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<meta content="This paper discusses the work of two very different settler-Australian painters, and in particular, their respective interest in Aboriginal art and myth. Margaret Preston, one of Australia’s leading modernist artists, was interested in bringing Aboriginal designs to popular appeal, largely through home furnishings, because of the contribution she thought they could make towards the creation of a robust nationalist aesthetic. The other painter considered, Ainslie Roberts, who did not enjoy critical acclaim as an artist, ignored Aboriginal designs when painting his interpretation of Aboriginal myths. Roberts’ believed he was assisting in bridging a gap between two cultures, and that his paintings were a genuine record of Aboriginal mythology. Whereas Preston sought from Aborigines the ‘ways of seeing’ that she felt could serve as the foundation for an Australian aesthetic and paid no heed to the mythological and cultural context of Aboriginal design, Roberts took the converse approach. He endeavoured to illustrate Aboriginal myths and legends through paintings not in any way derived from the Aboriginal visual arts. Both artists, however, subjugated Aboriginal designs in the one instance and myths in the other to their own respective interests and concerns. " name="eprints.abstract" />
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<meta content="1 Quoted in Gary Catalano, ‘Changing responses to Aboriginal art’, Meanjin, vol
36, no 4, December, 1977, p 574.
2 Robert Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria,Volume 1, Government Printer,
Melbourne, 1878, p 291. Robert Brough Smyth held a number of public service
appointments in Victoria, including the position of Victorian Secretary of Mines,
and influential honorary secretary to the Victorian Aborigines Protection Board.
Indicating the colonial government’s interest in disseminating knowledge about
Aborigines, in 1878 the Government Printer published his two volume The
Aborigines of Victoria:With Notes Relating to the Habits of the Natives of Other Parts of
Australia and Tasmania.
3 F D McCarthy, ‘The art of rock-faces’ in Ronald M Berndt (ed), Australian
Aboriginal Art, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1964, p 33.
4 Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia,
Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996, pp 181-83.
5 Ronald M Berndt,‘Preface’ in Berndt, op. cit., p 1; Catalano, op. cit., p 573. See
Charles P Mountford, Records of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to
Arnhem Land 1: Art, Myth and Symbolism, Melbourne University Press, Carlton,
1956, for an account of the artwork seen by the Expedition. Mountford was the
Expedition’s planner, organiser and leader.Although Baldwin Spencer amassed at
the National Museum of Victoria—of which he was the Director for many
years—a very large holding of bark paintings from Arnhem Land—collection
commencing during 1911-12—he never convened a formal exhibition of this
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work. Nor did Spencer’s valuable private collection of Australian art include any
Aboriginal paintings. Spencer had left Australia before the Museum’s 1929
exhibition. See Derek John Mulvaney and John Henry Calaby, ‘So much that is
new’: Baldwin Spencer, 1860-1929, Melbourne University Press, 1985, pp 250,
303-04, 359.
6 Berndt, op. cit., pp 1-2
7 ibid., p 1
8 J Mendelssohn, ‘A visual pun within different layers of meaning’, Australian, 16
September 1996, p 3.
9 Quoted in P Weekes,‘Games logo wins support and cliché claim’, Australian, 16
September 1996, p 3.
10 Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850: A Study in the
History of Art and Ideas, Oxford University Press, London, 1960, and his Place,Taste
and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since 1788, Oxford University Press,
Melbourne, 1979 [1945] discuss this. See also Geoffrey Dutton,White on Black:
The Australian Aborigine Portrayed in Art, MacMillan, South Melbourne, 1974; Ian
Donaldson and Tamsin Donaldson (eds), Seeing the First Australians, George Allen
& Unwin, North Sydney, 1985; For brief discussion on certain artists such as
Russel Drysdale, Robert Hughes, The Art of Australia, Penguin Books, Middlesex,
1970; and Richard Haese, Rebels and Precursors, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1988,
for discussion on the portrayal of Aborigines by artists in the 1930s-40s.
