Thomas Lycette, View of Tasman’s Peak, from Macquarie Plains, Van Dieman’s Land, c 1823, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (AGSA, 2024).
A quaint little dalliance on the Merry old Tasman Peak
Every painting is set in England, isn’t it?
Lightning strikes & robs all the colours from the frame
This is the sort of been through the wash of an old family polaroid
A man standing like a tin pot on a peak & another with a sash
That only a tin soldier would wear—though they
haven’t discovered many minerals yet. Just wait.
The sperm stain of a town, of course, is waiting for hot water to christen it
To turn that wayward nowhere place into a great Tim Winton-esque novel
Reminiscent, nonetheless, of the bloodhound bounding across the bog
The sort of floppy-eared fella who ripped the head off a rabbit
And brought its myxomatosis-riddled body across the pacific
by its neck
At least this time, I suppose, all the ‘natives’ aren’t ashen
The way only a stranger or a ghost or a cigarette burn is
In fact, they’re saved from the brush in their absence
Accurate, at least, when thinking about genocide
Though the smoky complexion had the same
inference
Yes, these trees are so perfectly straight and equidistant here
They’re ripe for the axe, the timber yard or the woodchipper
What did they say, again? Art is all about the collateral.
You reveal the sculpture within the block
by beheading the cliff face
By Tim Loveday
Melanopic Light
I encounter Thomas Lycett’s Distant View of Sydney 1824 for the first time through the computer screen on which these words also appear. It is late afternoon in my office at UTS on 10 April, 2024. The white walled room is lit by fluorescents. To counter the glare off my computer I use a program called f.lux, which adjusts my screens colour temperature according to location and time of day, growing warmer and less harsh on my eyes as the unseen sun disappears.
Melanopic Light (vs. white) 25% Ambient light: 63.0lx.
As I stare at Lycett’s construction of Australia I am reminded of what Judith Wright wrote in Preoccupations of Australian Poetry, 1965. She discussed the problem which faced the European settler, that in coming to a new land a sense of tradition and inheritance slowly faded. That their lives made grand beyond the scope of their subjective lives, their link to history, to the past, lost power as soon as the sails flexed.
Melanopic Light (vs. white) 24% Ambient light: 328.0lx.
If an essence of art is to divulge and purge into the form oneself to know oneself and one’s culture then what is the settler artist but a place not here nor there.
By Graham Akhurst
