Christopher Menz

If Australian art has sometimes been perceived as wanting in style and opulence, recent art museum exhibitions and monographs examining the art and artists of the Edwardian era tell another story and reveal that there is abundant glamour in Australian art. The Edwardians (2004) and George W. Lambert Retrospective (2007) – both from the National Gallery of Australia – and Bertram Mackennal (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007) have succeeded in presenting Australian art in the grand manner from this most extravagant period.

Julie Blyfield is the most recent subject in a series of monographs on South Australian living artists. They are commissioned by the SALA Inc. Board and produced in association with the annual South Australian Living Artists Festival, now in its tenth year. Handsomely produced and elegantly designed, these abundantly illustrated volumes do much to promote the art and artists of South Australia. Not all the artists in the series, which began with Annette Bezor: A Passionate Gaze (2000), are well known in other states. Notable absentees are Fiona Hall and Hossein Valamanesh, both of whom have received major state and national institutional recognition, through solo exhibitions and publications.

Studies of nineteenth-century decorative arts in Australia have largely focused on objects – furniture, silver, ceramics – produced in Australia for the home market, rather than on a systematic study of imports. The design sources for Australian-made furnishings during the nineteenth century were mostly British; this is also reflected in Britain’s being the principal source of exports to Australia. Given the vast amount of imports from Asia available today – from tableware to mobile telephones, and much of it demonstrating the latest in technology – one could be excused for thinking that our reliance on Asian trade is a twentieth- century phenomenon. Not so. As India, China, Australia: Trade and society 1788–1850 amply demonstrates, our trade with Asia began in the eighteenth century – even ensured the survival of the fledgling port of Sydney – and we have never looked back.