PAMELA ZEPLIN - Senior Lecturer, South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia

LOST WHITE TRIBES OF THE TASMAN-PACIFIC: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF AUSTRALIA-NEW ZEALAND ART EXCHANGES IN THE 1970S & 1980S.

"The value of cultural exchange should indeed be exchange – dialogue, a two-way track. If travelling exhibitions were not so official, prestigious and pretentious; if they consisted of more recent, less formed, less acceptable work, more of an exchange might be possible." (Lucy R. Lippard, 1975). Introduction Much is assumed in New Zealand and Australia about a ‘special relationship’ connecting the two countries. However, despite a shared ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) heritage forged at Gallipoli in 1915, a 1983 Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement (a.k.a ANZCERTA or CER) (Templeton 2003) and a longstanding but fragile ANZUS strategic alliance (Camilieri 1987), such preferred nation status is not evident in cultural and social discourse – and all but invisible in art history. Over thirty-three years, this situation provoked comment by New Zealand writers; in 1947 poet, Allen Curnow (in Gardiner, 2001) described the trans-Tasman cultural relationship as being like "the neglected middle distance", while in 1980 poet and critic, Wystan Curnow (1980:20) could declare: "All things considered Australia and New Zealand have quite a record for ignoring one another’s art".

However, for a brief space of time in the 1970s and 1980s the Tasman was intensely and enthusiastically traversed; these crossings were made not only by Australian and New Zealand trade and popular music, but also by visual artists, writers and administrators. Initially, this cultural traffic was facilitated mainly through Australian art institutions, publications and national and international events, such as the Mildura Sculpture Triennial (1967-1978), the Australian Sculpture Triennial (1981), the Experimental Art Foundation (1975-1985), the Biennale of Sydney (1973-1984) and the journal, Art Network (1979-1986). With the advent of ANZART from 1981, a major continuous art project specifically set up to promote Australasian relations between artists in both countries, trans-Tasman encounters also took place on New Zealand soil. This exchange was hosted in Christchurch (1981), Hobart (1983) and Auckland (1985), before transmuting into the Perth-based ARX (Australia and Regions Exchange, later termed Artists Regional Exchange) from 1987 onwards. In 1984 Australian and New Zealand funding agencies appropriated ANZART’s name and successful reputation as ANZART-in-Edinburgh. Conceived as a cultural ‘export’ for the Edinburgh Festival and alienated from its geographical and exchange rationale, this exhibition proved ill-fated and highly controversial. Such intervention also adversely affected the final ANZART exchange event in Auckland, while ARX went on to minimise, and finally sever, trans-Tasman connections in favour of South East Asian representation.

Apart from this 1984 Government instigated project, much exchange across the Tasman during those two decades was dependent upon the goodwill and enlightened effort of a handful of dedicated and highly motivated individuals, such as Tom McCullough, Jim Allen, Nick Spill, Terry Reid, Ian Hunter, Barbara Strathdee, Leigh Hobba, Phil Dadson and, at a later period, Bernice Murphy. Moreover, the context for artist-driven encounters of the 1970s and 1980s was sympathetic to an anti-institutional ethos; the events took place within a political and cultural environment charged with alternative, socially engaged discourse and practice, where experimental form and concepts were highly valued. Risky territory in the 1970s, this informal and inclusive ethos would become distinctly unfashionable during the next decade, dominated as it was by cool postmodern professionalism.

The political winds changed in 1985, when New Zealand foreign policy declared all ports nuclear free, effectively scuttling a stable, thirty-four year ANZUS alliance with Australia and the U.S. Later the same year, ANZART’s role as historical guardian of trans-Tasman exchange was submerged under a new wave of ‘industry’ professionalisation and, to some extent, attitudes of cultural neo-colonialism, as Australia’s art bureaucracy flexed its international muscle. Not surprisingly, this diminished cultural and political interest in New Zealand coincided with major changes in the direction of Australian foreign policy, which by the mid 1980s dramatically shifted priorities from its smaller neighbourhood to enthusiastically embrace prevailing trade winds from the north, where rapidly developing East Asian economies loomed large. This period also witnessed strengthened Australian connections with the centres of Euroamerican culture in New York, London and Paris. As Smith (1985:25, 26 n.18) noted: "In the past two years, more (V.A.B. funded) Australian art has been exhibited abroad than ever before" but raised the question: "why not more interaction with our region – Japan, say and laterally – with Chile, for example (?)". Thus two decades of exchange, constructed upon what has been generally termed "daggy" (Broker 2000) and informal co-ordinates of post-object enquiry, spontaneity, site specificity and artist-to-artist collaboration – together with copious quantities of idealism and optimism - became, metaphorically speaking, buried at sea. This was despite the fact that ANZART’s direct and humble successor, ARX partially continued ANZART’s ethos from 1987 onwards. Literally facing Asia across the Indian Ocean, the Perth-based organisation minimised, however, previous links with New Zealand, which, as a geographical priority, was displaced by burgeoning Australian desire for South East Asian representation. In this way, ARX’s biennial project provided a significant base, in terms of information networks and artistic contacts, for later and larger institutions concerned with Asian art in the 1990s, such as Asialink, the journal, Art and AsiaPacific and Queensland Art Gallery’s opulent Asia-Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Art (APT, APT2, AP3, APT4). The earlier legacy remains largely unacknowledged in Australian art history.

