It is interesting when and how an artwork gains iconic status. Recently when I was going through the records of a photographic gallery operating in Melbourne in 1975, I noticed that the price for an original vintage print of Max Dupain's Sunbaker (1937) photograph was $185. Last year it sold at auction for $105,000.

Charles Meere (1890-1961) was a minor, English-born, Sydney-based painter and commercial artist, who is known through a single work, Australian Beach Pattern (1940), which was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1965, after the artist's death. It was in the late 1980s that the painting became an eye-catching national icon and has served as a subject for parody (such as the superb photographic essay by Anne Zahalka), a subject for politically correct moralising, and even a target for fakes and copies for misguided investors.

Joy Eadie, who describes herself as a Canberra-based independent researcher, has devoted a book to uncover the "true meaning" of Australian Beach Pattern, and to rehabilitate Meere's reputation. To somewhat oversimplify the matter, the painting has frequently been viewed as an all-white Aryan celebration of Australian beach culture created at a time when eugenics was popular in some Sydney art circles. Eadie argues that the exact opposite is true and the painting is an ironic statement on Nazi ideals replete with a Nazi saluting girl and marching parents.

I am never completely comfortable with the idea of uncovering the "true meaning" of something – simply because of the impossibility of the task. Meere did not leave a coded message or set of instructions to uncover ironic intent. In May 2017, Bill Shorten came under criticism when, in an advertisement to promote hiring Australians to make Australian products, there was little ethnic diversity shown in the accompanying photograph. The advertisement was quickly pulled. Meere in his composition of about 30 people on the beach caught up in what could be interpreted as an athletic display has an all-white youthful body-beautiful cast.

A few years ago, Isobel Crombie published a fascinating book, Body culture: Max Dupain and Australian culture, 1919-1939, where she placed the artists of the Dupain circle within the context of the then prevailing pseudo-science of eugenics, the philosophy of vitalism and the "body culture" movement. This Anglo-Australian creed of racial regeneration promoted the idea of a white Australia flourishing away from the horrors of Europe.

Australian Beach Pattern shares many of the features in common with the "body culture" movement that need not be interpreted as some sort of pro-Nazi propaganda. Meere's student and apprentice, Freda Robertshaw, who witnessed the development of the painting, noted: "Charles never went to the beach. We made up most of the figures, occasionally using one of Charles' employees as a model for the hands and feet, but never using the complete figure. They were then arranged to fill the whole composition." The painting is an academic neo-classical exercise with a very stiffly posed composition.

Eadie's attempt to link facets of the composition with Théodore Géricault's well-known classic, The raft of the Medusa (1819) in the Louvre, is possible, but not completely convincing. Many of the classical topoi employed by Géricault were far from unique and Meere, who was trained in the English and French academic traditions, was familiar with these forms and with the principal of academic eclecticism, where bits and pieces were sourced widely and were brought together into a single composition.

In Australia, Meere worked as a commercial artist and newspaper illustrator and did have the knack of piecing together a memorable composition, none as memorable as Australian Beach Pattern. When the impressive Meere retrospective was exhibited at the Nolan Gallery in Canberra late in 1987, the painting was a maverick work within a rather predictable sea of mediocrity.

Eadie, with passion and enthusiasm, has embraced Charles Meere and has forensically examined his most famous painting. Although not all of her conclusions ring true, she has forced us to re-examine in some detail a largely forgotten figure in Australian art. For this we must be grateful.