Page:Rambles in Australia (IA ramblesinaustral00grewiala).pdf/108

78 should call the professional classes, though no such conventions segregate the trading, the commercial, the professional classes in the same way as in the home country. But Adelaide is in one respect different from other Australian cities. It has more nearly a professional class—or may we say a professorial class?—than Perth or Melbourne, or Sydney, or Brisbane. An English journalist once tried to express it by saying that Adelaide represented "culture" in the Commonwealth; but that is unkind both to Adelaide and the Commonwealth, for the soil of Australia is unfavourable to the growth of culture or any other pretences. But Adelaide has a large population in its trim bungalows of the suburbs, interested in university work, in education, in social and democratic problems, in art, in literature. It has the most eclectic collection of pictures of any of the states; and here perhaps one may tell another story. In the year before the War there was an outbreak of allegorical canvases on the walls of the New English Art Club where a return to primitive methods of expression in paint reflected the activities of Post-Impressionism and Cubism and Futurism which permeated the studios of Europe. Among others who had a hack at allegory was that most capable of the younger school of painters, Mr. W. Orpen, and