In the visual arts people typically refer to the so-called Heidelberg School – misse en plein impressionists - as the first real attempt to come to terms with the quality and true nature of both the light and the landscape. This may be so, and painters of the school are still loved, but it was a limited endeavour. As in Europe, impressionism was quickly exhausted and opened into the multivalent by-ways of post-impressionism and beyond. In Australia, modernism had a difficult and unhappy birth and, in fact, came to very little. Artists routinely travelled back to Britain or other European sojourns in order to escape the isolation and limitations of the great south land and its 'tyranny of distance'. In the best cases they brought back fertile currents of European culture to synthesize with local habits.
A particularly interesting synthesis – although much maligned or neglected today – was what we might call Australian Paganism. This imposed elements of classical mythology upon the Australian landscape, sensing a deep pagan spirit (as opposed to the indigenous ‘primitivism’ which remained alien to Europeans) in the land. Several important artists worked in this vein, although their insights were not pursued after the rupture of the wars and even more so the recent rise of a cringing anti-Eurocentric bias in progressivist (politically correct) thinking. Accordingly much contemporary art is pseudo-aboriginal and actively shuns the European heritage. But such paganism was not at all unfounded. As evidence its truth and depth was reiterated profoundly in 1975 by Gheorghe Zamfir’s soundtrack to the celebrated Peter Weir movie Picnic at Hanging Rock. If the visual and literary engagement with the land has been problematic, the Australian musical heritage has been utterly undistinguished. Zamfir, a Romanian, captured it. He brought together the pan flute and the deep sonorous qualities of the organ framed by the realisation that the organ is nothing but a pan flute writ large. In this, he brought out both notes that resound in the Australian bush: a crisp, strange whimsicality with a forbidding mysterious vast 'geological' antiquity. The pan flute – in its two extreme registers – was exactly the instrument to evoke a true music of the land.
Similarly, the figure of Pan featured in visual evocations of the landscape among Australian Paganist painters. By far the greatest of these was Sydney Long. His paintings and etchings are regularly described as “incongruous” now because he places Pan and nymphs and other pagan mythological elements into Australian bush settings. But why not? Like others, he travelled to England and Europe to live and study and brought back with him new sensibilities and techniques; in his case he started as an impressionist of the Heidelberg School but with the sundering of impressionism thereafter took up the concerns of the so-called ‘Symbolists’ and much of the aesthetics of Art Nouveau. Indeed, he must be counted as Australia’s foremost representative of the Symbolist movement broadly defined. His solution to the problem of engagement with the land found little support, however. One of his earliest paintings – By Tranquil Waters – already shows his concerns as well as the difficulties he would have. It is a painting done more or less in the Heidelberg impressionist style, but he adds to the landscape a paganesque eroticism which his contemporaries found scandalous. Here already we see the haunting playfulness of Pan. It becomes explicit in his later work.
He was himself a difficult character. As time went on he became more and more in conflict with younger Australian avante garde artists. As modernism descended into the depravity of abstract expressionism and the barren anti-art of conceptualism his work was deemed more and more 'old fashioned'. He did not take this well. Those who knew him described him as a lonely and bitter figure who resented the many ways in which he was snubbed by the art establishment. Although he won several prizes, he felt passed over and neglected. This was on top of his personal insecurities. A very short man - indeed elf-like - he often wore a tall top hat to give himself extra stature, and in his later years he habitually claimed to be much younger than he in fact was. He resented a younger generation of modernists who increasingly regarded his work as irrelevant to their concerns.
Perhaps his most famous painting - certainly the most often reproduced - is the one below, entitled The Spirit of the Land:
It is not "aboriginal" enough for contemporary progressive tastes (and no doubt it will be deemed 'sexist' and all the rest as well nowadays?) but it remains one of the truest renderings of the anima of the Australian land. It is an image of the soul of place. It does not pretend to be 'authentic'. It does not valorize the "rugged Australian" or anything of the sort. It is, it is true, an amalgam of the European and the native, but, again, why not? It demonstrates how Mr Long brought an Art Nouveau sense of line to the task of capturing the spirit of the great southern continent- and indeed his line is superb. The present writer, at least, (himself an Australian) regards it as one of the few truly successfully spiritual evocations to be found in Australian art. It is one of the finest examples of Australian Paganism.
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The paintings and etchings below give readers of these pages a representative sample of Mr Long's work; both his more conventional landscapes (the gum trees etcetera one expects of Australian landscapes) and his explicitly pagan impositions. Sydney Long (1871–1955)is a major Australian artist whose solution to the problem of rendering the Australian landscape through the vehicle of a European artistic vocabulary was not misconceived. The other artist of this persuasion - now thoroughly out of favor - was Norman Lindsay - Australian Pagans of the first half of the XXth century.
Harper McAlpine Black
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