Once again, however, during the1990s New Zealand’s aesthetic horizon beckoned to its neighbour, surfacing like a diminutive volcano from the Tasman Sea. Notwithstanding almost a decade of sustained lack of interest by Australian curators, administrators and writers, the smaller country’s newfound appeal proved different from previous exchange projects. As a minor site of exotica, it occurred within an Australian art environment considerably more affluent, outward looking and object-centred than that which prevailed the 1970s and early 1980s. Spearheaded by the APT from 1993 to 2002, this renewed interest in Pacific/New Zealand nevertheless held lesser status than Asian art. In fact, the Pacific/Oceania region represented the tail end of overall enthusiasm for the generalised region of the ‘Asia-Pacific’, a linguistic catchall much vaunted between 1983-1996 by the economic and diplomatic rhetoric of Australian Labor Governments. This hyphenated term was more commonly understood as referring to the (more affluent) region of northern Asia and/or the Pacific Rim, including Japan and the west coast Americas. Moreover, the ‘90s wave of interest in a recently ‘discovered’ Pacific of the South Seas broke on indigenous rather than Pakeha shores as Australian attention became fixated on a ‘new’ New Zealand, Aotearoa. Meanwhile Pakeha culture continued to occupy a position largely beyond the Australian pale. While this indigenous ‘Pasifeka’ provided a welcome, vigorous and more representative - if somewhat belated - acknowledgement of New Zealand’s cultural diversity, notably in terms of a "more emphatic (Maori) presence" (Morrell and Neale 1999:96), the enthusiasm with which Australian curators and writers embraced ‘ethnic’ New Zealand nevertheless maintained, and perhaps widened, the gulf existing between white tribes of the Tasman-Pacific.

This paper examines that longstanding hiatus in trans-Tasman relationships between non-indigenous artists and how it affected their cultural convergence at a particular moment in time. That moment focuses on the ANZART exchanges, with particular reference to the final event, ANZART/AUCKLAND ’85. It suggests that, like dysfunctional family relationships, which can be "profoundly uncomfortable in their apparent sameness" (Broker 2000), Australian art institutions, curators and writers have been unwilling thus far to interrogate more subtle historical and cultural differences existing across the Tasman divide.

More obvious racial and/or cultural differences, as well, were seldom interrogated or included during earlier Australia-New Zealand events, despite deeply held notions of inclusivity and social enlightenment that suffused these exchanges. Issues of gender were also slow to manifest but questions of race, culture and ethnicity remained even less contested. Until 1985 the white tribes of the Tasman-Pacific seldom engaged with indigenous issues in terms of selection and/or theme. Moreover, such engagement was more noticeable in New Zealand, where relations operating between indigenous, Islander and non-indigenous groups were more publicly debated than was the case in Australian artwork and/or curatorial programs. Notions of ‘exclusion’ and ‘representation’, therefore, could translate differently between the two national groups. As a case study in regionality, the ANZART reality and myth therefore invites reclamation from the sea floor.

Imagining a new Pacific While teaching at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts in the 1960s, New Zealand artist, Colin McCahon "predicted that the Pacific would become the centre of the art world" (in Mane-Wheoke 1996:28). Even to the New Zealanders gaze, which was staunchly fixed on British horizons, this must have seemed a "bizarre" prediction at the time; to Australians, it would have been unthinkable. Beyond the notion of this region assuming cultural ascendancy, the prospect of close artistic relations within Australasia was virtually unheard of, so much so that in 1985 Meanjin’s editor, John Brett (1985:328) could remark: "Australia and New Zealand both look steadfastly back to the Northern hemisphere with scarcely a sideways glance".

If, however, we widen McCahon’s geographical co-ordinates to incorporate Pacific Rim countries, including parts of northern Asia, his prediction appears more prescient - at least for Australian mainstream art three decades later. In the 1990s major, non-indigenous institutions rushed to embrace the exotica of contemporary ‘Oriental’ art – a decade after Australia’s wholehearted embrace of lucrative ‘Oriental’ trade. The South Pacific, however, was another matter for Australia’s art world; unlike New Zealanders’ experience, it remained a site of anthropology and tourism, ‘coconuts, cannibals, Christianity’ – (Anon. 1993) and cruise ships - not serious art.

Within the vast watery map of Oceania New Zealand held even less aesthetic credibility, as another, smaller and, by implication, inferior pink country. As late as 2000, Gregson Edwards (2000), Director of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Cultural Relations Branch) remarked that New Zealand was regarded "almost like Tasmania". He also quoted former Prime Minster, Paul Keating’s (2000) warning that the present Government should "mend our … relations with Asia, (or) Asia would soon look at Australia like Australia looked at New Zealand".

