Antipodean Vision: Postwar Arts in Australia and the South Pacific Available to Purchase

The South Pacific was a major theater of conflict during World War II. Acts of unprecedented violence—the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki—brought about the surrender of Japanese forces. Such experiences shaped postwar consciousness in countries throughout the South Pacific, as did the emerging realignment of global power along Cold War lines. This chapter traces impacts on artists throughout the region. Australian artists such as Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, and Sidney Nolan processed the war by absorbing its effects as resonances within the mythologizing of Australian experience that had become their main enterprise. Aotearoa/New Zealand artist Colin McCahon saw local landscape as a site of human desolation. While several artists remained committed to modernist internationalism, others insisted on the universality of local, Antipodean values. Indigenous art and culture asserted itself, not least as “Maori modernism” and as a powerful Aboriginal art movement across Australia.