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.' He was undoubtedly a pioneer of post-colonialism and the book remains 'a lighthouse' in pacific studies.
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.' He was undoubtedly a pioneer of post-colonialism and the book remains 'a lighthouse' in pacific studies.