Discovering a new Pacific Against such a background ‘this’ section of the Pacific was nevertheless (re)discovered by Queensland Art Gallery’s First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT 1) in 1993, comprising artists from Paua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australians, regionally grouped under "South Pacific" and representing twenty three per cent of the entire exhibition (Grano 1993) . Michael Dunn (1993-1994: 35) commented:

Interestingly, the Pacific aspect of the show did not include places like Hawaii or any of the Pacific Islands apart from Papua-New Guinea. It was left to the New Zealand entries to cover for these omissions by representing Polynesia.

That same year art from this region also entered wider contemporary art discourse in the new journal, Art and AsiaPacific. Three years later, a similar "Pacific" grouping comprised twenty per cent of APT 2 . Up to this time there had been a singular exception to the dearth of New Zealand exposure in terms of art; this was the exhibition, Headlands, shown in Sydney in 1992 (Barr 1992), which Thomas (1992: 181) noted as "Australia’s first extensive and high visibility sighting of New Zealand art". New Zealand critic, Hamish Keith (1992: 212, 214) was not so enthusiastic, declaring the exhibition "doggedly intellectual, "dangerously anorexic", adding: "its curatorial framework has seriously reduced the breadth of the New Zealand imagination". The new ‘frontier’ represented by Headlands and APT had not been generated, as in the past, by bilateral curiosity or a shared sense of Antipodality. As "the other end of the (Asia-Pacific) hyphen" (Zeplin 1996:12), the genesis of recent Australian curatorial interest in the Pacific was located within a generalised enthusiasm for the broader region inclusive of Asia. However, while the South Pacific – and Tasman-Pacific - enjoyed a certain novelty value, work from this region at APT2 and elsewhere was conferred with significantly less status and space than those works representing Australia’s larger (Asian) trading partners. Expatriate New Zealand curator, (David Broker 2000) commented that "current issues in (Australian) art are often based on a fascination with the exotic … the art scene seems to love what it doesn’t understand" "Perhaps", he proposed, "Australia has fetishized otherness more than most?" Feelings of isolation and inferiority may well have contributed to "the way the Asia (Pacific) thing took a hold of Australian art", which, he suggested, was "suspicious".

From 1998 onwards Sydney’s biennial Pacific Wave Festivals, co-ordinated by The Performance Space and Casula Powerhouse, extended Pacific exposure but failed to attract mainstream art audiences, despite strong support from Pacific communities (Gouriotis and Pierce 1998:1). By 1999 at the next Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT3), combined Pacific and New Zealand representation was now separated from the Australian section, to comprise less than thirteen percent of selected artists - including one Pakeha artist, Bill Hammond - and ten percent of all exhibited and performed works (Webb 1999) . At this time, APT3 Pacific Curator, Margo Neil (1999:90) optimistically predicted that:

(t)his leaves open the next chapter of the Pacific story for the next triennial. Developments in Hawaii, Fiji and Tonga promise new possibilities for future exploration. In fact, this would not happen. Nevertheless, in a later catalogue essay, two of APT3’s curators, Timothy Morrell and Margo Neale (1999:96) , made a rare attempt to engage with a range of differences in Australian and New Zealand’s histories and cultures, including pakeha art; they explained:

New Zealand’s participation in the Asia-Pacific Triennial is not only an opportunity for sentimental reinforcement of the links between the two countries, both of which, like Singapore, have a British colonial history. It provides a useful reminder (particularly for Australians) that Aotearoa/New Zealand is a foreign country and it produces distinctive art. (Re)discovering New Zealand Despite this broader perspective, the new appeal of the country across the Tasman lay firmly in an identity assumed to be ‘Other’. From its previous, subordinate status as a white, South Seas country cousin, sharing a combination of Antipodean geography and British heritage, this smaller country thus entered ‘90s Australian art consciousness as Pacific Aotearoa. New Zealand had thereby been transformed into a site of exotica, privileging indigenous Maori and Pacific Islander art, and in particular, cultural hybridity. Overwhelmingly, as an indigenous Aotearoa was being re-mapped on Australia’s regional horizon in the 1990s, the pale pink Pakeha version of New Zealand remained – and remains - a foreign country of the past, despite or because of deeply held beliefs about a ‘special’, familiar link with Australia.

Notwithstanding recent APT interest, as well as long-established and vigorous two-way traffic across the Tasman between Australian and New Zealand craft sectors, it’s as if non-indigenous, visual arts relationships have customarily been framed, from Australian shores at least, within an unspoken discourse of neo-colonialist disdain, contempt, or worse, indifference. This attitude tends to be based on assumption rather than experience, despite Australia’s legislated position on multiculturalism, policies of regionalism Brabazon 2000:40) , and the presence of half a million expatriate New Zealanders living near the shores of Bondi (Dobell 2000:117) . Size still matters, it seems and, as the smaller country, New Zealand tends to be considered culturally inferior and therefore dependent on the larger country – not necessarily different. Thus, for the Australian gaze, its neighbour provides a site of magnificent scenery, funny ‘eccents’ and rural jokes (Grant 2001).

