EVEREST to OPERA: Art versus anti-authoritarianism

You can imagine my delight at last week's made-for-blog news that a painting of Ned Kelly had just become Australia's most expensive work of art, reaching almost US$5m at auction.

How fitting that, in a country which prides itself on its anti-authoritarianism, art's richest price tag should be attached to a work featuring Australia's most celebrated anti-hero - a homicidal rogue who regularly defied the colonial authorities.

First Class Marksman (Menzies Art Brands)

Much is made of how Australia can boast a Ned Kelly but not an Elliot Ness or Dixon of Dock Green, a national hero who enforces the law rather than breaks it. But as regular readers will know, your blogger does not really buy into this anti-authoritarian myth-making, and continues to be surprised at the meek adherence to a bewildering array of rules and regulations (see below).

So I tend to view the acquisition of First Class Marksman - which depicts the notorious outlaw walking through the Australian bush, his rifle at the ready, wearing his trademark body armour, with its iron helmet with a narrow, oblong eye slit - rather differently. It is not so much about the sanctification of Australian folk-lore as the celebration of high-brow Australian art. It is recognising the glorious talent of Sidney Nolan rather than the inglorious notoriety of Kelly - even if, as some of you may point out, Nolan's brilliant series of Kelly paintings did much to enshrine the myth.

Admittedly, my knowledge of Australian art is sketchy at best. Following on from our last blog, any discussion surely has to start with an acknowledgement of the cultural contribution of indigenous artists, who produced an extraordinary body of work both ancient and modern. Then it moves on to the European artists who arrived here after white settlement and made the mistake of representing Australia as if they were painting Europe. The light was all wrong. The trees were too neat and tidy. Landscapes tended to look like the Scottish highlands or the French Alps.

At the end of the 19th Century, artists from what became known as the Heidelberg school changed all that by painting their homeland with a more careful eye for local detail and a distinctly nationalistic brush. Australian art began to look like Australia.

Sidney Nolan came much later and painted in a different style, but his art was perhaps the apotheosis of that trend: it was emphatically and uniquely Australian, and could not have come from any other country.

Nolan was also fixated with Australian stories and idioms. The Ned Kelly series is perhaps his most popular work - and the most visited Australian art collection at the National Gallery in Canberra. But his work also focused on the adventures of the legendary explorers Burke and Wills, along with Gallipoli, which he viewed "as the great modern Australian legend, the nearest thing to a deeply-felt common religious experience". With good reason, art experts see Nolan as "Australia's premier iconographer". So how fitting that his work should command such a high price, the modern-day currency of cultural success. The hammer went down in celebration of Australian art not Australian anti-authoritarianism.

On that front that, there's this blast from Australia's great Formula One hope, Mark Webber. Following the Australian grand prix in Melbourne, Webber said he had spent his time "dodging the ridiculous speeding and parking [rules] and all the nanny-state country that we have down here in Australia" - a reference to Lewis Hamilton's run-in with police.

"I think we've got to read an instruction book when we get out of bed - what we can do and what we can't do ... put a yellow vest on and all that sort of stuff," Webber went on. "It's certainly changed since I left here. It pisses me off coming back here, to be honest.

"It's a great country but we've got to be responsible for our actions and it's certainly a bloody nanny state when it comes to what we can do."

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A swing and a miss

Nick Bryant | 20:56 UK time, Wednesday, 31 March 2010

Comments (24)

A fleeting overnight stay in Canberra or the chance to secure your place in history? Quite. Presidential decisions do not come much easier than the last-minute postponement of Barack Obama's visit to Australia and Indonesia earlier this month, so that he could remain in Washington to focus on minting his health care proposals into law. As the Vice-President Joe Biden rather famously put it, in language that could easily have slipped from the lips of an Australian politician, it really was a very big deal.

According to the news diary here, March was supposed to be dominated by the visit from Barack Obama, the scheduling of which had delighted the Australian government because it had come so early in a first-term presidency. With an election in the offing, Kevin Rudd could have paraded a leader with whom he has struck up a genuinely close personal relationship - a friendship which has added weight to Australia's diplomatic punch.

As it turned out, many commentators have taken the White House's decision to rearrange the trip Down Under as evidence of Canberra's diplomatic irrelevance, especially since the trip had already been downgraded to a one-night, one-city stay. Unhelpfully for the Rudd government, the change in flight plan for Air Force One came on the back of the postponement of a visit from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defence Secretary Robert Gates because of the Haiti earthquake. Again, the impression here was that Washington did not seemed overly concerned about disappointing Canberra, and the story was of how Australia had been slighted.

This was also supposed to be the month that Australia's influence also became manifest in Beijing over the Stern Hu trial. Australian diplomats started March hoping that they would have gained full, unfettered access to the entire trial, and that the court in Shanghai court would have veered on the side of leniency in its sentencing. After all, as soon as it became clear that Stern Hu would face trial, the working assumption here has been that he would be found guilty.

However, even though Kevin Rudd said that the world would be watching, China did not seem overly perturbed about obscuring the view. Then came then verdict, which the Australian government has publicly said was unnecessarily severe. Both are setbacks for Australian diplomacy, an area where the country has in recent times taken great pride in punching above its weight.

Of course, the postponement of the Obama visit sits rather unhappily with the diplomatic wrangling in the run-up to the Stern Hu trial, which the news diary had also suggested would be a big story of the month. Canberra wanted consular access to the entire trial. Beijing refused point blank. Again, the commentary has been about how easy it is to disappoint Australia, or, in this instance, to say no.

So imagine for a moment how March might have unfolded. President Obama would have come to Canberra, delivered a speech extolling the mutual benefits of the ANZUS alliance and shown, through his body language and kind words, how much he values his chummy relationship with Kevin Rudd.

