In City Bushmen, Astbury studies their large-scale pastoral figure subjects of pioneering settlers, gold prospectors, stockmen, shearers, etc.; those canvases upon which the Heidelberg School painters expended most time and effort, and which fulfilled their highest ambitions. (Roberts made between seventy and eighty ‘studies of the light, the atmosphere, the shed, the sheep, the men and the work’ over two shearing seasons before completing his heroic Shearing the Rams in 1890. McCubbin considered The Pioneer, executed between 1903 and 1905, his own ‘best effort in Art’.) These heroic paintings – probably the best loved in Australia – are frequently reproduced and written about, but rarely discussed in a social and historical context. City Bushmen is a scholarly and thoroughly readable account of their origins.

The Heidelberg School’s ‘national’ subject matter was often foreshadowed by popular black and white newspaper illustrations and photography; derived in turn from a pictorial tradition centred on the bushman which had emerged as early as the 1850s in the work of S.T. Gill and other colonial artists. This evolution is fully documented in twenty-nine colour plates and more than 200 black-and-white reproductions. As well, whilst the Heidelberg School painters consciously strived to reveal an Australian national identity in their pastoral figure subjects, they were keenly aware of contemporary trends in European art. The nineteenth-century French and English realists and naturalists, such as Jules Bastien Lepage or George Clausen, combined a deep reverence for nature with emphasis on the moral, universal imagery of human endeavour: the hardships and humble rewards of a life close to the soil. Astbury argues that changes in the Heidelberg School’s treatment of the bushman theme ‘were as much a response to recent developments within European [and American] realism as a spontaneous reaction to local events’.

By the centenary decade of the 1880s, Astbury explains, the ‘reflexive empathy’ felt by city dwellers for their rural forebears and counterparts was a vital component of nationalistic feeling: ‘as urban society became more industrialized, sophisticated and complex it was perhaps inevitable that artists and writers should turn with nostalgia towards the ‘simpler’ life of the bush’. Indeed the ‘rural mythology’ of this book’s title was as much a creation of contemporary audiences as it was the conscious intention of the artists themselves.

The grand scale of the Heidelberg School’s response was largely made possible by sound professional and academic training offered at the National Gallery of Victoria’s art school (the envy of aspiring painters in New South Wales). Astbury argues convincingly that the Heidelberg artists were not ‘young radicals in revolt’ against prevailing aesthetic tastes. He is one of the re-writers of Australian art history (along with Dr Ann Galbally, Ms Helen Topliss and others) whose research over the past couple of decades has challenged earlier 20th century accounts of the Heidelberg School based on inexact reminiscences and cliche which at times approaches idolatry. The arrival of George Frederick Folingsby –trained in Munich, Paris and London – as Director of the National Gallery and Master of the School of Painting in 1882 ‘had a magical effect on the students’, wrote one contemporary; for he encouraged both figure painting and dramatic narrative subject matter. McCubbin’s long absent swagman returning, Home Again, was a prize winner in the Gallery’s student competition of 1884. John Longstaff carried off a European traveling scholarship with his picture of a mining disaster, Breaking the News, in 1887.

Pioneering life is the most constant theme of McCubbin’s oeuvre: from the little bush wanderer in Lost of 1886, through the unsuccessful gold-digger in Down on His Luck, 1889; A Bush Burial, 1890; the itinerant families in The North Wind, 1891. or On the Wallaby Track, 1894; and many others. Probably most famous for his images of ‘strong masculine labour’. Roberts wrote that ‘by making art the perfect expression of one time and one place, it becomes art for all time and of all places’.

As Astbury demonstrates, their paintings present a highly selective view of the contemporary rural scene, avoiding significant social and political realities. In fact, Roberts tended to hark back to earlier times. He was most romantically historicising in Bailed Up, begun 1893: a bushranging incident ‘typifying the early days of New South Wales’ which had occurred some thirty years before.

Of the Heidelberg School protagonists, Streeton was less interested in figure painting than in effects of landscape and light; whilst Conder rarely worked on a large scale and departed for Europe in 1890. Streeton’s early Settler’s Camp (whereabouts unknown to Astbury at the time of writing) has now been ‘rediscovered’. Several other important pictures presently known only from contemporary descriptions and reproductions are discussed by Astbury, making City Bushmen a most comprehensive survey; for too many publications have dealt only with the limited selection of paintings held by museums and galleries.

In his emphasis upon the popular origins of the Heidelberg School’s subject matter Astbury runs some risk of trivializing the works of art themselves. (Several of the greatest paintings are reproduced on far too small a scale in relation to their photographic or black-and-white press precursors; and a number of the colour plates are very poor.) Of course, all artists are influenced by earlier productions. The young Heidelberg painters, however, transformed familiar imagery both by means of sheer physical scale and by a new attitude to its significance for Australians. At their best they achieved a balance between the particular and the typical, the individual and the universal, of timeless appeal. This achievement is dearly demonstrated in the first national touring exhibition of the Heidelberg School which, by happy chance. coincides with publication of City Bushmen*. Indeed, that exhibition and its catalogue are indebted to Leigh Astbury’s years of research (published but widely scattered in theses and journals as recorded in his excellent bibliography). City Bushmen is not only an essential resource for art historians. It is a fascinating revelation of the social and cultural context –almost exactly one hundred years ago as we approach our national bicentenary – of Australian painting’s golden age’.

*‘Golden Summers: Heidelberg and beyond’, at the National Gallery of Victoria until 27 January 1986; then at the Art Galleries of New South Wales from 21 February to 20 April, South Australia from 9 May to 29 June and Western Australia from 30 July to 14 September 1986.