Beneath the sentimental clichés glossing over this reality, "proximity", "familiarity" (Brabazon: 2000:34) and shared colonial heritage have created a relational awkwardness, a taken-for-granted-ness that, for Australians, has proved less attractive than more obvious and exotic differences of indigenous Pacific or Asian cultures. While Pakeha, Maori and Islander New Zealanders seem acutely aware of cultural differences between neighbouring indigenous, as well as between white tribes of the Tasman-Pacific, there is little acknowledgement of Austral/asian difference within Australian art circles - unless marked by ‘ethnicity’ and/or skin colour. As with trans-Tasman trade corridors, individual New Zealand artists have long exhibited in Australia, with expatriate ‘Kiwi’ artists rarely identified by nationality, while substantially more New Zealand artists have exhibited and resided in Australia than vice versa (Gardiner 2001) . Apart from the titanic figure of McCahon - who was only seriously acknowledged in Australia from 1984 (Bloem and Browne 2003: 228-29, 252-62) - art production per se from that country is rarely discussed in Australian art schools or exhibited and collected (Thomas 2003) in Australian public institutions. Pakeha New Zealand is not sexy. No Australian university teaches New Zealand studies, although the converse is true. It’s "not a trendy academic enterprise" (Brabazon 2000:34) and as the only possible place of exile for Australian artists (Ewington 1986:30), that country still hosts no Australia Council-funded studio , nor attracts potential Samstag scholars . Broker (2000) describes Australian/New Zealand relations as "seldom considered to be foreign affairs (and) more like family affairs". Paradoxically, however, any imagined inferiority on the part of New Zealanders as junior siblings is hard to find; they regularly assert independence from Australian mores, values and policies, not only in regard to bi-culturalism, maritime, defence and asylum seeker issues but towards women executives and art world culture, as well.

Lost white tribes: a genealogy of ANZART For Tara Brabazon (2000:33), relationships between Antipodean "whitefellas’’ may well be familial, but they are often "dysfunctional". Broker (2000) agrees with the "bickering family model" and adds the factor of "petty jealousies and meaningless competition" which "sum up the relationship". "Competition", he notes, "has framed trans-Tasman relations for yonks. Football, trade and art". Over time these repeated and unexamined patterns of behaviour, such as sentimental clichés about ANZAC bonding, unravel, evoking the image of "an old married couple who (sic) have nothing left to say". If we extend the marine metaphor, trans-Tasman relations also suggest a deeply submerged, even shipwrecked, vessel. However, as in most marriages and marine endeavours, there was once a time of engagement, a period of excitement, experiment and buoyant optimism. This occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, when artists from both sides of the Tasman consciously challenged the authority of Euro-American models of culture and seriously examined their shared Antipodean backyard as much more than a provincial backwater. In these heady, perhaps ‘adolescent’, days of post-object art, socially and/or intellectually committed artists from both countries established and maintained a number of significant encounters throughout various cities, many of them regional: Mildura, Adelaide, Sydney, Christchurch, Hobart, Auckland and Perth in the 1980s. This development paralleled a similar tendency in cross-Tasman popular music during the same period (Brabazon 2000:95-112).

The ANZART encounters of the 1980s were the result of more than a decade of informal and formal connections and represented a buoyant and diverse 'raft' of specifically trans-Tasman exchange projects, originating in the Mildura Sculpture Triennials in the early 1970s, officially launched in 1981 in Christchurch and afloat until 1985, when they sank, almost without trace, in the region of Auckland’s non-nuclear harbour. In the meantime, a vigorous, two-way flow of artistic traffic had resulted from these encounters, manifested mostly through associations between individual artists and private galleries. With relatively little support in terms of arts infrastructure available for artists in New Zealand at this time, access to significant art events of national or international stature at home could not compare with those staged in Australia. Few, if any, New Zealand events and/or institutions could match the exchange links that Australia offered. Those able to financially support some connection included the limited resources of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council (QEII) and organisations directly connected with Mildura and/ or ANZART, such as Wellington’s National Art Gallery, the Robert McDougall Art Gallery and Christchurch Arts Centre in that South Island city and Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland.

Notwithstanding these complex artistic entanglements within relatively small-scale, regional operations, ‘salvaging’ of the Good Ship ANZART’s history awaits re-discovery. Beyond the project’s aesthetic value, its recuperation provides a useful artistic marker of broader attitudes towards place and regional difference within the Tasman-Pacific. While this shared history may no longer represent a pressing issue for New Zealand artists, who have long understood and articulated their understanding of regional difference (Hay et al. 2000), self-examination by the Australian art community of its role in ANZART’s rise and demise is long overdue, as is a re-examination of the 1970s, generally, and in particular, that period’s emphasis on relational values and social ethics. Such a task may, however, dredge up uncomfortable information.