Let's also imagine that Beijing had granted Australia's request for complete access to the trial of Stern Hu, and the court in Shanghai had handed down a lighter sentence.

Then we might have been talking about how Australia had entered a new era of regional influence at the beginning of the Asia-Pacific century. Of how it had new-found clout in Washington and new-found leverage in Beijing.

As March came to an end, we could have been talking about the enhanced power of Australia's diplomatic punch - a punch that was becoming commensurate with the country's growing strategic influence in this corner of the world. Instead, we saw a presidential no-show and a further souring of the relationship with Beijing - a diplomatic swing and a miss.

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Rio Tinto response

Nick Bryant | 12:20 UK time, Monday, 29 March 2010

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There's been a stout-worded response from the Australian government to the 10 year sentence handed down against the former Rio Tinto mining executive, Stern Hu.

This would have been one of the most carefully-calibrated statements of foreign policy since the Rudd government took office, because it clearly wanted to register its disapproval at the severity of the punishment but not in a manner that risked a full-blown diplomatic row.

In recent months, Canberra has worked hard at mending fences with Beijing, which underscored the delicacy of the diplomacy.

Within hours of the verdict, the formulation that Foreign Affairs minister Stephen Smith delivered to reporters was that the sentence was "tough - very tough". The soft-spoken minister expressed disappointment on two counts: first, the severity of the sentence and second, the fact that the portion of the trial dealing with the alleged theft of commercial secrets was held behind closed doors with Australian diplomats kept outside.

In a stiff rebuke of the Chinese legal system, Mr Smith said that Beijing had "missed an opportunity" to show more openness and transparency. This was an "incorrect decision" that was "not in China's interests". He said that the process raised questions that the international business community would want answered - strongly implying there would be commercial fall-out from the trial.

On the allegations of accepting bribes, Mr Smith said that there was substantial evidence, aside from Stern Hu's admission of guilt on this count, of criminal wrong-doing. Still, he stressed that he thought the sentence was unduly harsh.

Senator Bob Brown, the leader of the Australian Greens, has called for Stern Hu to serve out his sentence in an Australian prison. But although Canberra and Beijing have been working on a prisoner exchange agreement, it has not yet come into effect.

It will be interesting to gauge the public reaction. Up until now, the Stern Hu case has failed arouse any great passion. Certainly, there's been none of the outrage that surrounded the case of David Hicks, an Australian convicted in a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay of "providing material support for terrorism". Perhaps it will come, but I have yet to hear any great outcry on talk-back radio, or from the tabloids. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that Stern Hu was born in China and did not become an Australian citizen until 1994.

For its part, Rio Tinto has put as much distance between itself and its former employees as quickly as possible. Within hours of the verdict, it sacked its former employees for what it called "deplorable behaviour". The Anglo-Australian mining giant also said that an external audit conducted after the men's arrest did not uncover any evidence of illegal activity: "Rio Tinto has concluded that the illegal activities were conducted wholly outside our systems".

Rio Tinto made no comment on the severity of the sentences, and the company's chief executive, Tom Albanese, expressed the hope that the guilty verdicts would not prevent it from continuing to build its relationship with China. Like we said last week, Rio Tinto is hoping it's business as usual.

You can get Rio Tinto's full reaction here.

UPDATE, TUESDAY 0600BST:

I just wanted to give some morning-after reaction to the Stern Hu verdict. Here's a robust piece from the business journalist, Ian Verrender, published in the Sydney Morning Herald print edition under the headline, 'Hu just roadkill on the economic superhighway".

Both echoing and amplifying one of the central criticisms of the Australian government, the paper editorialises that "what has been lost... is any previous respect for China's efforts to improve the professionalism, transparency and rationality of its judicial system". The Australian says that the verdict sends a "clear signal that China will not countenance corrupt practices from foreigners or nationals alike", and also criticises the lack of transparency.

In a short editorial, the Melbourne Herald Sun says the sentence "appears harsh", and notes that the Chinese government "missed an opportunity to demonstrate openness in its dealings with a major trading partner".

As if to demonstrate the lack of an obvious tabloid angle on this story, Sydney's Daily Telegraph does not editorialise on the sentence and relegates the story to page 5. The front page is dominated by a story about calls for stronger drink laws. At the foot of the front page is the headline: "100th Boat Arrives: PM's Refugee Crisis Deepens >>p2-3".

The tabloid television news shows, meanwhile, are still focusing on the allegations of misconduct on the set of Hey Dad!, a 1980s television sit-com.

Driving to work this morning, the most outrage to emanate from my radio was generated by the news that international Twenty20 cricket will now move from the Sydney Cricket Ground to the Olympic Stadium at Homebush (many Sydneysiders regard this as the outskirts of the city, but it has become its geographical centre because of the creep of the cul-de-sacs into the countryside). "A soulless game played at a soulless venue," in the words of one caller.

One of the most interesting strands of the Stern Hu story will be how Rio Tinto responds to the finding from the judge in Shanghai that Stern Hu passed on what the court regarded as commercial secrets to the company. By sacking the four men, Rio Tinto obviously moved quickly to distance itself from its former employees, and the charges against them - the Anglo-Australian mining giant described their behaviour as "deplorable". But the statement released in the aftermath of the verdict has not addressed the issue of the theft of commercial secrets. The statement notes: "Rio Tinto is unable to comment on the charge regarding obtaining commercial secrets as it has not had the opportunity to consider the evidence. That part of the trial was held in closed court and no details of the case were made public until the verdicts and sentences were announced today."

As I write, Rio Tinto is in the process of going through the ruling and formulating its response. I will keep you posted.