Folk music and national songs

Cover of Old Bush Songs, Banjo Paterson's 1905 collection of bush ballads

The early Anglo-Celtic immigrants of the 18th and 19th centuries introduced folk ballad traditions which were adapted to Australian themes: "Bound for Botany Bay" tells of the voyage of British convicts to Sydney, "The Wild Colonial Boy" evokes the spirit of the bushrangers, and "Click Go the Shears" speaks of the life of Australian shearers. The lyrics of Australia's best-known folk song, "Waltzing Matilda", were written by the bush poet Banjo Paterson in 1895. This song remains popular and is regarded as "the nation's unofficial national anthem".

Well-known singers of Australian folk music include Rolf Harris (who wrote "Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport"), John Williamson, and Eric Bogle whose 1972 song "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" is a sorrowful lament to the Gallipoli Campaign. Bush dance is a traditional style of dance of Australia with strong Celtic roots, and it influenced country music. It is generally accompanied by such instruments as the fiddle, accordion, concertina and percussion instruments.

Classical music

Visual arts

Bradshaws in the Kimberley region of Western Australia

The visual arts in Australia date as far back as 60,000 years. Ancient Aboriginal rock art can be found throughout the continent, notably in UNESCO-listed national parks, from Kakadu in the Northern Territory, to Sydney's Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. 19th century Indigenous spokesman William Barak painted ceremonial scenes, such as corroborees. Led by Albert Namatjira, the Hermannsburg School received national fame in the 1950s for their watercolours of Central Australia. Leading critic Robert Hughes saw contemporary Indigenous Australian art as "the last great art movement of the 20th century”. Key exponents such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rover Thomas and the Papunya Tula group use acrylic paints on canvas to depict dreamings set in a symbolic topography of traditional land and culture. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri's Warlugulong (1977) typifies this style, popularly known as "dot painting". Art is important both culturally and economically to Indigenous society; central Australian Indigenous communities have "the highest per capita concentrations of artists anywhere in the world". Issues of race and identity are raised in the works of many 'urban' Indigenous artists, including Gordon Bennett and photographer Tracey Moffatt.

Shearing the Rams (1890) by Heidelberg School artist Tom Roberts

John Glover and Eugene von Guerard were among the foremost landscape painters during the colonial era. The origin of a distinctly Australian school of painting is often associated with Heidelberg School of the late 1800s. Major figures of the movement include Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin. Like the French Impressionists they painted en plein air, and sought to capture the intense light and unique colours of the Australian bush. Popular works such as McCubbin's Down on His Luck (1889) and Roberts' Shearing the Rams (1890) defined an emerging sense of national identity in the lead-up to Federation. Civic monuments to national heroes were erected; an early example is Charles Summers' 1865 statue of the ill-fated explorers Burke and Wills, located in Melbourne.

Sidney Nolan's Snake (1972), held at the Museum of Old and New Art

Among the first Australian artists to gain a reputation overseas was the impressionist John Peter Russell in the 1880s. He and Charles Conder of Heidelberg School were the only Australian painters known to have close links with the European avant-garde at the time. Other notable expatriates include Rupert Bunny, a salon painter of sensual portraits, and sculptor Bertram Mackennal, known for his commissioned works in Australia and abroad.

Heidelberg’s tradition lived on in Hans Heysen's imagery of gum trees. Roy de Maistre and Grace Cossington Smith were pioneers of modernism in Australia. Jessie Traill and Margaret Preston were accomplished printmakers; the latter artist advocated for a modern national art based on Aboriginal designs.

The conservative art establishment largely opposed modern art, as did the Lindsays and Australian Tonalists. Controversy over modern art in Australia reached a climax when William Dobell won the 1943 Archibald Prize for portraiture. Despite such opposition, new artistic trends grew in popularity. Photographer Max Dupain created bold modernist compositions of Sydney beach culture. Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker were members of the Angry Penguins, a group of expressionists who revived Australian landscape painting through the use of myth, folklore and personal symbolism. Elements of surrealism were used to evoke the strange disquiet of the outback, exemplified in Nolan's iconic Ned Kelly series and Russell Drysdale's 1948 masterpiece The Cricketers. The post-war landscapes of Fred Williams, Ian Fairweather and John Olsen border on abstraction, while the Antipodeans group and Brett Whiteley further explored the possibilities of figurative painting.

