empire partners, deciding on 1 March 1956 that the US would not commit land forces to the Far East and that ‘we are wasting our time trying to find out from the Americans their inner secret plans’.
Mark Oliphant, the suburban South Australian prodigy, a sensitive agnostic, had just finished his Cambridge PhD in 1929 on the impact of positive ions on metal surfaces as Ernest Rutherford and other
nuclear pioneers at the Cavendish Laboratory, also at Cambridge, were achieving a great deal of notability for their experiments with uranium. Oliphant himself became involved in nuclear experiments, but at Birmingham, another research powerhouse. Even as a brilliant young scientist working in Cambridge, Oliphant had noticed the release of energy from the reaction between hydrogen and tritium particles. Then, sitting as a member of a British organisation named the MAUD (Military Application of Uranium Detonation) Committee, which had declared an atomic bomb feasible by 1943, he promoted the concept to the United States and was one of the midwives of the Trinity test, which led to the first explosion of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert.
Oliphant knew of the possibility of nuclear fission, and it had long been known that Uranium 238 was the element that produced the surplus neutrons needed to start off the chain reaction. Yet though British scientists and Oliphant were nominally allowed to participate in the Manhattan Project, the overall US operation to develop the bombs ultimately dropped on Japan, it was a very one-sided agreement.