Australian Pastoral

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Mapping the tradition of pastoral painting in Australia, charting its entanglement with the great pastoral settlement of the country, this new interpretation of contact history argues that the twin strategies of friendship and betrayal were used to defeat black sovereignty over the land and that these entered the narrative of the new nation’s artists. Pastoral capitalism became the means by which the country was won, while the ancient frameworks of the pastoral were used to celebrate the pleasures of land ownership and honor the rewards of labor. And in the 20th century, with the emergence of modernism and fascism, the nation was reawakened to the values of rural Australia—in an excess of pastoraphilia. But with the defeat of European fascism the pastoral landscape lost its currency and in its place came a new pastoral landscape in the art of the great black painters of the outback.

Jeanette Hoorn is associate professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely in Australian and Pacific art and film. Her other books include and Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific, Vox Republicae: Women and the Republic, and Strange Women: Essays in Gender. She is currently working on an exhibition of Charles Darwin in Australia for the bicentenary celebrations of Darwin’s birth. Her research and teaching interests include Australian indigenous art, documentary and ethnographic cinema, and the European civilizing mission. She has held fellowships at Yale, Berkeley, the University of London, and the Australian National University.

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