Robert Hughes reaches that Fatal Shore

Australian writer and art critic Robert Hughes (obituary here) died in New York on 6 August 2012. He was 74.

I didn’t read Robert Hughes’ 1987 best seller The Fatal Shore: The epic of Australia's founding properly. Perhaps I should have. To me, his natural acerbic style had tipped over into a bitterness and even weariness in which the prejudices formed during his period at school and as a member of the Sydney push had reached a natural flowering. Perhaps that was unfair. I thought that his 1981 production, the Shock of the New, had been magnificent. Compare the tone there with his 1997 television series American Visions. I still enjoyed it, but I now found that Hughes’s prejudices were standing in the way. In any event, I put The Fatal Shore Aside in the bookshop and have not returned to it since.

I first read Robert Hughes during what I now think of as my Australian art phase, that period in my life when Australian art and the interaction between it, history and culture had become a fascination. I had read Bernard Smith and found him good because his work provided a coherent structure that fitted my own knowledge, experiences and no doubt prejudices as well.

Robert Hughes’ The Art of Australia (1966) challenged that structure. Whereas Smith reviewed Australian art and found it to be good, Hughes saw it as derivative, secondary, a minor by-blow in global terms. Hughes wrote brilliantly, the 28 year old enfant terrible challenging the old master; Smith was already fifty. While at the end I still preferred Smith, I did enjoy Hughes and his visual mastery; his ability to use words to bring a visual medium alive was quite remarkable. I also liked the way he set an international context even if I did not agree with his dismissal of the local.

There was must have been something in the Sydney water at the time, for Hughes was one of a number that would go on to achieve international fame. Clive James was another, Germaine Greer a third. I also suspect that Hughes’s time at St Ignatius played a part, for that school’s Jesuit tradition provided a framework for a boy who was brilliant but different, who might well not have fitted in at another more pedestrian place.

St Ignatius had another influence as well, one often seen among those leaving the all male strongly boarding environment for the freedom of university. He discovered women and promptly failed first year!

In all, Robert Hughes was a quite remarkable man, if also a very complex one.

Postscript:

Heartfelt tribute to Robert Hughes from Malcolm Turnbull