A month of Miles

Australia is glutted with literary prizes, all competing for attention; but the Miles Franklin Literary Award, first awarded in 1957 and now worth $42,000, retains a cachet all its own. This month’s shortlist is very exclusive: the three shortlisted books are Roger McDonald’s When Colts Ran (Vintage), Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (Picador), and Chris Womersley’s Bereft (Scribe). The winner will be announced in Melbourne of all places, on 22 June.

Patrick Allington

Because of its unique status, much is written about the Award, not all of it original or edifying. This month we are delighted to be able to publish Patrick Allington’s long, nuanced article about the Miles Franklin Literary Award (or ‘the Miles’, as he calls it). Patrick – the recipient of the first ABR Patrons’ Fellowship – spent several weeks reflecting on the Award’s history, strengths, quirks, and past controversies. Fascinatingly, Patrick (pictured above in the ABR office, after a roundtable discussion) has elicited comments from some of the major authors whose works have been excluded from consideration because they don’t‘present Australian Life in any of its phases’.

Rabbits and Rupert

‘Mot of the Month’ goes to Rupert Murdoch. In the foreword to a new collection of his great-uncle’s essays, he writes: ‘I have been accused of many things, but never literary criticism.’ Walter Murdoch was already seventy-five when young Rupert left for Oxford, in 1950. Keith Murdoch urged his son to visit him – ‘or you might never get the chance’. The grand old man of Australian essays lived for another twenty years. Imre Salusinszky, who included him in The Oxford Book of Australian Essays (1997), has compiled On Rabbits, Morality, etc.: Selected Writings of Walter Murdoch. Courtesy of UWA Publishing, we have ten copies to give to new print or online subscribers.

Changes at ABR

Christopher Menz – co-editor of this issue and a former director of the Art Gallery of South Australia – will leave ABR later this month after a year as Philanthropy Manager, a part-time position jointly funded by the Australia Council and ABR. His term has been transformative for ABR. When Christopher joined us last year, we had about twenty Patrons: now we have more than ninety. Fundraising at ABR is not about air kisses or canapés (though we are very partial to a Dobos Torte). Without the support of individual benefactors and philanthropic foundations, there would be no Online Edition, no patrons’ fellowships, no paid editorial internships, no Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize – simple as that. Christopher Menz, who remains contactable and eminently patronisable until 17 June, will become Acting Director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art in July. An announcement about his successor will follow in due course.

Meanwhile, Joel Deane – poet, novelist, journalist, and chief speechwriter to Premiers Steve Bracks and John Brumby – has joined the ABR board. His article on Julian Assange appeared in the May issue. We list all our Board members on the imprint page of the print edition.

Slow coach

Delivery of ABR can be slow, especially in northern Queensland. We’re monitoring this and will do what we can to expedite delivery to all our readers. It’s very helpful when you notify us of receipt of your copy (just email us or fax us the flysheet). On the imprint page we will list the date of lodgement with Australia Post (30 May in this case), so that readers can see how long magazines take to reach them.

HOWL and the Fox

Ten new print subscribers this month will receive a signed copy of Marion Halligan’s Shooting the Fox, courtesy of Allen & Unwin. Judith Armstrong, in this issue, describes Halligan’s stories as  ‘slyly double-edged’ and ‘always elaborated with a great deal of cleverness’. Ten other new print subscribers will receive a double pass to the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art exhibition Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams (11 June–2 October 2011). For ten renewing print subscribers, we have copies of HOWL – the acclaimed film about the writing and reception of Allen Ginsberg’s eponymous poem, starring James Franco – on DVD, thanks to Madman. Be quick, though; they’ll go in a flash. Call us now to subscribe or renew (03) 9429 6700, or visit our print edition or online edition subscription pages.

