[ESSAY]

AUSTRALIA IS NOT AN ISLAND

POET JOHN MATEER REIMAGINES THE TERRAIN WE CALL AUSTRALIA

... a shipwreck is a tall shore of humanity. with an island background it had been composed on sand, dry inland, crafted by hand. it can be seen in the city, daily, neatly. 'shipwreck' by Arthur Yap, Singaporean poet CONTRARY to conventional belief, Australia is not an islandit's an archipelago, culturally porous and edgeless. The Australian government has recently placed much emphasis on the notion of'border protection' because it knows that the nation consists, in effect, of a handful of islandsMelbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Tasmaniaeach approachable from any number of directions and each engaging in its own internal and external commerce. It is through more than the act of imagination that Australians keep the notion of Australia-as-an-island alive. Australians keep its borders active by thinking of the Land as the basis of their commonality, by emphasising the importance of the Bush, the Outback, and by exporting the most distinctive art of the land, Aboriginal art. Until the late 1970s, when the art of the Central Desert

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came to prominence in the imaginative life of Australians, the Outback was seen to be just as empty and mysterious as the open ocean. Earlier explorers' accounts of journeying into the interior on camels or 'ships of the desert', into what was called the Dead Heart of the continent, would use the metaphor of sailing to articulate the sensation of moving through seemingly identical terrain for interminable lengths of time. It felt like uncharted waters, with all the anxieties produced by the feeling of the unknown and the overwhelming presence of the bare elements. That the interior of Australia is entirely dry except for underground reservoirs, hidden waterholes and desert lakes filled by rain on rare occasions was something they often couldn't believe. One explorer pushed on into the Central Desert, taking with him a whaleboat in which he intended to sail the Inland Sea that he was sure must exist somewhere out there. It had existed but, unfortunately, many millions of years before his arrival. Even today, though this interior landscape has now been documented, mapped and photographed in the tradition of Western science, conjured in the imagination of the wider world as much by Australian cinema as by the complexity and diversity of Aboriginal art, especially desert painting of the kind exemplified by the Papunya School, it is still possible to have a sense that the gaps between the Australian cities are powerfully oceanic. In Australia the 'tyranny of distance', to use historian Geoffrey Blainey's famous phrase, is not solely that of the expansive conduit between colonial periphery and imperial centre but also that of the chasms between its own settlements, its various islands. Like all dwellers in an archipelago, Australians assert the cultural superiority of their own particular island and display their suspicion or jealousy of the others. Anyone who has travelled in Australia knows that the inhabitants of the two largest islands, Melbourne and Sydney, are constantly casting aspersions on each other, while those islanders from the further flung reaches of the archipelago, Perth for instance, comfort themselves by stressing the characterbuilding potential of isolation and the consolation of a pleasurable, if boring, lifestyle. These tensions are the consequence of Australia's extraordinary geography, its vastness and its aridity, and they are also the product of history. Australia is a federation of states that, in terms of their wealth as much as their populations and history of conquest and settlement, differ gready from one another. As most of Australia's major cities are on the coast and facing various directions, their orientations away from their hinterlands are towards quite different parts of the globe. Sydney faces the islands of the Pacific and the United States; Melbourne

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Australia is not an Island faces New Zealand and Antarctica; Darwin faces Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Indonesia; and Perth the Indian Ocean islands and Africa. In the cultural history of Australia little attention has been given to the nuances of movements between the archipelago of Australia and those of its neighbours. This is due to the socio-political framework within which Australian debate usually takes place, that of the relationship between Australia and its influential ally of the moment, whether it be the United Kingdom, the United States orthe ally and market of the futureChina. But the reality of everyday life in Australia is that it is cosmopolitan in a particularly Australian way. The inhabitants of the Australian archipelago, just like those other islanders of the Cocos Islands or of the Torres Strait, share a culture that is as porous and edgeless as the geography they inhabit. Cultural and racial mixing is increasingly now the result of this kind of island culture. Many Australians of an Anglo-Celtic background, who are often now maligned in those intellectual, inner-city circles that emphasise the notion of cosmopolitanism and the politics of internationalism, display those other, older, classically 'insular' traits of conformity and caution in the presence of the strange. How could they not do so, having come originally from the British Isles, islands that at different times were raided by the Vikings, invaded by the Romans, menaced by the Germans, colonised by the English and dispersed to the Commonwealth? It would be foolish to attempt to deny the powerful influence that British governance has had on the Australian archipelago. Thanks to the links of the old Empire, this string of islands has for more than two hundred years been politically connected as much to Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Fiji as to the United Kingdom. Yet to regard the Australian islands simply as a series of late colonies of an outdated empire, whether that empire is British oras some commentators would have itAmerican, would be to ignore the individual economies of the islands, the irradiation of their own networks and the peculiar evolution of their unique island cultures. For the artists of the Australian archipelago, the mistaken belief that Australia is one enormous island has the disadvantage that it constantly forces them to talk about their practices as if there were real commonalities that they all shared, as if the art forms of the various islands could be effectively grouped under the one cultural discourse, that of the nation. Australians seldom have the opportunity to talk about themselves as islanders, and yet this is one of the first things that strikes the curious visitor: each island's isolation from the others. When the visitor asks