Pro Hart's output of Australiana and Ken Done's Sydney Harbour views are widely known through reproductions. Michael Leunig developed a popular style of poetic cartoons. Public artworks have sprung up in unlikely places, from the annual Sculpture by the Sea exhibitions at Bondi and Cottesloe Beach, to the rural folk art of "Australia's big things". Australian street art flourished at the turn of the 21st century, particularly in Melbourne.

Major arts institutions in Australia include the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Australia and National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. The Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart is the Southern Hemisphere's largest private museum.

Theatre

The ceremonial dances of Indigenous Australians recount stories of the Dreamtime and have been performed for thousands of years. European traditions came to Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, with the first performance being carried out in 1789 by convicts. In 1988, the year of Australia's bicentenary, the circumstances of the foundations of Australian theatre were recounted in Timberlake Wertenbaker's play Our Country's Good.

The Princess Theatre in Melbourne

Hobart's Theatre Royal opened in 1837 and is Australia's oldest continuously operating theatre. Inaugurated in 1839, the Melbourne Athenaeum is one of Melbourne's oldest cultural institutions, and Adelaide's Queen's Theatre, established in 1841, is today the oldest purpose-built theatre on the mainland.

The mid-19th century gold rushes provided funds for the construction of grand theatres in the Victorian style, such as the Princess Theatre in Melbourne, established in 1854.

After Federation in 1901, theatre productions evidenced the new sense of national identity. On Our Selection (1912), based on the stories of Steele Rudd, portrays a pioneer farming family and became immensely popular. Sydney's grand Capitol Theatre opened in 1928 and after restoration remains one of the nation's finest auditoriums.

In 1955, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler portrayed resolutely Australian characters and went on to international acclaim. That same year, young Melbourne artist Barry Humphries performed as Edna Everage for the first time at Melbourne University's Union Theatre. His satirical stage creations, notably Dame Edna and Les Patterson, became Australian cultural icons. Humphries also achieved success in the USA with tours on Broadway and has been honoured in Australia and Britain.

Founded in Sydney 1958, the National Institute of Dramatic Art boasts famous alumni including Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson and Hugo Weaving. Construction of the Adelaide Festival Centre began in 1970 and South Australia's Sir Robert Helpmann became director of the Adelaide Festival of Arts.

The new wave of Australian theatre debuted in the 1970s. The Belvoir St Theatre presented works by Nick Enright and David Williamson. The Sydney Opera House, inaugurated in 1973, is the home of Opera Australia and the Sydney Theatre Company.

The Bell Shakespeare Company was created in 1990. A period of success for Australian musical theatre came in the 1990s with the debut of musical biographies of Australian music singers Peter Allen (The Boy From Oz in 1998) and Johnny O'Keefe (Shout! The Legend of The Wild One).

In The One Day of the Year, Alan Seymour studied the paradoxical nature of the ANZAC Day commemoration by the Australians of the defeat of the Battle of Gallipoli. Ngapartji Ngapartji, by Scott Rankin and Trevor Jamieson, recounts the story of the effects on the Pitjantjatjara people of nuclear testing in the Western Desert during the Cold War. It is an example of the contemporary fusion of traditions of drama in Australia with Pitjantjatjara actors being supported by a multicultural cast of Greek, Afghan, Japanese and New Zealand heritage.

Cinema

Actor playing the bushranger Ned Kelly in The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), the world's first feature film

Australia's first dedicated film studio, the Limelight Department, was created by The Salvation Army in Melbourne in 1898, and is believed to be the world's first. The world's first feature-length film was the 1906 Australian production The Story of the Kelly Gang. Tales of bushranging, gold mining, convict life and the colonial frontier dominated the silent film era of Australian cinema. Filmmakers such as Raymond Longford and W. J. Lincoln based many of their productions on Australian novels, plays, and even paintings. An enduring classic is Longford and Lottie Lyell's 1919 film The Sentimental Bloke, adapted from the 1915 poems by C. J. Dennis. After such early successes, Australian cinema suffered from the rise of Hollywood.

