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Arts & Communication

ARTICLE
Kenneth Jack and rural towns: Australian socialist

realist art (or just a less bitter pill to swallow)?

Kieran Edmond James*
School of Business and Creative Industries, University of the West of Scotland, Paisley, Renfrewdhire,
Scotland, United Kingdom

Abstract
Early Australian artists of European extraction had to wrestle with the vast,
inhospitable climate of inland Australia, unfamiliar animals and plants, and harsh
sunlight. To a greater or lesser extent, especially Boyd and Drysdale, they also
considered the Aboriginal inhabitants and how Europeans’ grip on the land and their
understanding of it always paled in comparison with theirs, leaving the Europeans
the ones out of place, infringing on a complex culture. Here, I use Marxist theories of
ideology and art to examine the work of Kenneth Jack, an Australian realist painter of
rural towns. His reassuring images are not confrontational, unlike those of Boyd and
Drysdale. They can be ideological by pointing to an apparently timeless and tranquil
midday peace, free from urban stressors and manufacturing and architectural blight.
As with poet Banjo Paterson, they create a discourse that raises up life in “the bush.”
These images can function as ideology where rural communities and services appear
to be underappreciated and under threat. It is a conservative vision as the absence
*Corresponding author: of people and vehicles reminds us, perhaps paradoxically, of romanticized rural
Kieran Edmond James
(KIERAN.JAMES@UWS.AC.UK) communities just out of the painter’s sight.
Citation: James KE. Kenneth Jack
and rural towns: Australian socialist Keywords: Australian art; Kenneth Jack; Lenin on Tolstoy; Marxist theory of art; Marxist
realist art (or just a less bitter pill to theory of ideology; Realism; Socialist realism
swallow)? Arts & Communication.
2025;3(1):3481.
doi: 10.36922/ac.3481
Received: April 23, 2024 1. Introduction
Revised: May 14, 2024
Kenneth Jack’s watercolor paintings of quiet rural Australian townships are well
Accepted: June 5, 2024 known for showing bare minimum activity—a single dog, two people in the near- or
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Published online: October 9, 2024 middle-distance, and no vehicles. Sometimes, a small church would be positioned in
2
3
Copyright: © 2024 Author(s). the distance or middle ground, creating a feeling of pathos. One can imagine a small
This is an Open-Access article and aging, yet faithful, congregation, consistent with the romanticized depictions of a
distributed under the terms 4
of the Creative Commons timeless rural life, populated by white people, and not many of them either given that
AttributionNoncommercial License, the featured towns appear to be so small. The time and place are often around noon on a
permitting all non-commercial use, quiet weekday, with the impression of heat and people moving slowly to conserve energy.
distribution, and reproduction in any
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medium, provided the original work There are typically no caravans, tourists, or any motor vehicles present, and few people,
is properly cited. suggesting heartland values and morality, separate from the tourist trade. The freedom
Publisher’s Note: AccScience from capitalist or urban oppression is suggested by the absence of manufacturing
Publishing remains neutral with facilities, which is reinforced by the age of the buildings and their rundown and shambolic
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional nature. The aim appears to depict unchanging, or very slowly changing, scenes, not only
affiliations. minute-by-minute and hour-by-hour but also year-by-year and decade-by-decade.

Volume 3 Issue 1 (2025) 1 doi: 10.36922/ac.3481