Fred's Place: A Dry Aesthetic

Abstract

For many Australians, Fred Williams's landscape paintings embody their country's dry aesthetic. While it has often been said that Williams 'painted the landscape as we see it today', little attention has been given to the fact that the present dryness and scruffiness of the places he painted in southeastern Australia are a result of colonial clearing of land once farmed by Indigenous tribes. Underlying this lack of acknowledgement is a complex European history and culture of repressed culpability, which throws partial light on Williams's claim to have no interest in the land for its own sake. Nonetheless, Williams unconsciously prefigured these concerns, rejecting the prevailing romantic and picturesque landscape aesthetics of his day for a formalist approach that indirectly indexes dryness and land degradation resulting from colonial exploitation. When Aboriginal art first appeared in public galleries in the 1970s, Williams developed a keen appreciation for it, believing it touched on his own concerns in fundamental ways. Since Williams's premature death in 1982, increased awareness of global warming and climate change has challenged aesthetic responses to and conceptions of the land. Given the important position Williams holds within the canon of Australian landscape painting, it is crucial to understand precisely how his aesthetic relationship to the land operated and how cultural and ecological conditions brought it about.