Corrupt Australia presents an alternative to the politically correct channels of debate to reveal and scrutinize the skewed structure/design of modern Australian society. We also seek to encourage autonomous Australian culture which is free from the standardizing and overly materialistic clutches of globalisation and which encourages citizens to go further than simply contributing to a quantity over quality mindset and the banal and unsustainable conditions under which we may increase our love for and attainment of material mass.

Johann Joseph (Eugene) Von Guerard {1812-1901}


Born in Vienna, Austria, Von Guerard was educated in the visual arts in Rome and Dusseldorf, Germany. He immigrated to the gold fields of Victoria in 1852 but soon found that there were opportunities for men of his artistic talent in Australia.


His own style drew noticeable influences from German landscape painters of the European Romantic period (spanning, roughly, from 1790 to 1840) such as Caspar David Friedrich. This style of natural art was attached to the intellectual concerns of the Romantic Period such as holism and of identifying God, the 'divine', or the 'life force', inside of nature rather than outside of nature (these ideas also provided the abstract mental orientation for Darwin's observations and subsequent theories). Thus the art strove to depict nature as infinite and as 'the sublime'. Works emphasise depth, detail and 'the picturesque'. Tiny human figures are often dwarfed by the grand scale of nature, as can be seen in many of Von Guerard's works.


By 1860 Von Guerard was recognized as the leading landscape artist in the colonies. Although with the onset of greater 'spontaneity' in the works of Louis Buvelot a few years later, and then even more so with the subsequent Heidelberg school, his population began to dwindle in later years.


In all, he was considered a pioneer in Australian art, and a man of considerable strength and determination, venturing into remote areas of wilderness in search of the sublime and opening the eyes of younger Australian artists to the vast and inspiring subject matter that lay in waiting to anyone who cared to venture into more remote areas away from the cities and larger townships.


Think of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.

Boast as you will of your mateship now - crippled and mean and sly - The lines of suspicion on friendship's brow were traced since the days gone by.
There was room in the long, free lines of the van to fight for it side by side -
There was beating-room for the heart of a man in the days when the world was wide.

With its dull, brown days of a-shilling-an-hour the dreary year drags round: Is this the result of Old England's power? - the bourne of the Outward Bound?
Is this the sequel of Westward Ho! - of the days of Whate'er Betide? The heart of the rebel makes answer "No! We'll fight till the world grows wide!"

The world shall yet be a wider world - for the tokens are manifest; East and North shall the wrongs be hurled that followed us South and West. The march of Freedom is North by the Dawn! Follow, whate'er betide! Sons of the Exiles, march! March on! March till the world grows wide!

- Henry Lawson

(c)2008 Corrupt AU