How Australian Art Influenced Our Identity

Australian music, literature and art have shaped Australia’s identity since the European Settlement. Australia’s legends, hardships, environment were all reflected in the work of Australian-born European artists, writers and musicians who came to Australia. The Australian bush is an iconic feature in Australia’s identity. The bush was unfamiliar to the European and other landscapes many of the immigrants came from. Poets such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson admired the bush as an origin for Australian ideals. Romanticising the bush lead to a legacy of bush legends and folklore. The work of poets and novelists such as Banjo Patterson, Miles Franklin, EJ Brady and Barbara Bayton were based on Australian living and working in the bush. Henry Lawson believes Australian identity should be sown and grown in our own soil. Henry Lawson was a famous Australian writer. Lawson’s work is mainly based on the bush and bush life. Lawson was the first Australian born writer to thoroughly analyse Australia with its own eyes. He gave a voice to the Australian character. He was first published in The Bulletin with his poem Song of Australia. Many agreed that he knew the characters he wrote about and his work showed the experiences of Australia with a truth readers familiarized. Australian life was portrayed in many ways. Compared to Lawson’s work, Barbara Bayton gave Australian life a blacker portrayal. She especially focused on the lives of women who were left alone for months while husbands left for drovering. Many bush songs were created by ordinary people who based them on their experiences working and living in the bush. The most famous of these bush songs is the unofficial anthem: Waltzing Matilda. Like folklore these songs are passed down orally. The bush has brought out themes of struggle and survival in stories of drovers, outback women, lost children and bushrangers. ‘Black trackers’ brought a sense of nourishment and survival to the bush. The skills of the indigenous people in the bush became legendary in the mind of the settlers. The indigenous people also expressed their knowledge of the bush in their arts. As the years went by there was an increased sense of nationalism. This was boosted with the creation of the bush legend which was an extension of the diggers in the goldfield. The diggers and the characters of the bush shared the same qualities. The Australian landscape inspired the works of many treasured artists. The Heidelberg schoolwas the first significant art movement for Australia. The changing nationalism formed painters who painted the environment to capture the essence of the country. “...the Australian artist can best fulfil his highest destiny by remaining in his own country and studying that which lies about him...” Fredrick McCubbin, 1915

McCubbin was the first significant Australian born white artist and was seen as the more impressionistic of the group of nationalistic painters. He was also one of Heidelberg schools main artists. Lost is his most famous piece which was inspired by the story of Clara Crosbie. Tom Roberts another artist part of the Heidelberg School studied in London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 1881; he then studied impressionism in Europe before returning to Australia 1885. He, Streeton, McCubbin and Condor dedicated themselves to painting Australia’s bush. Some of Roberts’s famous pieces are shearing the rams and a break away both pictures depicting the lives of the drovers. Over the centuries the Australia’s identity has slowly been shaped by cultures. But the identity we have now is thanks to what shaped for us by the first Australian literature, music and art.