Idris Murphy

4 The ‘cultural convergence’ between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia that was initially called for by Bernard Smith in his 1980 Boyer lecture for the creation of a sense of national Australian identity, finds resonance in the interplay of philosophic and aesthetic discourses expressed in the work of Australian artist Idris Murphy. Murphy comments, “Of course I’m not Indigenous but I love the idea of this great wonderful European tradition, which I belong to, fusing with the Indigenous art – happening right under my nose, in my lifetime! And I can see that as a whole new sort of language base for contemporary painting.” Art historian, Terry Smith formally acknowledged this convergence in 1991 to have occurred in the contemporary work of Australian artists and that of Aboriginal artists in the mediums of bark and acrylic. More recently, Professor of Art History at Melbourne University, Ian McLean, has intricately evaluated on this contemporaneity. McLean now explores this cross-cultural interaction through the lens of the ‘transcultural’. McLean explains, …there is no single Indigenous or Western art style, but many constantly evolving ones responding to, and dealing with, changing situations. Likewise because art is the currency of transculturation there is no exclusively Western or Aboriginal aesthetic principle. Rather the poetry of feeling that produces art is an innate human faculty not bound by cultural mores, and artists, whatever their traditions, are adept or interacting with other ways of making and thinking about art, thus artists are alert to the new and the different; like the canary in the mine, art is an early warning system of the new and the other (McLean 2016: 247-248) Idris Murphy elaborates his aesthetic and philosophic discourse of ‘transculturation’ through the medium of landscape painting interweaving the complex metaphysical currents associated with ‘connection to place’ and ‘being’ that are informed by a number of sources. Foremost is that of the Aboriginal Dreaming first elaborated by anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner (1905-1981) in his famous essay, ‘The Dreaming’ written in 1953 and published in his White man got no Dreaming : The Dreaming is that of a sacred heroic time long ago when man and nature came to be as they are, but neither ‘time’ nor ‘history’ as we understand them is involved in this meaning ...Time is also, in a sense, part of the present. One cannot ‘fix’ the Dreaming to time: it was, and is, everywhen ... It was an age when the ancestors did marvellous things that men can no longer do ...The Dreaming is ... a kind of charter of things that still happen: and a kind of logos or principle of order that transcends everything significant for Aboriginal man. For traditional Aboriginal artists, an understanding of the nature of their relationship to ‘country’ and the Dreaming is vital to how they see themselves, how they lead their lives and what they paint. (Stanner 1979: 23-24) Transculturation in the Painting of Idris Murphy. European and Aboriginal Dialogues