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a Melbournian curator for a list of the ten most interesting artists working in Australia it is usual for the list to contain mainly artists from Melbourne, and the same would be true of Sydney. The other, smaller islands would be slightly different because they would be aware of the cultural exports of their competitors, and so would temper their list with the names of a few artists from the bigger, more powerful islands. (A survey of this kind was recentiy conducted by a writer for the French magazine Artpress, and the results bore out such prejudices.) That there is a reluctance to admit to the reality of the archipelago is unfortunate because the richness of Australia resides in the cultural differences between the islands. This is also true in the case of those sea peoples known by the deceptively unifying term Aborigines. Their art, too, is amazing in its stylistic and geographical diversity. The differences between the practices of the various islands also reveal other discrepancies: for instance, the economic impoverishment and South-East Asian orientation of Darwin, as opposed to the material extravagance and First World orientation of Sydney. By keeping the myth of Australia-as-island alive the islanders avoid acknowledging their own relation to the flux of migration, cultural exchange and commerce that is essential to their homelands. Few prominent Australian artists have taken these issues as the subject of their work. Increasingly those newer artists who do are drawing their audiences' attention to the dynamics of the archipelago's cultures. Among them, Symryn Gill, an artist born in Singapore, resident in Malaysia, then in London and now in Sydney, is a perfect example of the contemporary Australian islander's sensibility, as she is both local and mobile. In the art theorising of the 1980s the term 'nomad' was used far too loosely. Australian islanders, aware of the symbolic significance and actual material culture of the Aborigines, understand perhaps better than most that nomadism is provisional, and is produced by the relationship between necessity and opportunity. But the islanders' possessiveness towards their own cultural products and exports is, ironically, a mirror image of the latest, post-postmodernist metamorphosis of islander culture that goes under the name of globalisation. Under the regime of globalisation the world becomes an archipelago, or a set of archipelagos, which is connected by various logics that are sometimes commensurate, sometimes not. The islander logic that connects Sydney, Venice, Berlin (First World art capitals) isn't the same one that connects Havana, Sao Paulo and Dakar (Third World biennale cities), nor is it the logic that links London, Paris, New York and Tokyo, those islands of centralised transnational commerce. The islander mentality exists in all of those places, but owing to the new currents of globalisation, the flow of capital needn't parallel the flow of culture.

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Australia is not an Island America was, of course, the first modern example of the denuding of a direct correspondence between locality and culture. When the Paris-focused modern art movement was relocated to New York after the Second World War, the notion that art was a natural outcome of the logic of an island's culture was irrevocably interrupted. International Modernism seemed to represent an art free of the constraints of local meaning yet that was, as art historians of the past two decades have been discovering, a self-deception as great as the belief that Australia is one island. After all, Manhattan, until recently the centre of the international artworld, is an island too, an island that during the era of colonial expansionism was 'exchanged' by the Dutch for the important spice island of Ran, which is now an almost forgotten island in the west of today's Indonesia. To see Australia as a string of islands is to notice the particularities of each island and also to see that each of the islands is in a different relationship with the outside world: Perth feels closer to Singapore than to Adelaide, Darwin is closer to East Timor than it is to any other Australian city, and so on. But there is another implication of the notion of Australia as archipelago. If Australia is appreciated as a network of islands, the colonial metaphor for acculturationthat is, the 'development' of the Land with all its attendant technologies of picturing the landscape, clearing the bush, dispossessing the Nativescan be replaced with another, more ethical set of metaphors, a collection of terms more in keeping with current experience in this region. Those metaphors would be those of travel: art as magical and commercial cargo, culture as the trading of information and values, galleries as airports or trade fairs, the practice of the artist as a means of diplomacy and as a technique of survival after marooning or shipwreck. In 'the wake' of the Indian Ocean tsunami, it is clear that Australians have been made more aware that they are connected to this region through the ocean. It is by encouraging a corresponding new 'metaphoric' of travel and exchange, of a rhetoric that reveals genuine histories and true geographical relationships, that we may open the borders of the Australian islands not only to Asia but also to all the other islands of the world.

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