‘Up on our luck?’

Abstract

Frederick McCubbin’s ‘Down on His Luck’ used to be one of my favourite paintings. It was in a book of prints my mother bought for me when I was four, published to commemorate the 1988 Australian bicentenary. I vividly remember leafing through the pages of that green, gold and black covered book, and returning again and again to ‘Down on His Luck’. For some weeks, I, an unselfconsciously white settler girl, carried the treasured book round with me. Was it the melancholy of the image of a disheartened man, sitting alone on a log in the bush that drew me in? Or did I sense there was something at stake in it? The Wesfarmers exhibition recently on display in the Art Gallery of Western Australia highlighted two nineteenth-century paintings of weight in the Australian nationalist art canon. One is McCubbin’s ‘Down on His Luck’, part of the permanent AGWA Historical Exhibition, and the second Tom Roberts’ ‘Shearing the Rams’, on loan from the National Gallery until late July this year. The gallery’s website celebrated the proximity of the two paintings, telling how visitors could see ‘these two great nationalistic narrative paintings side-by-side’. Both works take rural subject matter as the starting point for their images of Australian identity. Roberts presents a glowing vision of the pastoral industry, in contrast with McCubbin’s image of a struggling pioneer ruminating on his misfortune. The contrast is an effective one. In mellow distinction with the sad and serious tones and untamed bush of McCubbin’s painting, ‘Shearing the Rams’ depicts happy smiling boys, dark-haired bearded men, submissive sheep, sunlight filtering in through the semi-open shed to bathe their labour in warmth, a ‘hymn to the glory of rural labour’, in curator Melissa Harpley’s words. These paintings were hung near more examples of nineteenth-century colonial Australian art, around the corner from the Ballarat-born nationalist white woman Hilda Rix Nicholas, and John Longstaff, whose painting ‘Breaking the News’, hung beside ‘Down on His Luck’, likewise draws attention to white masculine emotion. Katherine Bode has argued that since the early 2000s, ‘the white male victim, or the “man in crisis” ... has entered the Australian consciousness, and now begins to challenge the “Aussie battler” as the hegemonic construction of Australian masculinity’. A generous reading of this exhibit, then, could be to see it as valuable for placing the shifting binaries of white settler masculinity in stark relief – the joys of white working-class masculinity for those who belong to that club, the solidarity of pastoralism and of making money from dispossessed land, and, on the other hand, its historical and contemporary crises and