11 Hughes, op. cit., p 36.
12 Smith, Place, op. cit., p 112; Leigh Astbury, City Bushmen:The Heidelberg School and
the Rural Mythology, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, pp 1-14.
13 Smith, Place, op. cit., pp 120, 120-25.
14 ibid., pp 125, 133; Hughes, op. cit., pp 59, 67; Astbury, op. cit., passim.
15 C Symes and B Lingard,‘From the ethnographic to the aesthetic: an examination
of the relationship between Aboriginal and European Culture in Australian Art
1788-1988’ in Paul Foss (ed), Island in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian
Culture, Pluto Press, Leichhardt, 1988, p 194.
16 Smith, Place, op. cit., p 172.
17 Hughes, op. cit., pp 75-6.
18 Sydney Long, ‘The trend of Australian art considered and discussed’ in Bernard
Smith (ed), Documents on Art and Taste in Australia:The Colonial Period 1170-1914,
Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1975, pp 263, 266.The children’s author
Patricia Wrightson took up this same theme in the early 1970s. In the epilogue
to her An Older Kind of Magic, winner of the 1973 Australian Children’s Book of
the Year, she explains her reasons for using Aboriginal spirits as magical figures.
‘It is time we stopped trying to see elves and dragons and unicorns in Australia.
They have never belonged here, and no ingenuity can make them real.We need
to look for another kind of magic, a kind that must have been shaped by the land
itself at the edge of Australian vision’. Patricia Wrightson, An Older Kind of Magic,
Hutchinson Group, Richmond, 1973, pp 150-51.
19 Long, op. cit., pp 266-67.
20 ibid., p 267.
21 ibid.
Rolls | Painting the Dreaming White
22 The artist Tom Roberts did paint several portraits of Aborigines between 1890-
95. In assessing these works within the context of Roberts’ other paintings,
Helen Topliss finds that they are in accord with his other ‘outback’ pictures. In
these Roberts was thinking in terms of time and place, and hence in terms of
national identity. See Helen Topliss,‘Tom Roberts’ Aboriginal Portraits’ in I and
T Donaldson, op. cit., pp 110-36.
23 Smith, Place, op. cit., p 177.
24 Margaret Preston,‘Australian artists versus art’, Art in Australia,Third Series, no
26, December, 1928. Preston citations without page numbers refer to
unpaginated articles.
25 ibid.
26 G Long, ‘Some recent paintings by Margaret Preston’, Art in Australia, Third
Series, no 59, May, 1935, p 18.
27 Margaret Preston,‘The indigenous art of Australia’, Art in Australia,Third Series,
no 11, March, 1925.
28 Quoted in Humphrey McQueen, The Black Swan of Trespass: The Emergence of
Modernist Painting in Australia to 1944, Alternative Publishing Cooperative,
Sydney, 1979, p 161.
29 Elizabeth Butel, Margaret Preston:The Art of Constant Rearrangement, Penguin Books,
Sydney, 1986, p 51. The Australia First Movement, although overtly racist in
their espousal of anti-Semitic and anti-Asian views, did support Aboriginal
activists. Their anti-imperialism led them to focus on place and land as
determining factors in developing national characteristics, hence their interest in
Aboriginal culture, and the overlap with the views of Preston and the
Jindyworobaks. See Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics
in New South Wales, 1770-1972, Allen & Unwin, 1996, pp 236-37.
30 Preston in McQueen, op. cit., p 146.
31 Margaret Preston, ‘Art for crafts: Aboriginal art artfully applied’, The Home, vol
5, no 5, 1 December, 1924, pp 30-1.
32 Preston in Ian North (ed), The Art of Margaret Preston,Art Gallery Board of South
Australia, Adelaide, 1980, p 10.
33 Preston, ‘Art for’, op. cit., p 31.
34 Preston, ‘The indigenous art’, op. cit., unpaginated.
35 Carved tree marking a grave.
36 See Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, University
of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991, pp 97, 119-37.
37 See Griffiths, op. cit., p 145.
38 Margaret Preston, ‘The application of Aboriginal designs’, Art in Australia,Third
Series, no 31, March, 1930.
