One Summer Again

One Summer Again is a 1985 Australian mini series about the painter Tom Roberts and the Heidelberg School.^[1][2]

One Summer Again: The Dramatising of the Heidelberg School

One Summer Again opens with Tom Roberts cycling into the country with his painting gear on his back. A viewer with an eye for anachronism might notice that he is riding a modern bicycle. A couple of scenes later, as the women art students erupt into the street after having been excluded from the life drawing class, we see modern cars passing. How could this be possible? Surely the action is taking place in the 1880s? Later, Frederick McCubbin stumbles through a paddock of car wrecks as he and Roberts make their way to a sketching ground. Interior scenes suggest the late nineteenth century, but costumes seem ambiguous. The characters behave as if they are in the past, but the setting is often the present. The ‘rules’ of period drama have been deliberately broken, but for what purpose?

One Summer Again is a 3x1 hour ABC TV series dramatising the Heidelberg School of painting, the movement also known as Australian Impressionism which produced the first self-consciously ‘national’ images as the Australian colonies approached Federation. The iconic pictures of Roberts, McCubbin and Arthur Streeton were associated with an assertive ‘Australian’ identity in which the bush was represented as primal. These pictures inform the look of the series and the paintings often set the scenes, but the representation of the past is constantly undercut by glimpses of the present. The deliberate use of anachronism dislodges the drama from its imagined ‘time’ with the result that the 1880s do not seem so distant or so different. A clear separation between past and present is usually the mark of historical drama and diminishing in this way raises questions about the conventions of representing the past on screen.

In 1981 the Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen, known for A New Britannia (1970) and The Black Swan of Trespass (1979) approached the ABC with a proposal for a technically innovative television series about Tom Roberts and the Heidelberg School. The national broadcaster was keen but wary. Although drawn to a subject of national importance, the ABC’s priority was that a drama should first be an entertainment. If it were to proceed it would be as a standard costume drama, an idea that appalled McQueen. The tension surrounding the project eventually led to sackings and the shifting of McQueen to an advisory role. Just before shooting was to begin the series was cancelled because period dressing (estimated at an additional 25%) would cost too much. This opened the way for an argument to be mounted to shoot in the present, which would cost much less (and allow a much more radical interpretation). With great trepidation the ABC agreed to let the experiment proceed.

McQueen welcomed the new approach but he was concerned that viewers might be confused by mixing the present with the past since viewers’ ideas of what the ‘past’ looked like had been formed from costume dramas. This approach would distance them from the characters. In the event, the audience response was very positive and the show was both a critical and ratings success. The technique showed that the audience was open to history being screened without the usual period trappings. And it was precisely their knowledge of the conventions that allowed the subversion of them to be entertaining as well as intellectually provocative. Instead of undercutting, the radical structure actually flagged and supported the radical historical interpretation the series was offering.

In the late 1880s Australian Impressionism was itself breaking the rules of academic painting. By also breaking the rules, the series opens a new space for the viewer’s imagination, offering a way of considering both the representation of the past and history. While the blatant anachronism initially shocks the eye, the mind soon accepts the new convention. By rendering anachronism irrelevant, attention is focussed on elements other than the detail of period reconstruction. The themes of the series are able to emerge less encumbered with period foliage. The marginalisation of women, the hegemony of the gatekeepers, the power of celebrity, the state of the economy and even the danger of STDs surface strongly. The question of an ‘Australian’ art that had so concerned the artists was exercising ABC television viewers in 1985 as the problem of national identity.

An element usually suppressed in period drama set before the twentieth century is any sense of modernity. The creators of One Summer Again wanted to present the Melbourne of the 1880s as a very modern city. In his book The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1979) Graeme Davison had shown that Melbourne in the late nineteenth century was probably the most modern city in the world. In One Summer the characters are simply dropped into the metropolis described by Davison. Shooting against a background of the 1980s reinforced the sense of a common modernity. So, when Roberts and Jane Sutherland catch an electric train it draws on the fact that in 1888 the artists could take suburban trains to their sketching grounds at Box Hill and Heidelberg, they could switch on a light, ride in a lift and make a telephone call. A certain documentary quality is achieved by shooting in locations frequented by the artists. Among these is the exterior of Roberts’ studio.

Drama prioritises character over history and writers and actors extend characters beyond what historical evidence can justify. With historical drama one must always wonder to what extent history is re-made to fit the characters and enhance the story. Viewer beware: One Summer includes many scenes lacking any evidentiary justification. Do such inventions render the whole program inauthentic or historically useless? Not if we understand the relationship. Historical fiction informs our understanding by offering plausible hypotheses: the drama suggests ‘it could have been like this’ but it doesn’t say ‘it probably was like this.’

