Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Darryn Ansted Review of Rex Butler and Sheridan Palmer (eds), Antipodean Perspective : Selected Writings of Bernard Smith
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'A new book on the seminal Australian art historian Bernard Smith recognises that he remains one of the most interesting figures in Australian art history. Antipodean Perspective, edited by Rex Butler and Sheridan Palmer, is a guided tour of Bernard Smith’s persistent, fine-grained, analytical and expert accounts of art and its cultures. Born in 1916, Smith ascended from a bleak beginning to the pinnacle of art history scholarship in Australia. In 1955 he became a lecturer at the University of Melbourne and in 1967 he became director of the Power Institute of Fine Arts in Sydney. This text traverses Smith’s major contributions to the field during his long academic life. In it, 28 leading scholars and artists supplement carefully chosen excerpts from Smith’s books, papers, speeches, autobiography and manifesto with passages that explain how his writing influenced the course of their own thoughts and speculate on what his passages on art represent today.'

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Journal of Biography and History no. 3 April 2020 21209150 2020 periodical issue 'Australians have always been great travellers, not only internationally but between  Australian states and territories. Writing about Australian lives is thus a  biographical challenge when they transcend national and internal boundaries. It means that, when dealing with mobile subjects, biographers need to be nimble diachronically, because of changing locales over time, and synchronically because many Australians have not always seen themselves as bound to a particular place. Nonetheless, despite the problems of writing about mobile lives, the deft use of biography appeals as a means of examining individual life paths in their immediate contexts within the larger scales suggested by transnational historical practice. An abundance of books, edited volumes, and articles have followed individuals, families, and other collectives as they ‘career’ (to use the term adopted by Lambert and Lester in their influential 2006 volume, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire) around the globe.' (Malcolm Allbrook, Preface) 2020 pg. 209-212
Last amended 3 Mar 2021 14:23:37
209-212 Darryn Ansted Review of Rex Butler and Sheridan Palmer (eds), Antipodean Perspective : Selected Writings of Bernard Smithsmall AustLit logo Australian Journal of Biography and History
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X