Multiple Contexts in the first decades of the twentieth century

Although national histories and art museums gather the history of Australian art into one story, the sources of inspiration of the works of art tell another story altogether, about a multitude of creative crossovers. The ‘tradition’ made by the icons of Australian art fuses academic, amateur, urban, outback, ceremonial, commissioned, and impromptu works, natural science, visitor’s chance impressions, soliloquies, arrangements, personal adornment, wall decoration, and addresses the viewer in mixtures of many cultural languages — English, German, Scottish, Chinese, Yolgnu, Yuat, Wiradjuri and a hundred others. This chapter (from a thesis) is about art produced in the early 1900s by a Yuat man William Monop (originally from East Victoria Plains in Western Australia) and a woman Margaret Preston (originally from Adelaide) and their creative engagement with ethnographer Daisy Bates (from Ireland) and anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe Brown (from England)