This post builds on an earlier short review of Stavros Pippos’s two books on South Australia’s Flinders Ranges landscapes that were published in the 1990s; a time of a neo-liberal globalization that emerged after the end of the Cold War. These books were An Australian Landscape The Flinders Ranges: The Art of the Photographer (1993) and the Flinders Ranges South Australia (1996). The former is about the southern and central Flinders whilst the second incorporates the northern Flinders or the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges. In the short review I was primarily concerned to open up a photographic conversation about the representation of regional nature through landscape photography in a globalized world within the 18th century picturesque aesthetic tradition. I now want to continue this conversation from a postcolonial perspective.

Art historians define landscape as a portion of land that the eye can comprehend at a glance with the point of view being that of an observer situated outside or close to the margins of the place that is being contemplated. Vision has a history, and the landscape tradition in the visual arts in Australia (ie., painting) has primarily been that of the settler and British colonialism with its violent interruption of an indigenous knowledge system and process of change. The sort of exploitative, extractive and dominant relationships that Europeans imposed on these already existing landscapes became instantiated as the dominant way of seeing, while obliterating and marginalizing others as aberrant representations.

The foundational art history’s canon (ie., Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting 1788– 1960) is a Eurocentric one with its roots in the Renaissance tradition and its linear idea of a unique national school of Australian art (primarily painting) emerging from under the influence of innovations radiating from a metropolitan centre after 1885. This linear historiography with its birth, maturity and decline constructed Australian art history within a framework of periphery and dependency, and it viewed Australian art in terms of exodus, dependency, and reaction to English, European, and American art. This reaction in the periphery took the form of assimilation, transformation, mutation of, and resistance to, the cultural transfer from Europe, Britain and America after 1945.

Smith’s centre–periphery model, which sought to overcome the provincialist legacies of its settler colonial origins, is a distorted account given its vast gaps: it assumed that art history could be written by excluding all other media except painting; it had a blindness to and exclusion of Indigenous art (eg., the Papunya painting movement); it overlooked the significance of that Australian regional landscape painting that reflected the settler-invader relationship with the land based on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples that circumvented Smith’s centre–periphery model. These exclusions, especially indigenous Aboriginal painting — open up the idea of Australian art’s participation in a global history of art as a way to define a place in the world for Australian art.

Pippos’ picturesque construct of the regional landscape of the Flinders Ranges circa 1993-96 works within Smith’s Antipodean relationship model of Australians on the periphery adapting/reworking/modifying the European centre’s aesthetic categories, codes and conventions inherited from the Renaissance. Within the British empire the colonies of Tasmania and parts of South Australia were viewed by the settlers as a picturesque, pastoral, English Arcadia (a pre-industrial idyll). The English settlers wanted to make their home in the colonial outpost of the empire and their sense of place was the image of a picturesque rural England.

The picturesque was defined by Uvedale Price in his An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1794) as a category inbetween Edmund Burke’s aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the sublime. The former was defined in terms of smoothness, gradual variation, delicacy, clarity, and small size with the experience of beautiful objects creating a relaxed and contemplative state of mind, which is a source of pleasure. Burke defined the sublime as in terms of those objects, such as mountains, storms, and the night sky, tend to be large and threatening, and to produce feelings of awe and majesty, which, when not truly dangerous, excite and stimulate the mind in a way that most found delightful.