Through the munificence of the Harold Wright and the Sarah and William Holmes Scholarships, many dozens of Australian art museum curators have learnt much of their craft by total immersion in the British Museum’s department of prints and drawings, one of the greatest and most comprehensive in the world. Yet that department has only lately turned its attention to the task of assembling a truly representative collection of modern Australian graphic arts. That it should have done so over such a brief period is largely due to the hard work of Stephen Coppel, the Jim Slaughter Curator of the Museum’s modern collection of prints and drawings, who is himself Australian, and to the generosity of a host of Australian donors and philanthropists, beginning with Lyn Williams in 2002, all of whom have evidently appreciated with vision the considerable benefits to Australia of establishing a firmer and more up-to-date cultural footprint in the Museum, the better to derive from it a truly global context for modern Australian art and, with luck, entirely new audiences – something that really ought to happen also in the United States, although American art museums seem on the whole curiously reluctant ever to engage seriously with Australian art. I cannot understand why this is so.

The present volume and the exhibition to which it is a companion formed part of a much larger Australian season at the British Museum last year, during which the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (which also benefited enormously from the early work and guidance of Banks) created a surprisingly resilient and pleasingly authentic, crackly Australian garden landscape in the Museum’s forecourt, running along a portion of Great Russell Street – replete with banksias, naturally – and an exquisitely chosen exhibition of Aboriginal Australian baskets was mounted from within the Museum’s Indigenous collections. Rarely, if ever, has any British public institution dedicated itself to such a cogent representation of Australian art and nature in central London, and it was impossible for this expatriate visitor not to be moved by that.

John Brack, The sun lamps (1966)

In the past ten years the Museum has gathered more than 880 modern and contemporary Australian prints and drawings. Although the print room’s exhibition was necessarily a representative selection (though flatteringly large), running roughly – as the title makes clear – from the Angry Penguins to the present, also paying particular attention to recent developments in Indigenous printmaking, the book contains a complete list of works acquired for the Museum, set out rather usefully, in this instance, by donor. Thus the generosity of artists and artists’ families, heirs, and estates is particularly evident. Many of them were apparently persuaded by James Mollison to follow Lyn Williams’s example, among them Helen Brack, Robert Jacks, Barbara Blackman, James Gleeson, Andrew Klippel, Mary Nolan, Bea Maddock, Barbara Tucker, and Margaret Tuckson. But to this first rank of donors one may also add curators(Mollison himself, Sonia Dean, Irena Zdanowicz, Anne Gray), dealers (Charles Nodrum, Philip Bacon, the Australian Print Workshop in Melbourne), the Australian High Commission, Gordon and Marilyn Darling, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra (from the Arthur Boyd gift), the Heide Museum of Modern Art (the Estate of Sweeney Reed), the Government of the Netherlands (who in 2006 presented Duyfken: The Aboriginal Print Portfolio – ten prints by ten Indigenous artists), among many others.

With the rapid evolution of all things ‘online’, the future of the printed catalogue has lately been called into question, yet there are few other portents of its imminent demise. There is, however, considerable discussion about how catalogues are structured and collated; what underlying presumptions shape them and possibly even produce a kind of straitjacket for the works of art they group and represent. I am not quite sure how helpful this is for those of us who are charged with the responsibility of writing them, but it is certainly true that some catalogues are compulsively over-exhaustive or maddeningly under-documented. There are catalogues whose barren texts drain much of the life from the works of art they incarcerate, and catalogues that struggle pluckily but in vain to lift an overwhelming burden of bad art. There are catalogues that are far too bossy, and catalogues that seem almost pathologically to avoid any form of judgement. There are catalogues that presume a mass of background knowledge and in which no observation is too granular or technical, and there are catalogues that treat the reader as one might treat an especially dim-witted seven-year-old.

