Public ideas
National treasure
Canberra has statues of prime ministers Curtin, Chifley and Menzies, and the occasional bust or relief of other prime ministers, but as yet there is no memorial to Gough Whitlam.
Unless you consider the Jackson Pollock painting Blue Poles, prominently displayed in the National Gallery, to be his memorial.
When the National Gallery bought it in 1973 for $US1.3 million, a wave of outrage was unleashed. Some have still not gotten over the purchase: just two years ago renowned art critic Senator James Paterson appeared on commercial TV urging the government to sell it, presumably so we could put the $350 million it would then fetch to something we really need – deposits on submarines someone might let us borrow in 20 years’ time, or a 0.1 percent contribution towards the nuclear power station sinking fund.
Writing in Inside Story – A finishing school for the nation – Frank Bongiorno reviews Tom McIlroy’s book Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the painting that changed a nation.
Bongiorno describes three streams of criticism directed to Whitlam. Some serious art critics, such as Robert Hughes, thought Blue Poles was overvalued. There were those who believed that the National Gallery should confine itself to Australian art, and there were the self-appointed authorities who believed their children could have done a better job. (There was and still is a fourth stream of people who classify anything a Labor government does as reckless.)
Bongiorno doesn’t try to address those arguments, which will go on into the distant future: that’s one reason Blue Poles is such an important acquisition.
Rather, he writes about how we regard national treasure, as something not only of our own making, but as something reminding us that we are part of a bigger world:
Australian maturity demanded that Australians be familiar with international standards, with the best work being done around the world, whether in health policy, urban development or in drops of brightly coloured paint on massive canvasses. If Australians were to make the most of their own country, they needed to understand how other people — the world’s best and brightest — had made the best of theirs.
An unheeded warning from the People’s Republic of Vermont
Bernie Sanders, then Mayor of Burlington, Vermont on the NBC Today Show in 1981, just after Ronald Reagan had been inaugurated as president.