In One Summer the characters are tightly constrained by class, economic and financial factors as well as by their personalities. They are not mysteriously ‘driven’ individuals. Their lives are formed by what is going on around them: what is being taught at the Gallery School, who controls the local art societies, what the critics are saying and who is buying. Roberts instructs the young Arthur Streeton on the importance of putting a price on a picture. Their ‘school’ is an ensemble in which conflict – the essence of drama – is explored. McCubbin, for instance, loathes Conder. The painters are not initially drawn together by a shared ideology (the 9x5 manifesto only comes later) but by shared opposition to the conservative forces in the local art world and by recognising that their ambitions will be advanced by being part of a group. For a national art movement their ideology is remarkably flexible. The Heidelberg School of the series is fragile, riven with differences and constantly threatened with dissolution because drama looks for conflict and so represents history, too, as conflict. But it may also have been like that.

Many characters in One Summer were already familiar to the television audience: Roberts, Streeton, McCubbin and Conder. To these were added Jane Sutherland and Clara Southern, the two women artists most associated with the Australian Impressionist movement. Bringing the women into the foreground reflects the politics of the 1980s which alerted both dramatists and historians to the situation of women artists in the 1880s. Theodore Fink, a lawyer to the landboomers, and Maurice Brodsky, editor of the high-class gossip magazine Table Talk comment on finance, the economy and society. The divisive politics of the time, when Australia came close to armed class conflict, is expressed through the socialist Dr. Billy Maloney. The male painters commercial success comes on the back of a property and sharemarket bubble. Paintings such as Roberts’ Shearing the Rams and McCubbin’s Down on His Luck are framed by politics and money. While Roberts is making his studies for Shearing the Rams he comes face to face with a militant shearer. McCubbin’s model in Down on His Luck was Louis Abrahams, who really was depressed, and killed himself after going bankrupt.

Historical dramas on screen usually rely heavily on published sources, but in 1985 the published history of the Heidelberg School was fragmentary. Conder was the only one who had been served by a full-length biography and only because he was regarded as an English painter. Very little was known about Sutherland and Southern. While the audience was familiar with the male painters’ names and with some of their works, few would have had any sense of their lives or their circle, so the series provided the opportunity of working on a new canvas. The characters that emerge are not bushmen with brushes but dandified city bohemians with an eye for the market. This sat uneasily with their reputation as the first authentic painters of the bush but it was soon to become the new orthodoxy, for 1985 saw the publication of City Bushmen a revisionist history which emphasised the urban identity of the painters and the often derivative nature of their images of the bush.

Although Humphrey McQueen was happy with the final result, as a historian he remained uncomfortable with ‘making things up.’ When history is re-imagined through fiction the result can be disturbing to historians, as in the controversy surrounding Kate Grenville’s The Secret River. The compromises exacted by television drama make it even more so. McQueen resolved his concern by writing a biography of Tom Roberts.

What does the past look like? Challenging the convention of period

Period drama is probably the most powerful influence on how we ‘see’ the past. But even where a production is respectful of research, as in One Summer Again, the relationship between the drama and the history is highly problematic. On the one hand drama can embody what historians have empirically established, on the other hand the fictionalisation falsifies that history. Conventional expressions of ‘period’ exacerbate this conundrum by entrenching stereotypes such as the representation of the ‘sixties’ (Flower children, LSD, Vietnam protests) or the ‘twenties’ (short skirts, gangsters and the Charleston). But historical dramas can open the audience to fresh understandings of the past simply by presenting period differently. In the film industry ‘period’ refers to any representation outside the present that requires special dressing to indicate the time in which the action occurs. There is no point at which period begins but if the art department has to source older model cars and the designer finds the costumes in the op shop, then it’s period. For convenience it is broken into decades (like history) but a period ‘look’ usually only becomes visible after about two decades. The 1980s is now period, but the 1990s has not yet become sufficiently differentiated. Challenging period conventions is an effective way of suggesting new interpretations of history. But is period dressing necessary for historical drama at all? A test case is the rejection of period in One Summer Again.

Production decisions make history

History is mediated by its means of production and distribution and in the film industry critical decisions are driven by two primary considerations: cost and audience. As story and character are the means of engaging the audience, for the film producer story is ultimately a more powerful idea than history. So history is shaped to fit story. That is clearly a distorting manipulation but how different is it, except in degree, from what historians do when they write? Does not the screen emphasis on story and character simply magnify the role that narrative plays in history writing generally? All history writing shapes events and uses characters to lead the audience – whether readers, listeners or viewers – on a controlled narrative journey. How different is the screen producer’s desire to attract an audience from the academic historian’s desire for sales and citations? Producers of history on screen, whether of period drama, dramatised documentary, or ‘factual dramas’ (of which One Summer Again is an example) know it is critical to respond to the demography of the audience, but the ‘hook’ informs the decisions of academic publishers as well. All history is created for am audience in the present. One Summer Again was created for a history-literate, art appreciating, politically progressive audience in 1985 that would not be put off by a degree of transgression. It is interesting to consider how different it might be if it were made in 2010.

References

Making Film and Television Histories, Australia and New Zealand James E. Bennett and Rebecca Beirne (Eds) I. B. Tauris, London, 2012 p 179-183

External links

• One Summer Again at IMDB