Impressionist's unimpressive high dudgeon

Will the experience of ogling his masterpieces, for example his beloved Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889) displayed at the National Gallery of Australia, be changed forever?

In a thoughtful, scholarly piece just published in The Monthly the cultural historian and Streeton authority Tim Bonyhady discusses a cracklingly racist letter from Streeton published in a Sydney newspaper in 1895.

To the modern, liberal reader the letter is a shocking thing.

Bonyhady notes while "Many of Streeton's surviving letters to his friends and patrons from the 1880s and 1890s are highly poetical and evocative ... his letters to the press, on the whole, are very different - written fast, in high dudgeon".

Alas, it remains true today that most letters to the press are like that; written fast, in high dudgeon. Most of those who write letters to The Canberra Times are seething dudgeonistas.

To Streeton's relative credit lots of his high dudgeon, Bonyhady shows, was expressed in letters on behalf of what strike us today as good, green environmental causes.

The discovery of Streeton's 1890s Sydney racism rather leaps out at one from the essay. It comes in these cancel-culture, statue-toppling times when we are urged to seethe with righteous, unforgiving indignation at previously revered figures now found to have been personally flawed.

Your columnist, doing lots of his reading and thinking in places where these sorts of issues are throbbingly alive right now (what if the poet you have always loved turns out to have been a monster when she wasn't at her writing desk?) confesses to often being bewildered.

Any day now I will, bewildered, sally-forth to the National Gallery to behold Streeton's wondrous Golden Summer, Eaglemont yet again, this time to examine my newly-informed feelings about its painter.

Hitherto one has always been lost in admiration of it. How wonderfully it captures the Australian summer's golden light and terrific heat. On the painting's hot, January thermals Wedge-tailed eagles (sometimes two of them, sometimes three or four or more, depending on what time of day it is when you arrive at the painting) are soaring and gliding.

I hope this time as I arrive at the painting and even before I count the day's eagles, my mind, wagging its finger at me, will warn me against "presentism".

Presentism is the sin of getting into our pulpits here in the enlightened present and feeling righteously, masturbatorily indignant towards/superior to people of the past. Embedded in the Sydney of the 1890s, in overtly racist times, perhaps any of us of British stock and with a proneness to high dudgeon might have written the racist letter that Streeton wrote.

Cultivated readers may know (and may sung it in choirs at school) the toe-tappingly melodious 13th century song Sumer is icumen in.

Sometimes called the Cuckoo Song and in ye olde Middle English it is popular with choirs because it is a round and so is best warbled by several voices at once all co-operatively weaving their way through this cheerful ditty of welcome to summer.

I mention this song because for today's Canberrans an Australian cuckoo, the Koel, arrives here from warmer climes and begins calling in late spring. It remains uncorked all summer. Suddenly the dear old song fits our youthful city and its summers like a glove.

Almost all Canberrans now are probably living within earshot of the Koel's loud, flute-like, far-carrying call. It is, with the yodellings of cicadas and cricket commentary on the radio, one of the definitive Sounds of Summer.

The song opens "Sumer is icumen in,/Loude sing cuckoo!" ("Summer has arrived,/Loudly sings the cuckoo!") and then goes on to rejoice at several other proofs of summer offered by welcome seasonal sights and sounds in nature.

Those Canberrans irritated by the repetitiveness of the Koel's calls should (as well as just patriotically getting used to it, for it is a true blue Australian sound made by a native Australian bird) note the ancient European legend that the number of times thou hearest the cuckoo call each season is the number of years thou hast left to live. So the more the better.

Da-da-da-dummmm! Da-da-da-dummmm! Next Thursday, December 17, is the 250th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven.

The New York Times, thinking it a tragedy for anyone not to know and love Beethoven but cannily aware of today's tiny attention spans, has recommended some five-minute excerpts from Beethoven works that will capture the hitherto heathen-hearer forever.

Performing the same service for this newspaper's readers, I prescribe the last five minutes (better still all 20 rapturous minutes) of Beethoven's Choral Fantasy in C Minor for piano, orchestra and choir.

Beethoven is at his best when he sweeps you away with him. So, preparing yourself to be swept, find a YouTube performance and go to about the 15:00 mark. This is where the choir joins in, radiantly warbling of the triumph of love, sunshine and harmony over all that is grim and ugly.

The version I give a link to here has, as well as the exuberant, engaging pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, English subtitles translating (from the German) the choir's chirrups of pure joy.