39 id., ‘Away with poker worked kookaburras and gum leaves’, Sunday Pictorial, 6
April 1930.
40 Sydney Ure Smith,‘Editorial’, Art in Australia,Third Series, no 31, March, 1930,
(not paginated).
41 Margaret Preston, ‘An art in the beginning’, Society of Artists Book 1945-46, Ure
Smith, Sydney, n.d., pp 14.
42 Margaret Preston, ‘New development in Australian art’, Australian National
Journal, vol 2, no 6, 1 May, 1941, p, 13; Margaret Preston, ‘Aboriginal art’, Art
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in Australia, Series Four, no 2, June, July,August, 1941, p 46; Preston in Sydney
Ure Smith (ed),‘Influence of Aboriginal art—Margaret Preston’s paintings’, The
Studio,Australia in art edition, vol 124, no 595, October, 1942, p 122.
43 Preston, ‘An art’, op. cit., p 14.
44 ibid.,‘Australian artists’, op. cit.
45 Butel, op. cit., p 53.
46 Preston, ‘Indigenous art’, op. cit.
47 ibid., ‘Application of’, op. cit.
48 ibid.
49 id., ‘Paintings in Arnhem Land’, Art in Australia, Third Series, no 81, November,
1940, p 61.
50 Butel, op. cit., p 64.
51 ibid., p 50.
52 Preston, ‘Aboriginal art’, op. cit., p 46.
53 Butel, op. cit., p 54.
54 Quoted in Haese, op. cit., p 135.
55 Smith, Place, op. cit., p 30.
56 Haese, op. cit., pp 150-51, 159-60.
57 Preston in Smith, ‘Influence’, op. cit., p 122; see also Preston, ‘An art’, op. cit.,
pp 14-15, 18-19.
58 See McQueen, op. cit., p 142.
59 North, op. cit., p 3; see also McQueen, op. cit., p 143.
60 Bernard Smith, The Spectre of Truganini, (1980 Boyer Lectures), Australian
Broadcasting Commission, Sydney, 1980, p 32.
61 Roman Black, Old and New Australian Aboriginal Art, Angus & Robertson, Sydney
1964, p 123.
62 Humphrey McQueen, op. cit., p 161.
63 See for example Nancy Munn in Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, Faber and
Faber, London, 1987, p 346. Nancy Munn worked with the Warlpiri of the
Northern Territory. She found that story-telling and drawing were ‘treated as
complementary channels of communication; each is a repository of narrative
meaning, and the production of one may evoke the other’.
64 All his paintings are privately owned. I have been unable to locate any records of
gallery ownership. Also, each reproduction in his books states the owner; no
galleries are listed. McCulloch and McCulloch’s The Encyclopaedia of Australian Art
(1994, 6) includes those artists who have won major prizes, or whose work has
been purchased by national, state, or regional galleries. Ainslie Roberts is not
listed. See Alan McCulloch and Susan McCulloch, The Encyclopaedia of Australian
Art, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1994, p 6.
65 Charles E Hulley, Ainslie Roberts and the Dreamtime, J M Dent, Knoxfield, 1988,
pp 30, 41.
66 ibid., p 85.
67 I am primarily concerned with Roberts for it was his artwork which was largely
responsible for the unprecedented sales of this series. See Bob Hodge and Vijay
Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind, Allen
& Unwin, North Sydney, 1991, pp 71-90, for a discussion on Mountford’s
textual distortions of the myths he has translated.
Rolls | Painting the Dreaming White
68 Roberts in Hulley, op. cit., p 86.
69 ibid., pp 80-1.
70 See E Seppelt, ‘A non-Aboriginal painter’s view of the Dreamtime: Ainslie
Roberts talks to Australian artist’, Australian Artist, vol, 6 no 1, July, 1989, p 31.
71 Ainslie Roberts and Melva Jean Roberts, Echoes of the Dreamtime: Australian
Aboriginal Myths in the Paintings of Ainslie Roberts, J M Dent, Knoxfield, 1988.
72 ibid., p 7.
