Bernard Smith in space and time : ‘The Antipodean Manifesto’ fifty years later

[Extract] As with all major cultural figures, the legacy of Bernard Smith is a complex phenomenon, one not necessarily best served by the simpler forms of hagiography. It is, for example, not necessarily the case that because his work engaged with the Pacific, it was therefore prophetic of the more general twenty-first century focus on this region in what Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard called ‘the Asian century’ and President Obama, with a significant shift of emphasis, ‘America’s Pacific century’. If such straightforwardly teleological charts of influence could be plausibly adduced, then almost every Australian anthropologist or cultural historian of the twentieth century might have a claim to be so honoured, but of course this renewed emphasis on the Pacific owes more to the evolving dynamics of globalisation in a more general sense. Moreover, there are always difficulties in properly assessing intellectual legacies so soon after someone’s death, since anecdotal reminiscence, with its implicitly proprietorial dimensions, can often cloud rather than clarify any given subject’s more enduring contribution. My purpose here, however, is to take a longer view of Smith’s achievement by re-examining ‘The Antipodean Manifesto’ from a retrospective vantage point of more than fifty years, in an attempt to determine where the most important and lasting aspects of his intellectual legacy might lie.