THE BOY ADEODATUS

Who is Bernard Smith? We do not need to accept his version of the story, but he has left us one. In 1984 Bernard Smith published his autobiography. Just this side of seventy, his life's achievements were already remarkable. Smith had written the two most significant works of Australian art history, and had travelled to London to work at the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes on the thesis that became one of the most respected in the field, European Vision and the South Pacific. He had coordinated the controversial Antipodean Exhibition in Melbourne in 1959 and had established the Power Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney. He had taught at a bush school, painted and stopped painting, walked up the hill between Potts Point and the Gallery of New South Wales, promoted public art education, had a family, served as art critic for the Age and he had loved his first wife, Kate – not bad for a ward of the state, a bastard for whom things might have turned out differently. Yet none of this triumphal public path, so much itself the stuff of conventional biography, was to figure in The Boy Adeodatus – The Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard.