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White Aborigines: Identity politics in Australian art

The value of this book lies in its ambitious theoretical scope and the important questions it asks about the status of Aboriginality within Australian art. Suggesting that ‘perhaps the history of non-Aboriginal Australian painting exposes, in its upturning and reinvention of a Western identity in the antipodes, the very structures of semiological exchange which stage identity’ (p 7), Ian McLean’s analysis of the  gure of the ‘White Aborigine’ in Australian art aims to deliver insights into deeper processes of European identity-formation . While it does forge an original thematic path through Australian art history and theory, however, White Aborigines ultimately fails to achieve its aims—not least, perhaps, because its psychoanalyti c bias prevents alternative interpretations of identity politics from surfacing in the narrative. McLean’s narrative is organised around three tropes: melancholy, redemption and reconciliation. Melancholy and the search for redemption shape a sensibility that explains (even if it fails to justify) the barbarity of Australian colonialism. And reconciliation is used to  gure the possibility of a postcolonia l present-future. McLean embarks on his historical survey with an engaging discussion of the melancholic underbelly of the European Enlightenment. He writes: ‘Melancholy was the diagnosis, colonialism the medicine, utopia the body redeemed’ (p 22). So, while the expulsion of convicts and other undesirables promised to simultaneously redeem Europe and reform its exiles, it also rendered Australia ‘a primary site of melancholy’ (p 22). McLean then traces melancholy through three colonial aesthetic conventions: the sublime, the grotesque and the picturesque. These are, in turn, respectively, connected to the colonial ‘phases’ of exploration, invasion and settlement. Overall McLean’s discussion of colonial art in the second and third chapters remains unconvincing . I am troubled by the working distinction that he maintains between ‘colonialism’, on the one hand, and ‘invasion’, on the other hand. Only the ‘grotesque’ depictions of Aborigines by Thomas Watling and the