Australia's First University Press

Bernard Smith


Bernard William Smith (1916-2011) was Australia's most eminent twentieth century art historian and a major thinker in the humanities. His first book Place, Taste and Tradition: a study of Australian art since 1788 is a key text in Australian art history, while European Vision and the South Pacific, first published in 1960, remains a pioneering masterpiece in the art and sciences of empire, imperialism and cultural contact in the Pacific. Smith was the president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1977-80), a senior academic in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Melbourne and the founding professor of the Power Institute of Fine Arts, Sydney University. During his life he published extensively on a wide variety of subjects including two memoirs, and was passionately committed to social, environmental and political concerns. In 1980 he presented the Boyer Lectures, and following his wife's death, established the RAKA award in recognition of Indigenous artists and writers. His major books include Place, Taste and Tradition (1945); Australian Painting 1788-1960 (1962); The Boy Adeodatus (1984); The Art of Captain Cook's Voyages, vols 1-3, with R�diger Joppien, (1985-7); Imagining the Pacific (1992) and Modernism's History (1998).

Books

Related News

Extract: Nation, Memory, Myth by Steve Vizard

Posted on 11 Jun 2025

How does myth generate meaning for a nation and its citizens? How does a national myth transform into symbolic performances of cultural memory and kinship?  

Extract: Beyond Green by Lesley Head

Posted on 11 Jun 2025

Culture, society and human behaviour have forever been linked to nature. In her thought-provoking book, Lesley Head, geographer and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Emeritus at…

Letter From the Publisher

Posted on

We started the year by moving tens of thousands of physical books across state lines, swam through oceans of metadata and updated our back-end systems…

Related Events

Dymocks Luncheon with Chris Hammer (NSW)

Fri 27 June at 12:00PM

Four Seasons Hotel, 199 George Street, Sydney NSW 2000

Join Chris Hammer in conversation with ABC's Fran Kelly to discuss the updated edition of The River.

Author Talk: Chris Hammer on The River (SA)

Thu 10 July at 6:30PM

Burnside Library, 401 Greenhill Road Tusmore, SA 5065

Learn more about author Chris Hammer's prize-winning non-fiction book about the Murray Darling Basin.