73 Dale Roberts is the daughter of Douglas Lockwood, author of I, the Aboriginal,
another Rigby publication. (Douglas Wright Lockwood, I, the Aboriginal, Rigby,
Adelaide, 1962).
74 Olaf Ruhen,‘Dreamtime wizardry’, Australian, 11 May 1974, p 25.
75 Cameron Forbes, ‘Joy from some myths of the Dreamtime’, Age, 7 September
1974, p 17.
76 Aldo Massola, ‘Myths in paint’, Age, 20 February 1971, p 15.
77 Roland Robinson, ‘White man’s reaction to Aboriginal art’, Sydney Morning
Herald, 9 April 1966, p 13.This review also contains the interesting snippet that
the former Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies was the owner of one of Roberts’
Dreamtime paintings. Roberts only exhibited in Adelaide, and at the time of this
review—April 1966—there had been only two exhibitions of his work and one
book of the Dreamtime series published.
78 Aldo Massola, Bunjil’s Cave:Myths, Legends and Superstitions of the Aborigines of South-
East Australia, Landsdowne Press, Melbourne, 1968.
79 A P Elkin, ‘ “Book Review” of A Roberts and C P Mountford’, The Dawn of Time:
Australian Aboriginal Myths in Paintings, Rigby,Adelaide, 1969’, Oceania, vol 41, no
2, December, 1970, pp 149-50;A Roberts and C P Mountford, The Dawn of Time:
Australian Aboriginal Myths in Paintings, Rigby, Adelaide, 1969.
80 David Moore, ‘The end of the Dreaming’, Bulletin, vol 94, no 4797, 11 March,
1972, pp 48-9.
81 Roberts in Hulley, op. cit., p 80.
82 Ronald M Berndt and Catherine H Berndt, The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in
Aboriginal Australia, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1989, pp 5-11.
83 Moore, op. cit., p 48.
84 Roberts in Hulley, op. cit., p 96.
85 ibid.
86 ibid., pp 96-7.
87 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and
Islam,The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1993, p 18.
88 Hulley, op. cit., pp 71-2, 62.
89 ibid., pp 116-17.
90 Roberts in ibid., p 118.
91 ibid., p 99, see also pp 81, 116-21.
92 ibid., p 99.
93 Ainslie Roberts and Melva Jean Roberts, Dreamtime Heritage:Australian Aboriginal
Myths in Paintings, Rigby, Adelaide, 1975, pp 14-15.
94 Hulley, op. cit.
95 ibid., pp 99, 109, 139.
27
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96 ibid., p 109; see Andrew Lattas, ‘Primitivism, nationalism, and individualism in
Australian national culture’ in Bain Attwood and John Arnold (eds), Power,
Knowledge and Aborigines, La Trobe University Press, Bundoora, and National
Centre for Australian Studies, Clayton, 1992, pp 56-7; Andrew Lattas,
‘Aborigines and contemporary Australian nationalism: primordiality and the
cultural politics of otherness’, Social Analysis, no 27, April, 1990, pp 62-3.
97 Roberts in Roberts and Roberts, Echoes, op. cit., p 9.
98 Roberts and Roberts, Dreamtime Heritage, op. cit., p 9.
99 ibid., p 10, my emphasis.
100Lattas, ‘Aborigines’, op. cit., p 62.
101Hulley, op. cit., p 19.
102ibid., p 19.
103See ibid., pp 59, 98, 99-100, 109, 116-17, 139.
104 It is one of Roberts’ line drawings of a bearded Aboriginal elder that appears on
the two dollar coin. The Reserve Bank of Australia did not obtain permission
from Roberts to use this. It is ironic that copyright actions previously brought
against the Reserve Bank by Aboriginal artists who had had their work
appropriated without authorisation for the use on currency, appears to have
facilitated Roberts’ legally negotiated settlement (see Hardie, op. cit., p 40).
105 Kenneth Coutts-Smith in Vivien Johnson, ‘A white shade of palaeolithic’ in
Cramer, op. cit., p 14.
