These were among the surprising benefits (so Smith maintained) of distance, of living at a remove from the centres of imperial and academic power: a conviction that came increasingly to dominate his ideas about art, politics, and social organisation as the years went by. 'I am thinking of distance, or more precisely distancing, as an intellectual tool both for aesthetic evaluation and the writing of history', he had declared before heading that summer for Prague. The idea that Australia's remoteness might also be seen as, in some sense, disabling – a doctrine powerfully enunciated a decade or so later – did not shake this conviction. 'Distance is not a tyranny to a serious historian,' Smith firmly declared. On the contrary, 'distance from one's own time' might extend and sharpen an observer's perception, just as a change of location could do. Smith relished the dictum of Hegel, here aptly evoked by Sheridan Palmer in the title of her new biography: 'The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.' Even with old age, the ultimate falling of the dusk – Smith was approaching ninety-five when he died in Melbourne in 2011 – new ways of seeing the world, of interpreting the past, of understanding the pattern of one's own (or another's) life, might still be found out.

Initiated at Bernard Smith's own request during the final years of his life, Hegel's Owl has the benefits of closeness to its subject as well as of distance from it. Sheridan Palmer draws on her own interviews and conversations with Smith during this last reflective phase of his life as well as the recollections of more than eighty of his friends and acquaintances. She has worked through the huge archive of personal materials – diaries, letters, papers, ephemera, now housed mostly at the National Library of Australia – to which she has enjoyed exclusive access; and with Smith's own collection of books, some closely annotated, which once filled four rooms of his house in Fitzroy and is now held in the State Library of Victoria. Smith shared with his near-contemporary Manning Clark (born 1915, a year before Smith) what Clark's biographer Mark McKenna has called 'an eye for eternity': a passion for hoarding such personal items for the benefit of posterity, confident that sooner or later the big story of his life would need to be told. And until the hoped-for biographer arrived, Smith proceeded to tell the story for himself (as Clark had done) in two volumes of autobiography: The Boy Adeodatus: The portrait of a lucky young bastard, published to critical acclaim in 1984, and A Pavane for Another Time (2002).

Bernard Smith (National Library of Australia)

Domestic and scholarly concerns were remarkably entangled in Smith's life, and knowledge of his personal circumstances often casts light on his larger intellectual beliefs and preoccupations, as Palmer revealingly shows. Smith's notions about marginality, for example, and the potential benefits of living at a remove from some presumed centre were shaped in large part by his complex feelings about his own origins and place in society. The product of a chance encounter between an unmarried Irish housemaid and a philandering gardener thirty years her senior, young Bennie Smith came to feel not only abandoned by his biological parents but sidelined too by his legal guardians, excluded even, in a final humiliation, from the funeral of his late foster-mother. 'Many illegitimate children who do not succumb to self-pity experience a kind of distancing from society,' Smith later wrote to Vincent Buckley: 'One sees oneself almost as a kind of witness figure.' In an ameliorating move, he cast himself as the boy Adeodatus, the brilliant and beloved illegitimate son of Augustine of Hippo, to whom Charles Smith, his actual father, bore a strictly limited resemblance. He found deep kinship with Kate Challis (also known as Ruth Adeney), the devoted partner in his long marriage, another illegitimate and displaced child. He befriended the New Zealand collector Rex Nan Kivell, yet another 'lucky young bastard' who shared his passion for art of the Pacific. When invited to deliver the 1980 ABC Boyer Lectures Smith intended initially to speak, no doubt from personal experience, on the theme of illegitimacy, before realising that this topic had more powerful application to the plight of indigenous Australians – long denied legal identity, pushed to the very margins of their own traditional lands – than to his own more privileged condition. In a change of direction that was to be of lasting significance in his work, he re-fashioned the series and called it The Spectre of Truganini.

The questions of national identity that Smith touches on in the Boyer lectures engaged him throughout much of his life. Ever scornful of American cultural imperialism, ever sensitive to lingering traces of unthinking condes-cension from the British art world, Smith stood for a freer and more equal form of global cultural exchange. Near to home, he loathed the xenophobic rantings of Lionel Lindsay against the intrusion into the local scene of 'degenerate' artists from abroad: precisely the group who, in Smith's view, had the power to enrich and expand Australian horizons. Rex Ingamells's Jindyworobak poets, drawing on Aboriginal traditions and beliefs, represented for Smith a variant form of emergent nationalism which he viewed with distrust. Whatever benefits a removed location might offer Australians, isolation, he could see, also carried its perils. For artists and academics, distance from the great cultural conversations and collections of Europe was particularly disabling, as he came increasingly to realise. He urged and assisted young students to travel regularly abroad, as he did himself. In London he valued especially his contacts with the extraordinary circle of scholars at the Warburg Institute – Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Wittkower, Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Cassirer, Fritz Saxl, among others – whose thinking spurred and sharpened his own. Refugees all from war-torn Europe, they remained, like Smith himself, displaced persons: almost English, but (as he had said to the Soviet officer in Prague) not quite.

Bernard Smith at his home in Fitzroy, Melbourne in 1987 (photograph by Alec Bolton)No one before Smith had brought such a breadth of learning to the study of art in Australia. Posted as a young man to a small one-teacher primary school in the now-vanished township of Murraguldrie some eighty miles from Wagga Wagga, Smith devoted his evenings to reading, with the passion of an auto-didact, the great writers who might prompt him to think about the role of art in the society of his time: Spengler, Marx, Engels, Mill, Darwin, Hegel, Burckhardt, Freud, Huxley, Auden, the English Romantic poets. Palmer skilfully traces the effects of this early reading on Smith's intellectual development. She makes (unsurprisingly, given the scope of her study) one or two trivial slips. Tolstoy's What Is Art? is not really a 'compendium' of aesthetic theory but a radical assault – almost in the style of a young Bernard Smith – on received art opinion in Tolstoy's day. T.E. Hulme did not call Romanticism 'split religion' but (more inventively) 'spilt religion'. Noël Coward, Cecil Beaton, and Charles Laughton are oddly described as members of the Bloomsbury Group, with which they were not closely associated. Whether Bernard Smith himself in 1956 – when appointed to the Australian Humanities Research Council (forerunner of the Australian Academy of the Humanities) – would already have been widely perceived as 'Australia's foremost art historian' is open to question: most of his major works were not yet published, while he himself was a recent recruit to the Melbourne Fine Arts Department where Joseph Burke, a future President of the Academy, still presided as Herald Chair.

In its larger sweep, Palmer's book shows nonetheless in persuasive detail just why and how Smith did come in time to deserve such a title, which – five years after his death, one hundred years from his birth, with the due distance of time – he might still be thought to retain. Palmer looks frankly at the debit side of the ledger: at Smith's personal failings, his controversial management of the Power Institute, his misplaced hopes for his revisionist history of modernism, or what he termed uncatchily the Formalesque. But as her generously spirited biography constantly reminds us, Smith played a towering role throughout a crucial and extended period of Australian cultural and intellectual life. He was the man who showed us, as Edward Said once admiringly noted, the cultural riches that lie beyond the 'metropolitan borders' of Europe; who, in the words of Greg Dening, 'made us look at our own marginality in a positive way'. Now the big story of his life has been eloquently told.