Happily, Out of Australia is none of these things. Indeed, it strikes this reader as an exquisite model of the form, both generous with carefully nuanced and brilliantly contextualising biographies for individual artists – Wally Caruana has supplied these for Aboriginal artists and printmakers – and related entries for individual works of art that are intelligent, comprehensive, sometimes technical in focus where the printmaking medium calls for particular elucidation, and sometimes more squarely centered upon artists’ treatment of a particular subject on its own or in a series, always with an eye to Australian contexts that are unfamiliar, if not completely unknown in Europe and North America, but never condescendingly so. The entry for Jan Senbergs’s wry, packed-jumbo-jet sugar-lift aquatint Going O/S (1992) commences: ‘“Going OS” is the common Australian expression for “going overseas”, a rite of passage for most young Australians.’ This would otherwise strike us as an especially blinding glimpse of the obvious unless the term ‘overseas’ were strangely and consistently unfamiliar to British and North American English-speakers, who tend to use the term ‘abroad’ instead.

One of the particular strengths of this book is therefore that it presents a picture of modern Australian art that is not necessarily intended for Australians, but that nevertheless retains the capacity to shed new light on things that the Australian reader might otherwise have regarded as familiar, even commonplace. It is, at times, like eavesdropping on a conversation that is clearly intended for someone else – but how very interesting those can be. A good example is the entry for John Brack’s remarkable 1966 etching The sun lamps (one of a series of four), which first occurred to the artist when he passed every day on his way up Swanston Street to the old National Gallery of Victoria a shop window containing surgical instruments and other medical supplies. It seemed to Brack that the display was set out in an almost perversely attractive way, as if dressed to tempt customers as a department store might beguile shoppers with hats, gloves, or other fashionable accessories: ‘Brack examines these ironies as a metaphor for the human condition. The sun lamps have the therapeutic function of restoring health and alleviating pain. Yet their botanical design and their position close to the shop window suggest strange nocturnal flowers turned towards the light and exuding a malign air. Within the shadowy recesses of the window display glints the chrome of waiting wheelchairs.’

Elsewhere you discover that the airiness of one of the seventeen truly marvellous drawings by Tony Tuckson that were presented to the Museum by his widow ‘was inspired, according to Daniel Thomas, by Tuckson seeing in his garden at night the long filaments produced by slugs during their aerial mating’. A good number of the entries for works that were produced by Australians temporarily residing in London provide context that is indeed valuable for Australian readers. Thus Barbara Hanrahan’s Goodbye honey baby, from about 1964, evokes ‘the seedy world of the Soho nightclub […] called “Dolly’s”’ (now mercifully defunct) and, incidentally, owes a good deal of its power to the strong impact made in the previous year by David Hockney’s suite of etchings, A Rake’s Progress. ‘In 1985 Hanrahan looked back over her prints and remarked in her diary: “I love the sharp London-alone-at-23 quality in the early work. So fresh and original – the excitement of being there, raw. Mistakes. So much work done, so fast.”’ Similarly, four bleak outback drawings by Sidney Nolan that relate to John Heyer’s documentary film The Back of Beyond (Shell Film Unit), were produced in January 1954, shortly after Nolan’s arrival with his family in London a few months earlier, and three of their titles refer explicitly to the lyrical commentary in the film that was partly written by the poet Douglas Stewart: ‘All tastes like dust in the mouth / All strikes like iron in the mind’ are lines that assume particular resonance when remembered in the damp of postwar Pimlico. These drawings were first shown in Venice the following summer, when Nolan was the Australian Commissioner for the Biennale, and Heyer’s film also won the Grand Prix at the related Film Festival. In other words, it is a self-consciously dramatised outback, ambitiously conjured for an exclusively European public.

Having achieved so much so quickly, let us hope that the British Museum maintains this momentum, and continues to expand its collection of Australian art on paper, and indeed that other public institutions in the northern hemisphere (and elsewhere) follow suit, and do rather better at folding us into the recent history of world art than has hitherto been the case.