Distinctive differences between Australian and New Zealand artists were frequently noted by critics during the 1970s Mildura Sculpture Triennials, directed by Irish-Australian Tom McCullough, who, with renowned New Zealand artist and educator, Jim Allen, forged dynamic and enduring trans-Tasman links, deepened through early Biennales of Sydney, Adelaide's Experimental Art Foundation and the Sydney College of Art, which Allen headed from 1977. Indeed, major Australian art events were regularly awash with over fifty Kiwi artists, often in collaboration with ‘Aussies’ in site-specific work: performance, video, sound and sculptural installation. Hatched in Allen’s unique 1960s and 1970s ‘laboratory’ at Elam School of Art in Auckland (French 2001), New Zealand work was frequently considered by Australian critics as more intellectually and/or politically rigorous than that shown by many of their Australian colleagues (Thomas 1975; Lynn 1975) . while U.S. critic, Lucy Lippard (1975:2) noted: "…much of the art being made in Auckland now either bypasses or is already extending the issues exposed (in the exhibition, Some Recent American Art)".

Then suddenly, in 1979, after a decade of art ‘traffic’ to Australia, New Zealand representation in the Biennale of Sydney: European Dialogue was reduced from an anticipated six artists to two (Hunter 1980a:20). Unlike the Australian situation, New Zealand arts infrastructure – comprising funding, national events, criticism and professional networks - was minimal, so these 1970s offshore opportunities had become nationally and internationally vital. Biennale Director, Nick Waterlow’s curatorial decision unleashed the unexpected. In reaction, an airlift of indignant, spurned Kiwis (artists, students and art administrators) funded by Q.E.II Arts Council, descended upon Sydney, where, supported by Australian artists, they staged an alternative Biennale, Prime Export. Consequently, this trans-Tasman solidarity launched the magazine, Art Network, led to the formation of Art Workers’ Union and Australian Perspecta (from 1981) and precipitated ANZART. The last was an initiative captained by Ian Hunter (another Irish artist, resident in New Zealand) and intended as a strategy for remedying ""the … imbalance in (trans-Tasman) cultural exchange". "One way to educate Australians about the possibilities of the Cross-Tasman connection", Hunter explained, was "to offer them a well-structured and attractive proposition, in the form of a 1981 art encounter in Christchurch (Hunter 1980a:20).

Hunter’s strategy envisaged a sustained, long-term relationship, not "an Australian art invasion". An ‘outsider’ like McCullough, he was commissioned by Q.E.II to write a comprehensive report on Australia-New Zealand art relations. This was an extensive feasibility study with multiple approaches recommended over a five year program in the form of regular exchanges, exhibitions, lecture tours, cultural agency meetings and publications (Hunter 1980b). In compiling the report, Hunter acknowledged the critical significance of regional differences. Having experienced these in Northern Ireland, he asserted: you have on the surface people who are much the same but just underneath you have differences that stem from religious convictions. Those differences run very deep. (Hunter 1981)

As early as 1981 Hunter (1981) was cognisant of Antipodean specificities as less impelled by religion than "revealed in the maps of the two countries", his Antipodean observations being based in intense participation as an artist, curator, administrator and researcher in New Zealand. Beyond sport and politics, he insisted that New Zealand and Australia’s respective topographies generated disparate spatial, and consequently, cultural orientations, which were "quite marked and growing wider with each decade" (Hunter 1980b:9). "In short", he urged, "there is a real need for a closer study of these differences and the building of a better understanding on the basis of mutual respect and wider knowledge of each other’s culture", adding:

Australia is very different from New Zealand, culturally as well as geographically, and if we do not make an attempt now to understand some of these real differences, through our artists and in cultural terms, the future relationships may not be as open and cordial as they are at present.

"It is up to us", he recommended to New Zealand’s major cultural agency, "to make the effort to communicate" (Hunter 1980b:11).

That effort brought forty artists from both countries together in August 1981 for ANZART, hosted by Christchurch Arts Centre. This highly productive model of exchange was widely praised by all participating artists for its low budget, high attendances, community involvement, hospitality, artists responsive to vicissitudes of site and weather - and minimal administration (Berriman 1982:65). ANZART’s predominantly white/Pakeha artists participated against a background of racial conflict during Springbok demonstrations across New Zealand, highlighting cultural differences in indigenous issues between and within both countries. Broker (2003) notes that numerical representation of Maori and Islander artists in art events during the early and mid ‘80s does not necessarily equate with ‘exclusion,’ as has been understood by Australians. Respect by "many ‘enlightened white folk’" for indigenous communities wishing to maintain separate cultural practices was reinforced by controversial concerns about ownership and copyright, and not necessarily indicative of racism or cultural insensitivity. Although discussion of these complex positions occurred informally at Christchurch they were not, unfortunately, continued by Australians at the next ANZART event in 1983, or understood at ANZART/Auckland ’85.

