The brave new conformity.

THE CULTURE WARS are over, and the Left won. For proof, look no further than the winners of three of Australia's most prestigious annual art prizes, currently exhibiting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The best-known of the three is the $50,000 Archibald Prize, awarded for portrait painting. This year's winner is Del Kathryn Barton, for her painting of herself and her two children entitled, You are what is most beautiful about me. It is a striking picture, and it makes a bold and simple statement about maternal love and protectiveness. As the artist explains, it expresses "the utterly profound 'in-loveness' that all mothers have for their children".

The picture is dominated by Barton herself, depicted as a rather stern matriarch, hair swept back, face unsmiling, eyes glaring eagle-like through her square-rimmed spectacles deterring any interloper who dares to threaten her private family space. In front of her, snuggled safely between her opened thighs and sheltered within her shielding arms, are her two children.

But isn't there somebody missing? I'm not making a comment here about Barton's personal family circumstances--I know nothing about her family set-up, and it doesn't matter for what I want to say. My concern is more general. It is simply to note that the winning entry for our most prestigious portrait prize portrays an ideal of family intimacy where the father-husband is not only missing, but appears to have been deliberately excluded.

Barton tells us in the blurb accompanying her picture that it celebrates "the alchemy of life offered forth from my inhabitable woman's body". The father of her children--the man who seeded that life--doesn't rate a mention. The message of the picture is similarly clear: a mother and her children alone represent family wholeness and totality. The circle is complete, closed and sealed. Nobody else need be admitted. Not even dad.

Ask yourself this. When was the last time a serious artist produced a strong and positive family image like this, but one depicting a traditional nuclear family group with a protective father as well as a loving mother? I suspect that such a picture would not get anywhere near a prestigious art prize in today's world. It would swiftly be dismissed as "reactionary" and "patriarchal".

Yet until recently, it was a core task of the husband-father to supply the protective membrane around the family unit, shielding it from outside threats. Fifty years of radical feminism have trashed this traditional ideal and made us feel squeamish about it. Nowadays, we feel much more comfortable with strong matriarchs than strong patriarchs. We like to believe that mum can do it all unaided--that a woman needs a man like a fish ... you know the rest.