John Glover and the Primal Scene of Australian Art

Abstract This article revisits the association that is now well established between the uncanny and the work of the early colonial Australian artist John Glover. The uncanny in not only Glover’s work, but equally the history of Australian art that he is said to originate, has so far been theorized as arising from the repeated failure to suppress the knowledge of founding acts of colonial violence. This is an argument that can certainly be aligned with Freud’s original article on the “unheimlich.” But what happens if we shift to more recent rewritings of Freud’s text? This article situates the repetition and return that characterize Glover’s art in relation to the different interpretation of the uncanny that Slavoj Žižek, after Jacques Lacan, has developed. This is the uncanny as not so much the failed attempt to conceal the knowledge of an event but, as Žižek writes, “the eruption of enjoyment into the social field.” A different understanding of what has been identified as the ghostly in Glover’s work will be proposed, one that seeks to identify the fantasy scene to which his work, and arguably the history of Australian art, repeatedly returns.