Thereafter, ANZART went biennial, its site of operation alternating between the two countries. By 1982, however, there was no longer an Australian counterpart to Hunter, like McCullough, with longstanding commitment to forging links with New Zealand. Nevertheless, Hunter’s enthusiasm and administrative ability, his numerous Tasman crossings, relentless newsletters, propositions and articles linking artists in both countries, ensured the next ANZART would take place in Hobart. These efforts were ably assisted by Barbara Strathdee in Wellington and Leigh Hobba in Tasmania. By 1983, the same year as the inauguration of the Australia –New Zealand Free Trade Agreement, Closer Economic Relations (a.k.a. CER), the exchange had become "the most significant art event in the last three years"(Hunter 1983), dramatically increasing the flow of government and privately funded "art traffic" (Curnow 1985:4) across the Tasman; it was also valued as cultural lubricant for "trans-Tasman links" across foreign affairs and trade. Michael Volkerling, Chairman of QEII Arts Council (1983) declared:

In common with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Council views opportunities for cultural exchange with Australia to be of particular importance, so much so in fact, that even in times of limited funding we have managed to strengthen trans-Tasman links through the support of events such as ANZART, the Sydney Biennale, and a number of sculpture triennales (sic).

But cross-cultural issues were not factored in to the next ANZART- in-Hobart. Again, indigenous artists weren’t represented, and unlike Christchurch, indigenous issues were barely evident, even though (Australian) artists rights, gender, representation(!) and ecology were strongly foregrounded. The two national art communities had drifted further apart; Australian artists were now increasingly fixated upon industrial mechanisms of professional development, an ‘Aussie’ tendency that had been decried as "dangerous" by New Zealander, Nick Spill (1979:4) as early as 1979. But for New Zealand participant, Hurrell (1983:21), ANZART-in-Hobart’s informal atmosphere was likened to "an agricultural fair… filled with artists and their groups lobbying for support from visiting funding administrators". "It is interesting to note", he added:

that Australia, unlike New Zealand, has a long history of collectives – the inevitable result of its large population and the high turnover of visitors bringing in outside ideas. The proliferation of art colleges turning out graduates, the unemployment situation, and greater economic extremes naturally results in more individuals who need to share resources and ideologies.

Surprisingly, the successfully modest Christchurch model was thrown overboard. Ambitiously up-scaled to include sixty funded - plus at least forty other non funded - Australian participants from across the country, an ambitious range of activities, including a sound and film festival and the first national conference of alternative art spaces across the continent, ANZART left twenty Kiwi participants feeling marginalised and "almost intrusive" (Hurrell 1983:21), notwithstanding a decade of successful trans-Tasman connection. Valuable expertise in negotiating with Australians was compromised when their intermediary, Hunter, fell ill in Hobart. Despite, imaginative and memorable collaborations between artists from both countries occurring – as are usually the case - ANZART had largely become a success story colonised by Australian interests. Despite Hurrell’s critique, Barbara Strathdee nevertheless insists that New Zealanders, overall, felt positively about the Hobart experience (Strathdee).

But worse was to come. Australian and New Zealand funding bureaucrats identified a high profile export opportunity in ANZART’s unique form of Antipodean bonding, appropriated the ‘family name’ and produced a ‘bastard offspring’ exhibition for the 1984 Edinburgh Festival. Ignoring Hunter’s initial proposals and dispensing almost entirely with the event’s concept, its artists and New Zealand organisers, the Australia Council Visual Arts Board (V.A.B.) isolated national components of ANZART-in-Edinburgh. The Australian component, Meaning and Excellence assembled Australia’s coolest ‘po-mo’ artists but proved a costly and controversial dud - at more than twice the budget of previous ANZARTs. Cultural differences now became palpable but remained non-negotiable for Australians, including curator, Denise Robinson (1985:35), whose defensive catalogue essay denounced all notions of regional geography as "a tyrannical fiction", while New Zealand curator and ANZART veteran, Wystan Curnow, assertively foregrounded regional specificities of place informing his compatriots’ work. In the U.K. the white tribes were now facing each other across a wide and deep gap. Even worse for Australian officialdom, New Zealanders – mostly selected from previous ANZARTs - received international acclaim.

Meanwhile, at home in 1985, New Zealand was blowing the ANZUS treaty out of the water - not a promising start for ANZART/ AUCKLAND ‘85, a final face-to-face encounter, proving more of an international 'incident' than an artists' exchange. Here the developing Tasman rift assumed alarming proportions as regional differences – and commonalities - remained unaddressed. After Hunter’s return to the U.K., Auckland hosts had been placed under a long black cloud of serious under-funding, a ‘hands off’ approach by the Q.E.II. and project administration by an inexperienced and idealistic artists’ collective. Added to existing difficulties were structural problems of space availability (due to Auckland’s commercial rental crisis) and continued V.A.B. intervention and decision-making delay, which seriously inhibited cross-Tasman negotiations. These factors determined ANZART's fate before the large Australian contingent ( fifty funded and unfunded participants) disembarked.

