‘They call her a young country, but they lie,’ wrote AD Hope in his fierce poem ‘Australia’, and this exhibition of prints and drawings from the 1940s to the present tracks the realisation of that mighty untruth, although it also raises the delicate question of who ‘they’ might be. Non-Antipodeans may not be that familiar with Sidney Nolan or Albert Tucker, whose wonderfully strong drawings (most famously featuring the outlaw Ned Kelly in Nolan's case and mad modernism in Tucker's) attempted to slake Melbourne’s cultural aridity in the 1940s. Like most of their group, known as the 'Angry Penguins', they then gave up and left for Europe. By the time Tucker returned, in 1960, Australia had a Museum of Modern Art but other difficulties remained – not least the problem of what, exactly, constitutes an Australian artist.
There are German-Jewish refugees deported from Britain here, like erstwhile Bauhaus teacher Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, whose poignant image of a New South Wales internment camp does not need the title ‘Desolation’. Somerset-born John Wolseley didn’t arrive until he was 38, although his four-sheet rendering of the Simpson Desert is the swirling, vibrantly detailed celebration the Red Centre deserves. The oldest inhabitants of the ‘young country’ didn’t receive artistic recognition for another three decades: with one exception, a beautiful 1988 print by Banduk Marika, they are in a separate room, and the earliest is from 1994.
So, an oddly representative exhibition, then: vast, full of unfamiliar beauties and unknown names, haphazard, genetically heterogeneous, racially problematic and pulsing with wit, outrage, inventiveness and cultural insecurity. The former convict depository is still criminally overlooked: this show proves, if nothing else, that Hope’s ‘they’ really ought to call Australia more often.