Kenneth Jack and rural towns: Australian socialist realist art (or just a less bitter pill to swallow)?

Abstract

Early Australian artists of European extraction had to wrestle with the vast, inhospitable climate of inland Australia, unfamiliar animals and plants, and harsh sunlight. To a greater or lesser extent, especially Boyd and Drysdale, they also considered the Aboriginal inhabitants and how Europeans’ grip on the land and their understanding of it always paled in comparison with theirs, leaving the Europeans the ones out of place, infringing on a complex culture. Here, I use Marxist theories of ideology and art to examine the work of Kenneth Jack, an Australian realist painter of rural towns. His reassuring images are not confrontational, unlike those of Boyd and Drysdale. They can be ideological by pointing to an apparently timeless and tranquil midday peace, free from urban stressors and manufacturing and architectural blight. As with poet Banjo Paterson, they create a discourse that raises up life in “the bush.” These images can function as ideology where rural communities and services appear to be underappreciated and under threat. It is a conservative vision as the absence of people and vehicles reminds us, perhaps paradoxically, of romanticized rural communities just out of the painter’s sight.