Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

LOOKING FOR THE 'BEAU MONDE' IN BRISBANE Godfrey Rivers Under the Jacaranda Sarah Tiffin Facing page R. Godfrey Rivers England/Australia 1859-1925 Under the Jacaranda 1903 Oil on canvas 143.4X 107.2cm Purchased 1903 Queensland Art Gallery Right 'Old Kiosk', Brisbane Botanic Gardens, c.1898. Photograph courtesy John Oxley Library, Brisbane The people of Melbourne Are frightfully well born. O f much the same kidney Is the beau-monde of Sydney. But in Queensland the people insult yer And don't 'ardly know they've been rude They're that ignorant, common and crude. It's hardly worth Mentioning Perth! j ew works in the Collection of the * Queensland Art Gallery have ^ enjoyed as much popularity as Godfrey Rivers's Under the Jacaranda. Painted in 1903, some twelve years after the British-born Rivers arrived in Queensland, the image depicts Rivers and his wife Selina sitting in the shade of a large jacaranda tree, at that time a landmark in Brisbane's Botanic Gardens.2 This was the first jacaranda tree grown in Australia, planted in 1864 by the Gardens' Superintendent, Walter Hill, from an assortment of seeds and plants brought back from Brazil by the Australian wheat ships that plied the trade route to South America.3Today the species is established as a Brisbane icon, and with jacaranda trees growing in most suburbs (many of the older trees were grown from the seed of this first jacaranda), Under the jacaranda may be considered a quintessential image of Brisbane. Certainly, Rivers's sensitive rendering of the clouds of mauve-blue blossoms captures the attention of Gallery visitors and has ensured the painting's enduring appeal. Rivers's portrayal of an urbane couple, indulging in that most civilised of practices, the taking of tea, countered the popular conception of Brisbane society at the turn of the century, which was frequently satirised in the southern press as uncouth and unsophisticated. Many of the perceptions of Queensland as a wild and rugged place were also shaped by the highly nationalistic and strongly parochial Bulletin magazine, which idealised the colony as the natural home of the bronzed Aussie bushman.4 The Bulletins championing of the bushman as our very own home-grown hero was a strategy employed by the magazine's staff of largely Sydney-based poets and journalists to cultivate a sense of national identity. That this identity was more a projection of their own masculine values than an accurate representation of the lifestyles of most Australians was conveniently ignored in the magazine's articles and editorials.5Such nationalistic fervour, coupled with the nostalgic belief that rural life was free of the corruption that tainted urban existence, resulted in an image of Australia not borne out by reality — by the late nineteenth century, Australia was one of the most urbanised countries in the world.6As one historian has suggested, 'one could argue powerfully that whereas the appeal of the bush has been the great myth of Australian history, the appeal of the city has been the great fact'.7 Despite the Bulletin's promotion of Queensland as the epitome of its tough, rural ideal, the colony was no different from the rest of Australia in the trend towards urbanisation. Still relatively new as a political and administrative entity (Queensland separated from New South Wales in 1859), Brisbane might have trailed the southern cities in the development of an urban infrastructure for much of the nineteenth century, but it made a concerted effort to catch up, and the final decades of the century saw phenomenal change as the city experienced unprecedented levels of growth. By 1891, 88 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965