White Australians have always seen in aboriginality the possibility of a genuine Australian culture . Perhaps the two most notable examples of this were the Jindyworobak poets of the 1940s who retold Aboriginal myths in a romantic, lyrical style and the painter Margaret Preston who in the 1920s began to use the flat, unmodulated colours of Aboriginal bark paintings in her woodblock prints. It was only in the 1980s, however, that "aboriginality" was taken up as the centre piece of a new aesthetic of appropriation or, as it became known in Australia , Popism. Here it was aboriginality not as a subject-matter or style, but as a metaphor or trope for the "nomadism" of representation itself. Just as Aborigines were supposedly not to be found in any particular place but were always in between places, so Australian art was not original but always came from somewhere else . Australia in this sense would be not so much some fixed geographical location as the space of representation itself, u-topic, everywhere and nowhere at once. It was the critic Paul Taylor who put this in its most well known form in his exhibition Popism, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1982. As he wrote later in an essay explaining the show, "Popism- the Art of White Aborigines':
Our art and criticism have recently sought to reverse the shame of earlier generations concerning cultural alienation and instead exploit that alienation as part of a multi-national strategy. A search for a regional Australian culture, ultimately a worthless pastime , reveals a centrifugal impulse wherein our art , like the mythopoeic Dreamtime of the Aborigines, is the flak of an explosion not of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline