Deutscher and Hackett

In his foreword for the 1994 monograph Arthur Boyd at Bundanon, then Prime Minister of Australia the Hon Paul Keating observed,

'Someone once said that Arthur Boyd as a painter of the Australian landscape was able to combine successfully the golden vision of Streeton with the darkness conveyed by earlier painters such as Buvelot and thereby show us what the bush as it really was - a thing of menace as well as beauty.

'In a more general sense too, he enabled us to see the darkness as well as the light in Australian life. Just as Manning Clark did. Just as novelists like Rodney Hall and David Malouf are doing. For the last sixty years, despite the fashions of the moment, he has been there, taking our spiritual temperature and offering his prognosis for our national well-being in his own unique way. Not hectoring or harassing. Just opening our eyes to things which we may have been otherwise inclined to overlook or sweep under the national carpet. As he himself said, he has concerned with a certain grandeur in things, even little things. And he has been second to none in helping us to comprehend the dimensions of that grandeur.

'People whose judgment is much more expert than mine see in Arthur Boyd's work a wide range of influences. At times it seems that of itself it is a mini-history of Western art. Boyd has taken what he needed from European tradition, he has also given back something of his own which is a sense of our essential difference. He has however brought to Australians, and to the world at large, a sense of the Australian identity.'¹

1. McKenzie, J., Arthur Boyd at Bundanon, Academy Editions, London, 1994, p. 7