Frustrated with arrangements and disregarding long-established trans-Tasman traditions of hospitality, collaboration and informality, Australian organisers, Louise Dauth and Christine Goodwin domiciled their participants in university barracks and addressed daily strategy meetings. As a contingent, Australian behaviour was considered that of ‘generals’ or "Texans" (Ewington 1986:30) and armed with a raft of bureaucratese, legalese, combative discourse and connections with Australian Foreign Affairs, Australian organisers were unimpressed with facilities provided for their ‘troops’. They demanded pristine exhibition facilities and sophisticated equipment from a "disorganised" Kiwi art community, condescendingly dismissed as "like that which prevailed in Australia a few years ago"(Dauth and Goodwin 1985:57). A separate exhibition venue for Australians, (ironically named Investment House), was "aggressively ferret(ed) out" (Zeplin 1985:6), creating further program delays and shortened exhibition exposure.

Then came a major cross-cultural débacle. Indigenous movements in both countries had been gathering momentum by 1985 and developing particular strength in Aotearoa-New Zealand. These factors, however, remained under-explored between national organisers, especially during planning, so that a ten-hour Maori hui provided ANZART’s single major indigenous inclusion. Further discussion of indigenous issues – dominated by predominantly non-indigenous Australian participants - also took place during mainstream forums and film and video programs, but remained marginalised by ‘whitefella’ concerns of career development and artists’ rights. At the hui it became obvious that Australians were unfamiliar with Maori oratory procedures and protocols; they were unprepared for what was to come. Unlike the vigorous participation of both Maori and Pakeha hosts, they became paralysed with white guilt and paranoia, interspersed with outbursts of hysteria. Even the sole indigenous Australian participant, Tracey Moffatt (1985), was unprepared for what she described as an excruciatingly long visit ..."(like a)Christian revivalist meeting... (where) I could not exchange a great deal even with my Maori brothers and sisters.

Here was a fertile opportunity for potential, if uncomfortable, debate, avoided by Australian organisers, who subsequently and surprisingly reported positively to the V.A.B. on "developed relations ... with the Maori community". Dauth (1985) noted: We also feel that Tracey benefited from an exposure to a variety of positions within the Maori community and the specific art based community. Her contribution to the forum of "Cultural Bias in the Arts" was disappointing, but not through Tracey herself, but through the lack of New Zealand organisers to provide a suitable opportunity for her to participate. The ‘housing’ of this forum in a ‘hui’ format on a Marae just outside Auckland, although providing an interesting insight into another culture (had) an unmistakeable air of ‘tourist’ (about) it."(Unpublished) New Zealand reports, however, shed self-reflexive light on an ‘other’ cultural reading of the final ANZART, revealing impossible Arts Council-imposed conditions, the rental crisis and Australians unprepared or unable to cross the Tasman and discuss preliminary arrangements. Despite dismay at their neighbours’ "confrontational points scoring tactics" (von Sturmer 1985:5), Kiwis accepted most of the responsibility for ANZART’s shortcomings and remained committed to keeping the ANZART family together, as did a number of Australians artist. They were confident this ‘learning experience’ could only enhance future exchanges.

But it was too late for negotiation and cultural mismatch became even more painfully obvious at ANZART’s closing forum. In an impromptu performance, two artists (New Zealander, Charlotte Wrightson and Australian, Ex de Medici) attempted symbolic healing between the two communities. Tourniqueting each other's arms, they attempted blood bonding via a syringe. The audience waited while their veins failed and continued waiting for the blunt needle to penetrate. In desperation, after more tense silence, they sliced their skin and ran, bleeding, to extend the hand of friendship to organisers, creating confusion between trans-Tasman transfusion and shared sacrament. An Australian leader shrieked; the Kiwi leader and the audience squirmed, realising the situation had unintentionally been oriented from lecture theatre to operating theatre to theatre of war.

The ritual might have been taken more seriously had the performers not worn hospital gowns exposing their bare bottoms but that art historical moment represented much more than bad performance art. Despite a sincere attempt at cross-cultural exchange, the ‘bloodletting’ became an apt metaphor for the final ANZART encounter, signalling the effective demise of longstanding trans-Tasman/Pacific connections for Australian art and the beginning of a new Asia-Pacific era. An on-site meeting of organisers, including the V.A.B. Director, Ross Wolfe, followed by a subsequent Australian report had already determined this trajectory by scuttling the very notion of a particular Australian and New Zealand exchange (having) any validity as an ongoing process (Dauth and Goodwin 1985:57).

V.A.B. policy was wrenched northwards, away from a 'recalcitrant' neighbourhood so that future New Zealand participation was reduced to bubbles on the Tasman. Meanwhile, host organisers in Auckland seemed unaware of this decision and continued looking forward to the next ANZART in Perth in 1987.In fact, Australia and Regions Exchange (later called Artists’ Regional Exchange) (ARX ) was to succeed ANZART as a national Australian multi-lateral exchange, diminishing New Zealand participation to four (none of whom were indigenous artists), among forty-two on-site participants. This decision was a combination of a late invitation being issued to New Zealand artists and Q.E.II’s decision to keep representation contained. By the 1990s these previous foundational connections, not only with New Zealand but with South East Asia, as well, remained virtually unremarked at all later Asia-Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Art from 1993 to 2002 as yet another ‘new’ history was invented and chronicled; but that’s another story.