106Andrew Lattas, ‘Nationalism, aesthetic redemption and Aboriginality’, The
Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol 2, no 3, 1991, pp 314-15.
107 C Symes and B Lingard, op. cit., p 214; see also Smith, Spectre, op. cit., p 32.
108 Smith, Spectre, op. cit., p 46." name="eprints.referencetext" />
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<h1 class="ep_tm_pagetitle">Painting the Dreaming White</h1>
<p style="margin-bottom: 1em" class="not_ep_block"><span class="person_name">Rolls, Mitchell</span> (2006) <xhtml:em>Painting the Dreaming White.</xhtml:em> Australian Cultural History, 24 . pp. 3-28. ISSN 0728-8433</p><p style="margin-bottom: 1em" class="not_ep_block"></p><table style="margin-bottom: 1em" class="not_ep_block"><tr><td valign="top" style="text-align:center"><a onmouseover="EPJS_ShowPreview( event, 'doc_preview_2822' );" href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/2238/1/Painting_the_Dreaming.pdf" onmouseout="EPJS_HidePreview( event, 'doc_preview_2822' );"><img alt="[img]" src="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/style/images/fileicons/application_pdf.png" class="ep_doc_icon" border="0" /></a><div class="ep_preview" id="doc_preview_2822"><table><tr><td><img alt="" src="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/2238/thumbnails/1/preview.png" class="ep_preview_image" border="0" /><div class="ep_preview_title">Preview</div></td></tr></table></div></td><td valign="top"><a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/2238/1/Painting_the_Dreaming.pdf"><span class="ep_document_citation">PDF</span></a> - Requires a PDF viewer<br />135Kb</td></tr></table><p style="margin-bottom: 1em" class="not_ep_block">Official URL: <a href="http://www.api-network.com">http://www.api-network.com</a></p><div class="not_ep_block"><h2>Abstract</h2><p style="padding-bottom: 16px; text-align: left; margin: 1em auto 0em auto">This paper discusses the work of two very different settler-Australian painters, and in particular, their respective interest in Aboriginal art and myth. Margaret Preston, one of Australia’s leading modernist artists, was interested in bringing Aboriginal designs to popular appeal, largely through home furnishings, because of the contribution she thought they could make towards the creation of a robust nationalist aesthetic. The other painter considered, Ainslie Roberts, who did not enjoy critical acclaim as an artist, ignored Aboriginal designs when painting his interpretation of Aboriginal myths. Roberts’ believed he was assisting in bridging a gap between two cultures, and that his paintings were a genuine record of Aboriginal mythology. Whereas Preston sought from Aborigines the ‘ways of seeing’ that she felt could serve as the foundation for an Australian aesthetic and paid no heed to the mythological and cultural context of Aboriginal design, Roberts took the converse approach. He endeavoured to illustrate Aboriginal myths and legends through paintings not in any way derived from the Aboriginal visual arts. Both artists, however, subjugated Aboriginal designs in the one instance and myths in the other to their own respective interests and concerns. </p></div><table style="margin-bottom: 1em" cellpadding="3" class="not_ep_block" border="0"><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Item Type:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">Article</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Subjects:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row"><a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/subjects/410000.html">410000 The Arts</a><br /><a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/subjects/379902.html">370000 Studies in Human Society > 379900 Other Studies in Human Society > 379902 Aboriginal Studies</a><br /><a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/subjects/420306.html">420000 Language and Culture > 420300 Cultural Studies > 420306 Postcolonial and Global Cultural Studies</a></td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">ID Code:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">2238</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Deposited By:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row"><span class="ep_name_citation"><span class="person_name">Dr Mitchell Rolls</span></span></td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Deposited On:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">22 Oct 2007 14:04</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Last Modified:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">09 Jan 2008 02:30</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">ePrint Statistics:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row"><a target="ePrintStats" href="/es/index.php?action=show_detail_eprint;id=2238;">View statistics for this ePrint</a></td></tr></table><p align="right">Repository Staff Only: <a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/cgi/users/home?screen=EPrint::View&eprintid=2238">item control page</a></p>
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