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.

Abram Louis Buvelot {1814-1888}


A Swiss-born landscape painter who emigrated to Melbourne in 1865, Buvelot studied, worked or painted, or all three variously, in the locations of Paris, Bahia in Brazil; Rio de Janeiro (attracting the attention of emperor Don Pedro II who knighted him with the 'order of the rose'), and lastly Switzerland before sailing for Australia where by 1869 his reputation was established in Port Phillip as the colony's leading landscape artist.


Several artists of the Heidelberg school, such as Frederick McCubbin, who Buvelot in fact taught at one point, considered him to be the father of Australian landscape painting with his emphasis on painting out in the open air directly in nature and in the surroundings of one's subject matter, and for his astute and realistic assessment of tone and lighting rather than emphasis on romantic themes and renderings, (a la Von Guerard), which Buvelot used to animate each of his works and which enabled him to depict the true appearance of the Australian landscape to a degree not yet witnessed.

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