In late 1961, Bernard Smith gives his well-known lecture at the University of Queensland, ‘The Myth of Isolation’, in response to Bryan Robertson’s Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery in London earlier that year. It is undoubtedly a slightly vexed response to what he saw as his unjustified exclusion from the show and the passing over of its catalogue-writing duties to the young Robert Hughes. In it, Smith, contrary to the position he was about to take in his Australian Painting (1962), argues against the idea of Australia’s artistic isolation, suggesting that this is still the prevailing assumption of Robertson’s show. Smith’s argument remains largely an assertion, but if he was looking for evidence for what he was saying he might have turned to the many largely homosexual Australian artists who had at been living and working in London since the late 1920s. They knew each other, occasionally had relationships with each other and altogether allow us to think another “Australian” art history beyond that “jardin exotique” spoken of by Hughes in his catalogue essay. Perhaps Smith overlooked this other history not merely because of a “myth of isolation” but a “myth of heterosexuality”. It is a myth that has recently been contested with regard to the Australian women artists in Paris before and after the Second World War and it is perhaps time to do so with the Australian men in London at the same time.