After the introductory flurries, including Thomas on writing and a 1999 text about his curatorial work, the anthology commences in 1962 with a Sunday Telegraph review of Sydney’s Annandale Imitation Realists, and concludes with an address to graduating students at the University of Tasmania in 2007; the most recent text was published in late 2018. Particular tones speak to different audiences: the newspaper pieces are summary, sharp, conversational; extended expository essays, such as the 1965 obituary for Ralph Balson, are both scrupulously accurate and immediate: ‘My own brief meeting with Balson revealed (besides shy charm) a man of striking serenity and immense pleasure and pride in his own paintings. It was at one of his exhibitions, and he seemed like a gardener whose flowers had all done their best.’

With this splendid and absorbing book, the importance of Daniel Thomas’s writing in Australian cultural life is revealed

Astonishingly, half the texts were written between 1998 and 2018, during ‘retirement’ in his native Tasmania, and many revisit artists first canvassed decades earlier, such as Tom Roberts, Grace Crowley, and Mike Parr. Some important issues recur: ‘Aboriginal Art: Who was interested?’, originally published in 2011, explores the vicissitudes of Australian understanding of Aboriginal culture. An exceptionally broad range emerges through the long duration of Thomas’s ‘recent past’. This has been secured by intense looking, warmed by generosity of spirit. The sublime ‘Inside Cossington’ from 2004 revisits paintings by Grace Cossington Smith that Thomas originally brought into the Australian canon in the early 1970s. (He often notes visiting artists’ studios or locations, seeing what they saw.)

Despite informed interest in colonial art, and occasional essays on John Glover and Eugene von Guérard, the overwhelming impetus of this long scrutiny has been to understand what has happened most immediately, in the light of current understanding. ‘Recent Past’ is a nicely agnostic category that sidesteps the theoretical minefields lying in the ideas of the modern, the postmodern, or even the contemporary, and has been central to Thomas’s work as a curator since at least 1973, when he curated the landmark Recent Australian Art for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Trained as an historian, Thomas says, ‘I am before theory.’

The ‘Recent Past’ thus suggests complicity in what took place, and the responsibility to record it. (‘The recent past is always vulnerable,’ says Daniel.) If this is history, as the editors say, it’s not pre-empted by defined periodisation but is shaped by alertness to the consequences of the continuous present. Indeed, Thomas’s reflections on colonial art always consciously rethink that past for this moment: the tough review of the National Gallery of Australia’s 1998 exhibition New Worlds from Old details its failure to read one crucial historical import of the works: ‘In New Worlds from Old we see a strong Aboriginal presence, but don’t read much about it.’ If this is current wisdom informing the past, other texts show startling prescience: the concluding sentence of ‘Aboriginal Art as Art’ (1976) reads ‘[Aboriginal art] should also be presented, in its totality, by the Aborigines themselves in whatever way they feel is most meaningful, first to themselves, and second to the visitors, like us, from another culture.’

In Recent Past, Thomas reports from the frontlines of art, the texts rich in observed detail that anchors the reader to the moment. The maverick intelligence of ‘Greenberg in Sydney: The Sharpest Eye in the West’, published in 1968, was so candid that it upset the visiting American critic; ‘Museum Pieces 3: 3D TV, 1973’, published in 2004, recounts the celebrated scandal of Tim Burns’s work in Recent Australian Art in 1973; and ‘Art & Life: The Actuality of Sculpture’, an important essay from 1976 about the ephemeral forms of art then becoming central to contemporary art, should be required reading for any course about Australian cultural history, including in high schools. Equally important is an insistence on attending to the overlooked, the out of fashion, like the Tasmanian portrait painter Owen Lade; the 1973 essay on David Strachan is a revelation – comprehensive, empathetic, imaginative; the text on Weaver Hawkins shows how important it is to work against taste, engaging with work on its own terms. Despite his habitually lively sympathy, when Thomas is made dyspeptic by carelessness, or wrong-headedness, we hear about it. ‘Fourth time unnecessary?’ he asks when reviewing the latest edition of Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting 1788–2000; and there is a hilarious admonition of the National Library of Australia for its slack editing of Hazel de Berg and Geoffrey Dutton’s 1992 Artists’ Portraits.

The writing is frequently amused, in a dry, worldly way, more often passionate. Perhaps all anthologies are biographies, but Recent Past reveals this more than most, partly through contemporary marginal notes, but mostly through the unfolding throughout of Thomas’s life: his Tasmanian origins; his appreciation, as a countryman first and last, of farming and labour; an undiminished love of country; and a certain unpretentiousness allied with confidence (born of privilege, it’s true). Summary, incisive, generous, Thomas is always, most importantly, interested in what he sees as speaking to Australian experience, whether Rosalie Gascoigne’s evocation of the Monaro or Christo’s 1968 Wrapped Coast.

I waited decades for this book. A few quibbles aside – the unexplained use of the almost-illegible 1973 typeface for title pages, some less than sharp illustrations – it has more than exceeded expectations. Recent Past: Writing Australian art is not only a guide to what has been, it shows how those of us writing about art in Australia might address the future. Essential reading.