Opening Night Reception
Royal Academy of Arts, London
17 September 2013
The Hon Mike Rann
Australian High Commissioner
I am delighted to join you tonight for the opening of this ‘Australia’ exhibition - the greatest collection of artworks ever to leave Australia.
I had the privilege to pre-view this extraordinary exhibition yesterday and I would like to congratulate the Royal Academy of Arts and its organising partner, the National Gallery of Australia, on their magnificent staging of these masterpieces.
As you have heard this exhibition helps tell the story of Australia over the past 200 years through our relationship with our land and our unique landscapes.
These days, it is true, most Australians live in cities but our psyche sense of place and identity has been so influenced by the scale and diversity of our continent – by notions of ‘bush’, ‘outback’ and the ‘never never’.
I am sure visitors will be thrilled by the exhibition’s strong focus on the indigenous art of Australia. Its stunning, vibrant colours will set the grey days of autumn alight with an energy and spirit powered for 50,000 years.
Back home, art creates a window through which Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians can more effectively communicate. It builds a bridge which can successfully traverse any cultural divide.
Albert Namatjira’s art communicates to us because there is so much knowledge, love and spiritual understanding of the land – his land – in every picture.
Because he was of the land. The land was part of him. He showed us how to look at our country with eyes that had seen it for a long, long time.
He opened the door of a new understanding of our land –through a meeting of hearts and palette – that has been, in his aftermath, immense.
He liberated a people’s vision and a country’s majestic, yearning and lingering beauty.
Visitors will see the exquisite works of the Heidelberg School and the Australian Impressionists. It was a period of great artistic experiment and courage.
The leash was finally off. Victorian sensibilities were becoming unbuttoned. People delighted in the ‘new’, the genre challenging artistic and social revolution that, in many ways, pre-figured the 1960s.
Painters emerged like Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin, Ethel Carrick, George Lambert, Charles Conder and Tom Roberts.
This golden time was to be short lived and illusory. It was soon smashed and ground into the mud of Gallipoli and the Somme. There was a loss of not only hope and glory, and more importantly so many young lives, but there was also, for Australia, a loss of innocence.
This exhibition, of course, features wonderful works by Sidney Nolan, Grace Cossington-Smith, Margaret Preston, Fred Williams and Arthur Boyd.
Few Australian artists have attracted more interest in Britain than Boyd. But unlike so many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Boyd was less influenced by the Paris School, than he was by German and Dutch painters like Breughel, Bosch and Rembrandt. In Boyd there are recurring themes of loneliness and vulnerability, as well as metamorphosis.
But it is terrific that so many living artists are not only celebrated in this exhibition but are here with us to take part in more than 90 associated events during the ‘Australia’ exhibition season.
Their work shows how Australian identity has changed. We are more urban, more outward looking. We are more multicultural, with a quarter of today’s Australians born overseas, and another 20 per cent having at least one parent who was born in another country. There are now two million Australians who were born in Asia.
What used to be known as the ‘tyranny of distance’ between Australia and Europe is now, with the growth of Asia, our ‘advantage of adjacency’ - with 60 per cent of the world’s population living in our time zone.
We pride ourselves on our unique blend of prosperity and opportunity, warmed by the sun.
But the ties that bind us to Britain are immense not only through our history, institutions and mass migration, but through trade, investment and tourism, through science, innovation, sport and, of course, the arts.
A recent poll by the respected Lowy Institute found that Australians liked Britain more than any other country surveyed.
It’s a relationship deeply rooted in both nations’ stories, great Allies in times of peril when Britain never stood entirely alone; great partners in times of peace. Not just friends. Family.
This exhibition is another manifestation of that rich and enduring partnership.
I would like to thank Charles Saumarez Smith, Secretary and Chief Executive of this world class institution and his team for the staging of this exhibition, along with Ron Radford and his team from the National Gallery of Australia who are the organising partners of this exhibition.
I would like to pay tribute to its curators, particularly Kathleen Soriano, Ron Radford, Anna Grey and Franchesca Cubillo for their passion as well as their expertise.
The Australian Government, through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, is honoured to be a financial supporter of this exhibition.
I would like to thank the National Gallery of Australia’s Honorary Exhibition Circle and the many companies who have given such strong support. Without the support or our enthusiastic philanthropists and corporate sponsors it would not have been possible for this great exhibition to take place.
So it is with great pride that I am delighted to declare ‘Australia’ officially opened.