In 1933, In the Wake of the Bounty was directed by Charles Chauvel, who cast Errol Flynn as the leading actor. Flynn went on to a celebrated career in Hollywood. Chauvel directed a number of successful Australian films, the last being 1955's Jedda, which was notable for being the first Australian film to be shot in colour, and the first to feature Aboriginal actors in lead roles and to be entered at the Cannes Film Festival. It was not until 2006 and Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes that a major feature length drama was shot in an indigenous language.

Ken G. Hall's 1942 documentary feature Kokoda Front Line! was the first Australian film to win an Academy Award. In 1976, Peter Finch posthumously became the first Australian actor to win an Oscar for his role in Network.

During the late 1960s and 1970s an influx of government funding saw the development of a new generation of filmmakers telling distinctively Australian stories, including directors Peter Weir, George Miller and Bruce Beresford. This era became known as the Australian New Wave. Films such as Wake in Fright, Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock had an immediate international impact. These successes were followed in the 1980s with the historical epic Gallipoli, the romantic drama The Man From Snowy River, the comedy Crocodile Dundee, and the post-apocalyptic Mad Max series.

Founded in 1993, Tropfest is the world's largest short film festival.

The 1990s saw a run of successful comedies including Muriel's Wedding and Strictly Ballroom, which helped launch the careers of Toni Collette and Baz Luhrmann respectively. Australian humour features prominently in Australian film, with a strong tradition of self-mockery, from the Ozploitation style of the Barry McKenzie expat-in-Europe movies of the 1970s, to the Working Dog Productions' 1997 homage to suburbian The Castle, starring Eric Bana in his debut film role. Comedies like the barn yard animation Babe (1995), directed by Chris Noonan; Rob Sitch's The Dish (2000); and Stephan Elliott's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) all feature in the top ten box-office list. During the 1990s, a new crop of Australian stars were successful in Hollywood, including Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger. Between 1996 and 2013, Catherine Martin won four Academy Awards for her costume and production designs, the most for any Australian. Saw (2004) and Wolf Creek (2005) are credited with the revival of Australian horror.

The domestic film industry is also supported by the US producers who produce in Australia following the decision by Fox head Rupert Murdoch to utilize new studios in Melbourne and Sydney where filming could be completed well below US costs. Notable productions include The Matrix, Star Wars episodes II and III, and Australia starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

Architecture

Sydney Opera House (foreground) and Sydney Harbour Bridge

Australia has three architectural listings on UNESCO's World Heritage list: Australian Convict Sites (comprising a collection of separate sites around Australia, including Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, Port Arthur in Tasmania, and Fremantle Prison in Western Australia); the Sydney Opera House; and the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne. Contemporary Australian architecture includes a number of other iconic structures, including the Harbour Bridge in Sydney and Parliament House, Canberra. Significant architects who have worked in Australia include Governor Lachlan Macquarie's colonial architect, Francis Greenway; the ecclesiastical architect William Wardell; the designer of Canberra's layout, Walter Burley Griffin; the modernist Harry Seidler; and Jørn Utzon, designer of the Sydney Opera House. The National Trust of Australia is a non-governmental organization charged with protecting Australia's built heritage.

Victorian era buildings in Collins Street, Melbourne

Evidence of permanent structures built by the Indigenous Australians before the European settlement in Australia in 1788 is limited. Much of what they built was temporary, and was used for housing and other needs. As a British colony, the first European buildings were derivative of the European fashions of the time. Tents and wattle and daub huts preceded more substantial structures. Georgian architecture is seen in early government buildings of Sydney and Tasmania and the homes of the wealthy. While the major Australian cities enjoyed the boom of the Victorian era, the Australian gold rushes of the mid-19th century brought major construction works and exuberant Victorian architecture to the major cities, particularly Melbourne, and regional cities such as Ballarat and Bendigo. Other significant architectural movements in Australian architecture include the Federation style at the turn of the 20th century, and the modern styles of the late 20th century which also saw many older buildings demolished. The Queenslander is a term which denotes the primarily residential style of warm climate architecture developed in Queensland and northern parts of New South Wales.

