Love this post. I've added some of these movies to my to-watch list. A slight rebuttal, Sam Neill is a New Zealander! (or Aotearoan, but I haven't managed to get anyone to start calling kiwis that)
Sam is also Australian! As I come from a family of immigrants, I choose to recognize people for the breadth of their identity; just a personal preference.
Brilliant roundup of contemporary Aussie talent. The tall poppy syndrome observation is what really got me, how a counrty with this level of creative output still seems hellbent on downplaying it. I ran into this alot when studying Aboriginal art last year, the gap between international recognition and domestic indifference was staggering. Warwick Thornton's visual language in particular feels underappreciated relative to his actual skill.
I think it’s getting much harder to obey the tall poppy syndrome, but I still hear it come up endlessly with Aussie artists. The fear of being cut down if you get too successful or at least are seen to be too ambitious is very real.
Thank you so much for this roundup of terrific artists! I’ll be including it the next time I do a roundup in my own newsletter below. Also? Australian writer/artist Amie McNee’s book “We Need Your Art” is terrific for anyone who hasn’t read it!
Ah, yes...the cultural cringe still seems to persist, yet here are Ozzers punching back against it. Fantastic. Good on 'em.
As a kid, I vividly remember the horde of people in the arts having to decamp to Europe or the States because they couldn't make enough of a living in Australia, and everybody going nuts over it because they reckoned it amounted to treachery. And if they came back, they were in for it - "ah, Jack was all right before the Poms got hold of him." There still seems to be echoes of this mentality.
Having said that, I still crack up over Barrie Humphries' Les Patterson quip, preserved on YouTube for posterity on one of his (many) Mike Parkinson appearances - "we've got more culture than a penicillin factory."
The idea that Aussie artists should be punished for wanting to make a living, for wanting to have an audience for their work, infuriates me. I point to Kylie, who had to go overseas to make her fortune. She was then scoffed at in Oz until she finally returned and announced she had been violently abused for years. That seemed to bring her down to Earth enough for the media.
This is at the heart of the cultural cringe - an inferiority complex that Aussie entertainers and creators still seem to be force-saddled with alongside this weird strut on the world stage - when no-one’s looking, of course (“I’m ‘stralia, I’m all right, so bugger off!” etc.).
I so vividly remember this as a kid in the 'early ‘70s getting discussed on TV and in the papers. But seen now, as some of the other commenters here have pointed out, this was such goldmine for the lampooning from the off by the knowing. Barrie Humphries had it by the tail, and Oz magazine was on it - hell, for a counterculture mag to have been the subject of not one but two obscenity trials - one in Sydney, then in London - even Rolling Stone seemed tame by comparison.
I don't know nearly enough about Oz magazine, mate. I've been reading up on it and I'm fascinated. Was it as progressive as it sounds? I mean, were they social progressive regarding women, Aboriginal people, and so on?
Well, when it came to women, they were. But for the indigenous, I'm not so sure. Oz ended up having to close itself down as the obscenity trials became too much, on top of the relocation from Australia to the UK. They were pretty much run out of both countries - from a countercultural viewpoint, that gave them a lot of street cred.
They were firmly grounded in the '60s counterculture - left-wing, progressive on drugs, enamoured of rock, and such - but saw themselves aligned with the UK-US-Western European mode. I believe they got some heavyweights writing for them for a time - they had Germaine Greer, for example.
But as for the indigenous, they certainly would've had sympathy for things such as land rights and the end of White Australia and the forced assimilation policies (the Stolen Generation legacy), but I'm not aware that Aboriginals were part of the "scene," so on that score, they still may have had the blinkerdness that so many white Australians have had.
Thanks for this primer! I'm going down a rabbit hole here. If there are any brilliant books or seminal retrospectives you think are worth checking out, let me know about those, too - cheers!
Melbourne. Do you have your itinerary set? Need any specific pointers you'd like a bit more of a local perspective about? I obviously don't need to mention the obvious stuff like "Sydney Harbour".
I'm neck-deep in unpacking right now, but DM closer to the date - maybe late-June - and I'll get you those tips and see what we can work out with coffee!
Art has art histories, not just art history. That argument was won many years ago. The fools have only now cottoned on, and presented long-dead views. We laugh at them.
Regarding both his own personal directorial filmography and the wider world of IP that has resulted from it, Ivan Sen gotta be one of the most underrated GOAT filmmakers in Australia's cinematic history.
This is very true. But Australia’s culture cringe problem, kissing cousins with its tall poppy syndrome, is pretty uniquely debilitating - as the artists themselves can contribute to the suppression of their own voice sometimes.
This is only a list of some of my favorite art and artists from the past decade - basically, contemporary artists. I imagine I’ll follow this up with another piece or two exploring deeper Australian cultural history in the 21st century.
If you're going to write another piece on Australian cultural history, you'll have to explain “the cultural cringe” that afflicted Australia for a long time. Luminaries like Barry Humphrey's, Clive James, Germany Greer, Sydney Nolan all helped with pushing back on the cringe, allowing Australians to feel confident on a wider stage.