In terms of forgotten histories, ANZART/AUCKLAND ’85 provides an echo of lesser-known ANZAC mythology, not only as a failed campaign but also in terms of the military and hostile character of both events. As heir to bridging the Tasman divide, ANZART by 1983 began to fall victim to untested assumptions about ‘special Tasman relationships’, at least on the part of Australian officials. The final ANZART continued to presume a 'naturally' imbued and unquestionable antipodean relationship, apparently forged at Gallipoli and here, an instructive comparison may be drawn, despite separation across seven decades. Like the experience of ANZART AUCKLAND ‘85, sibling squabbling had also characterised ANZAC Cove behaviour in 1915, where "the real fight" was less with Turks or British brass than between Australian and New Zealand troops. Divergent approaches to Empire, size and discipline led Claude Pocock, of Canterbury Mounted Rifles, to described the Australian soldier as a

skiting bumptious fool who thinks nobody knows anything but himself. If we meet or see them ... anywhere in town ... there is generally a row of some kind. (Brabazon 2000:23)

William George Malone’s diary simply noted: "The Australians … seem a slack lot…" (Brabazon 2000:25). Similar sentiments were heard in Auckland in May 1985.

In 1999 Morrell and Neale’s words reverberated with this knowledge still not having been ‘taken on board’ by succeeding generations, particularly those administering Tasman/Pacific exchanges.

To the rest of the world, New Zealand and Australia may seem very similar, and they are, in the same way that Canada and the United States are similar. In other words, there are immense differences between them (Morrell and Neale 1999:96).

The disappearance of trans-Tasman events from recent art historical narratives was not only due to aggressive Australian attitudes towards a neighbourhood becoming less attractive within a new global context. Indeed, as Broker (2000) suggests, "tentative and restrained" approaches evident at ARX were soon swamped by dominant art world attitudes of "here we are boots and all into Asia", promulgated by large institutions like APT.

However, there is at least one other factor in ANZART’s invisibility in the 1990s; this was also partially due to its intrinsic structure. Artist-driven, the ideological base was modest, inclusive and based on relational values of artists working with artists, rather than conventional aesthetics. Site-specific, collaborative and under-funded, it resisted institutionalisation. Open-ended and assuming, its acknowledged success was assumed to be historically self-evident and little documentation remains. In short, these important incursions into "de-territorialised but highly specific local terrains" (Barton et al 1998:4) proved too daggy and ephemeral for a new wave of image-conscious and object fixated postmodernism flooding Australian art in the mid 1980s. Moreover, despite their respective multicultural and bicultural societies, these events tended to be strongly mono-cultural in representation, if not in content, situated as they were on the cusp of Australian acknowledgement of contemporary indigenous art and its phenomenal international marketability.

Raising the ghosts To be sure, from the late 1990s there have been isolated instances of intense interest in New Zealand art by its neighbouring art world. With the exception of New Zealand initiated exchange exhibition, Close Quarters: Contemporary Art from Australia and New Zealand in 1998-1999 (Barton et al 1998), Broker (2000) considers "every contact with NZ these days is like the discovery of the lost world. A rich ‘new’ hunting ground attracting the occasional hunter". The most obvious example of this tendency is the relatively recent acknowledgment given to the lone figure of McCahon by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1984. His now legendary status has been confirmed in 2003, as, it should be noted, part of a major international tour initiated by the Rijksmuseum (Bloem and Browne 2003).

Notwithstanding these forays across the Tasman, today a neo-colonial and insecure Australian mindset, without access to regional histories, still represents Pakeha New Zealand art as a ‘whiter shade of pale’. Looking past each other, without conversation, we continue to assume a shared history and culture in the face of real differences, of which, some are negotiable, some incommensurable. Without evidence of previous successful - and unsuccessful - encounters between artists, administrators, curators and writers, such as those experienced at Australian triennials and biennales, and ANZART events, much power still lies with arts bureaucracies to re-inscribe our recent art historical chronicles, based on assumption, political expediency and fashionability, instead of deeper, perhaps difficult dialogue about subtle and uncomfortable forms of difference.

As a result, non-indigenous Australian curators and administrators have divorced the remnants of an embarrassing white past and its 1970s ‘hippy values’, while a new generation reinvents an ‘exotic’ discourse based simplistically on racial difference. Somewhere between these positions in the Tasman-Pacific the spectre of those lost white tribes haunts our histories, demanding re-examination of our complex genealogical and cultural connections. Sapabathy (1999:17) urges a re-assessment of local and regional Asia-Pacific histories, by "pris(ing) open these divergences … register(ing) differences and intense localisation within the region". Similarly (Barton et al 1999:4) advocate the "expos(ure) (of) misrecognitions, aporias and moments of rupture and dissention between negligent neighbours who have embarked, singly, on missions to find out who they are for themselves". Unless New Zealand and Australia’s familial genealogy is placed under such cultural scrutiny, our shared stories are doomed to repetition as pallid and parallel, rather than the intense and intertwined alliances they have been - and may yet become.

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