Interior of St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney

Religious architecture is also prominent throughout Australia, with large Anglican and Catholic cathedrals in every major city and Christian churches in most towns. Notable examples include St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne and St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney. Other houses of worship are also common, reflecting the cultural diversity existing in Australia; the oldest Islamic structure in the Southern Hemisphere is the Central Adelaide Mosque (built in the 1880s), and one of the Southern Hemisphere's largest Buddhist Temples is Wollongong's Nan Tien Temple. Sydney's Gothic-style Great Synagogue was consecrated in 1878. Historically, Australian pubs have also been noted for often distinctive designs.

Significant concern was raised during the 1960s, with developers threatening the destruction of historical buildings, especially in Sydney. Heritage concerns led to union-initiated green bans, which saved significant examples of Australia's architectural past. Green bans helped to protect historic 18th-century buildings in The Rocks from being demolished to make way for office towers, and prevented the Royal Botanic Gardens from being turned into a car park for the Sydney Opera House.

Cuisine

Bush tucker harvested in Alice Springs

Contemporary Australian cuisine combines British and indigenous origins with Mediterranean and Asian influences. Australia's abundant natural resources allow access to a large variety of quality meats, and to barbecue beef or lamb in the open air is considered a cherished national tradition. The great majority of Australians live close to the sea and Australian seafood restaurants have been listed among the world's best.

Bush tucker refers to a wide variety of plant and animal foods native to the Australian bush: bush fruits such as kakadu plums, finger limes and desert quandongs; fish and shellfish of Australia's saltwater river systems; and bush meats including emu, crocodile and kangaroo. Many of these are still seasonally hunted and gathered by the Indigenous Australians, and are undergoing a renaissance of interest on contemporary Australian menus. The macadamia nut is the most famous bushfood plant harvested and sold in large quantities.

Sheep grazing in rural Australia.

Early British settlers brought familiar meats and crops with them from Europe and these remain important in the Australian diet. The British settlers found some familiar game – such as swan, goose, pigeon, and fish – but the new settlers often had difficulty adjusting to the prospect of native fauna as a staple diet. They established agricultural industries producing more familiar Western style produce. Queensland and New South Wales became Australia's main beef cattle producers, while dairy cattle farming is found in the southern states, predominantly in Victoria. Wheat and other grain crops are spread fairly evenly throughout the mainland states. Sugar cane is also a major crop in Queensland and New South Wales. Fruit and vegetables are grown throughout Australia. "Meat and three veg", fish and chips, and the Australian meat pie continue to represent traditional meals for many Australians. The post-World War II multicultural immigration program brought new flavours and influences, with waves of immigrants from Greece, Italy, Vietnam, China, and elsewhere bringing about diversification of the typical diet consumed.

Australia's 11 million square kilometre fishing zone is the third largest in the world and allows for easy access to seafood which significantly influences Australian cuisine. Clean ocean environments produce high quality seafoods. Lobster, prawns, tuna, salmon and abalone are the main ocean species harvested commercially, while aquaculture produces more than 60 species for consumption, including oysters, salmonoids, southern bluefin tuna, mussels, prawns, barramundi, yellowtail kingfish, and freshwater finifish. While inland river and lake systems are relatively sparse, they nevertheless provide some unique fresh water game fish and crustacea suitable for dining. Fishing and aquaculture constitute Australia's fifth most valuable agricultural industry after wool, beef, wheat and dairy.

Vegemite is a well-known spread originating from Australia, though currently produced by the US-owned food company Kraft Foods. Iconic Australian desserts include pavlova and lamingtons. ANZAC biscuits recall the diet of Australia's World War I soldiers at the Battle of Gallipoli.

Beverages

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 899