From Australia's greatest art historian and pioneer of post-colonialism Bernard Smith comes a new edition of the Australian classic. Featuring a new introduction by Sheridan Palmer and Greg Lehman and cover artwork by Valerie Sparks.
Bernard Smith (1916-2011) was arguably Australia's greatest art historian and one of the most important humanist thinkers internationally on ideas concerning cultural contact. His European Vision and the South Pacific, first published in 1960, showed how the ideas of the Enlightenment and the empirical structuring of scientific and geographical knowledge during the great eighteenth-century voyages of discovery affected notions of identity-both for Europeans and the Indigenous peoples with whom they came in contact. Not only did Smith's investigation of art, science and imperialism of this period explore the conditions of frontier contact, it opened up the dialogue on de-colonisation and allowed us 'to think beyond or after it'.