I expect I'll get to the cringe problem at some point, yes. Just need to find my way into it. Might just end up being a subject for one of my podcast chats with an Aussie artist. We'll see.
I think this "cultural cringe" was explained well by Ghassan Hage in his book AGAINST PARANOID NATIONALISM, which discusses who out of the immigrant diaspora that populated Australia can be considered to reflect Australian culture, and the resistance against a multicultural Australia, including its suppressed Aboriginal culture. This manifests in a sense of cultural cringe
Agreed. Especially in the case of Barrie Humphries - he was probably the most urbane person anywhere you'd ever find, and his early public stunts (pretending to puke on an airliner where he needed an air sickness bag, then eating what turned out to be cereal from it, etc.) showed that he was probably the only Aussie, and possibly the only post-WWII person anywhere, who understood Dada.
Great list! As an Aussie, I sometimes realise I have spent whole weeks only consuming Australian art, music, TV. I'm so proud of it. Just look at our wealth of beautiful children's literature - Magic Beach, Possum Magic, A walk in the Bush, Where the Forest Meets the Sea. Quite often Australian books are all I'm reading to my son at night.
Can I add a few? Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia captured the blistering magic of the Australian suburbs so perfectly. SeaChange has also stood the test of time - that opening music with the Australian twang "don't wanna live in the city" still makes me break out in goosebumps. Also Meg Washington's latest album GEM just taps into that natural sensuality of the Australian landscape. Somehow she turns a seemingly mundane line (At the beach I feel amazing) into something revelatory. God, I DO feel amazing! It's a place you really feel and smell.
Ben Lee (another Australian musician) often tells young artists to tap into their local scene for inspiration. Everyone wants to "keep up" with what is happening overseas, but the real creative juice is happening on your street.
Love this post. I've added some of these movies to my to-watch list. A slight rebuttal, Sam Neill is a New Zealander! (or Aotearoan, but I haven't managed to get anyone to start calling kiwis that)
Sam is also Australian! As I come from a family of immigrants, I choose to recognize people for the breadth of their identity; just a personal preference.
It's the pavlova (Phar Lap) argument all over again :)
I wish we got another season of Firebite.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14814570/
Brilliant roundup of contemporary Aussie talent. The tall poppy syndrome observation is what really got me, how a counrty with this level of creative output still seems hellbent on downplaying it. I ran into this alot when studying Aboriginal art last year, the gap between international recognition and domestic indifference was staggering. Warwick Thornton's visual language in particular feels underappreciated relative to his actual skill.
I think it’s getting much harder to obey the tall poppy syndrome, but I still hear it come up endlessly with Aussie artists. The fear of being cut down if you get too successful or at least are seen to be too ambitious is very real.
Thank you so much for this roundup of terrific artists! I’ll be including it the next time I do a roundup in my own newsletter below. Also? Australian writer/artist Amie McNee’s book “We Need Your Art” is terrific for anyone who hasn’t read it!
https://naturallyentertaining.substack.com/p/the-cool-sad-and-weird-things-i-readwatched-8f8
I’ll read more about it. Thanks for the tip, Tara!
Ah, yes...the cultural cringe still seems to persist, yet here are Ozzers punching back against it. Fantastic. Good on 'em.
As a kid, I vividly remember the horde of people in the arts having to decamp to Europe or the States because they couldn't make enough of a living in Australia, and everybody going nuts over it because they reckoned it amounted to treachery. And if they came back, they were in for it - "ah, Jack was all right before the Poms got hold of him." There still seems to be echoes of this mentality.
Having said that, I still crack up over Barrie Humphries' Les Patterson quip, preserved on YouTube for posterity on one of his (many) Mike Parkinson appearances - "we've got more culture than a penicillin factory."
The idea that Aussie artists should be punished for wanting to make a living, for wanting to have an audience for their work, infuriates me. I point to Kylie, who had to go overseas to make her fortune. She was then scoffed at in Oz until she finally returned and announced she had been violently abused for years. That seemed to bring her down to Earth enough for the media.
This is at the heart of the cultural cringe - an inferiority complex that Aussie entertainers and creators still seem to be force-saddled with alongside this weird strut on the world stage - when no-one’s looking, of course (“I’m ‘stralia, I’m all right, so bugger off!” etc.).
I so vividly remember this as a kid in the 'early ‘70s getting discussed on TV and in the papers. But seen now, as some of the other commenters here have pointed out, this was such goldmine for the lampooning from the off by the knowing. Barrie Humphries had it by the tail, and Oz magazine was on it - hell, for a counterculture mag to have been the subject of not one but two obscenity trials - one in Sydney, then in London - even Rolling Stone seemed tame by comparison.
I don't know nearly enough about Oz magazine, mate. I've been reading up on it and I'm fascinated. Was it as progressive as it sounds? I mean, were they social progressive regarding women, Aboriginal people, and so on?
Well, when it came to women, they were. But for the indigenous, I'm not so sure. Oz ended up having to close itself down as the obscenity trials became too much, on top of the relocation from Australia to the UK. They were pretty much run out of both countries - from a countercultural viewpoint, that gave them a lot of street cred.
They were firmly grounded in the '60s counterculture - left-wing, progressive on drugs, enamoured of rock, and such - but saw themselves aligned with the UK-US-Western European mode. I believe they got some heavyweights writing for them for a time - they had Germaine Greer, for example.
But as for the indigenous, they certainly would've had sympathy for things such as land rights and the end of White Australia and the forced assimilation policies (the Stolen Generation legacy), but I'm not aware that Aboriginals were part of the "scene," so on that score, they still may have had the blinkerdness that so many white Australians have had.
Thanks for this primer! I'm going down a rabbit hole here. If there are any brilliant books or seminal retrospectives you think are worth checking out, let me know about those, too - cheers!
Cole! This is priceless treasure! We'll be in Australia this August for a few weeks. Great to have a culture prep list in hadn. Thanks!
Where in Australia are you heading to?
Melbourne, Cairns, and Sydney. My husband's running the Sydney Marathon at the end of August. Where are you?
Melbourne. Do you have your itinerary set? Need any specific pointers you'd like a bit more of a local perspective about? I obviously don't need to mention the obvious stuff like "Sydney Harbour".
That would be terrific! Maybe we could get coffee or something if you’re around. We’re staying in Fitzroy. It’ll be 14-18 Aug, I think.
I'm neck-deep in unpacking right now, but DM closer to the date - maybe late-June - and I'll get you those tips and see what we can work out with coffee!
Art has art histories, not just art history. That argument was won many years ago. The fools have only now cottoned on, and presented long-dead views. We laugh at them.
Regarding both his own personal directorial filmography and the wider world of IP that has resulted from it, Ivan Sen gotta be one of the most underrated GOAT filmmakers in Australia's cinematic history.
I don’t know nearly enough of Ivan’s work. Thanks for prodding me to dig deeper into it!
Everywhere has culture, just not everywhere is marketed.
This is very true. But Australia’s culture cringe problem, kissing cousins with its tall poppy syndrome, is pretty uniquely debilitating - as the artists themselves can contribute to the suppression of their own voice sometimes.
Yothu Yindi - World Turning
https://youtu.be/q9lkQQEVqv8?si=TVrYdmdfWwdetXoQ
Also the TV series Mystery Road, staring Aaron Pedersen is great crime drama.
It is!
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu needs to be on this list, Cole. That man had the voice if an angel.
This is only a list of some of my favorite art and artists from the past decade - basically, contemporary artists. I imagine I’ll follow this up with another piece or two exploring deeper Australian cultural history in the 21st century.
If you're going to write another piece on Australian cultural history, you'll have to explain “the cultural cringe” that afflicted Australia for a long time. Luminaries like Barry Humphrey's, Clive James, Germany Greer, Sydney Nolan all helped with pushing back on the cringe, allowing Australians to feel confident on a wider stage.
I expect I'll get to the cringe problem at some point, yes. Just need to find my way into it. Might just end up being a subject for one of my podcast chats with an Aussie artist. We'll see.
I think this "cultural cringe" was explained well by Ghassan Hage in his book AGAINST PARANOID NATIONALISM, which discusses who out of the immigrant diaspora that populated Australia can be considered to reflect Australian culture, and the resistance against a multicultural Australia, including its suppressed Aboriginal culture. This manifests in a sense of cultural cringe
Fascination distillation of the phenomenon.
Agreed. Especially in the case of Barrie Humphries - he was probably the most urbane person anywhere you'd ever find, and his early public stunts (pretending to puke on an airliner where he needed an air sickness bag, then eating what turned out to be cereal from it, etc.) showed that he was probably the only Aussie, and possibly the only post-WWII person anywhere, who understood Dada.
Great list! As an Aussie, I sometimes realise I have spent whole weeks only consuming Australian art, music, TV. I'm so proud of it. Just look at our wealth of beautiful children's literature - Magic Beach, Possum Magic, A walk in the Bush, Where the Forest Meets the Sea. Quite often Australian books are all I'm reading to my son at night.
Can I add a few? Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia captured the blistering magic of the Australian suburbs so perfectly. SeaChange has also stood the test of time - that opening music with the Australian twang "don't wanna live in the city" still makes me break out in goosebumps. Also Meg Washington's latest album GEM just taps into that natural sensuality of the Australian landscape. Somehow she turns a seemingly mundane line (At the beach I feel amazing) into something revelatory. God, I DO feel amazing! It's a place you really feel and smell.
Ben Lee (another Australian musician) often tells young artists to tap into their local scene for inspiration. Everyone wants to "keep up" with what is happening overseas, but the real creative juice is happening on your street.