James Curran replies to Stuart Macintyre

Dear Editor,

Stuart Macintyre’s response to my letter (May 2011) acknowledges that in terms of ‘composition, character and loyalty’ – that is, the basic needs of nationalism – Australia defined itself for much of last century in British race terms. But he continues to define John Curtin’s Empire Council proposal as ‘pragmatic’, thus playing down not only Curtin’s patient efforts to win his party and the people over to his ideas, but also the broader point that because Australians defined themselves as British he could expect, through such a Council, that all the British world would unite to protect equally and fully all the British peoples, including Australia’s own distinctive interests, within the postwar Empire.

It is certainly valid to ask why Australian leaders since Deakin’s time, despite one rebuff after another, kept visiting London trying to achieve the unachievable – an effective seat at the high table of imperial policy-making. It cannot be dismissed as a narrowly self-interested method of obtaining cheap defence. This begs a second, related question: namely, why did Curtin not approach the United States – which had in the Pacific war demonstrated its much superior ability to protect Australia – with a request for joint policy-making? The answer must be that they were not a British people.

Macintyre juxtaposes Curtin’s Britishness with his ‘angry’ cable battles with Churchill. He sees a similar tension between the dumping by the ABC of ‘The British Grenadiers’ in favour of ‘Advance Australia Fair’ in 1942, with Curtin rebuking Calwell in 1943 for wanting to play ‘Advance Australia Fair’ in cinemas. But Curtin had no problem with the latter being played to help ‘build morale’. In any case, ‘Advance Australia Fair’ was a hymn to Australia’s essential Britishness, with references to the country’s ‘British soul’. It would take the Labor government of Bob Hawke, in 1984, to at last remove these offending verses.

James Curran, Sydney, NSW

Universal White

Dear Editor,

In his retrospective essay on Patrick White (‘Continentally Shelved’, April 2011), Charles Lock was correct to assert that ‘The present neglect of Patrick White around the world is a scandal.’ Accordingly, like me, he might have been astonished that J.G. Farrell’s Troubles was preferred to The Vivisector – a work of vastly wider artistic scope – in last year’s Lost Man Booker Prize. It is also a scandal that so many of White’s novels are not currently in print. Don’t publishers have an enduring obligation to their successful authors?

While many of Professor Lock’s observations are acute and informed, I am less convinced by his diagnosis. The fact that, probably correctly, he believes that too many Australian critics and scholars are patriotically myopic about what White attempted artistically, and the fact that there are wider aesthetic vistas to be explored in his work, do not vitiate the truth that White was an Australian artist. The real point is that he transcended locality to become universal and the real regret, therefore, is that the literary world seems to remain blind to his aspiration: this is hardly the fault of those who study or teach White’s work here.

Consider a few parallel cases in music. Elgar was unquestionably an English composer; Janáèek’s music is steeped in Moravian culture; Messiaen’s oeuvre is, in its approach and its spirit, abundantly French. However, none of them is limited to his cultural roots; all are universal artists.

Indeed, White’s familiarity with literature was international and diverse. This is reflected in his own writing and it could be argued that he repeatedly sought to rewrite huge nineteenth-century novels. In fact, Brian Kiernan argues that The Tree of Man has the subtext of the artist bringing literary culture to the antipodes, and that its first chapter is a version of the Book of Genesis.

It is, in short, possible to be both national and international as an artist, though Professor Lock seems to believe that creative people need to make a choice. That is a false dilemma.

John Carmody, Roseville, NSW

Charles Lock replies:

I am uncertain as to the grounds of disagreement that are supposed to exist between me and your correspondent. However, in the last paragraph a belief is ascribed to me, and then pronounced false, so I should respond. Let me say that any choices made by the author, whether topographical, thematic, symbolic, political, polemical, or whatever, will be only the beginning of the process by which, posthumously, her or his works will be received and evaluated; the rest is in the hands of readers and critics and, yes, publishers – though a publisher’s first obligation has always been to the market, and markets are shaped by readers and critics.

Charles Lock, Copenhagen, Denmark

Twenty years ago, when I was at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, I heard of an Arthur Boyd exhibition in SoHo. Recklessly, without seeing the show, I urged my American friends to see one of Australia’s foremost contemporary painters. The gallery, unknown to me, turned out to be small and unimpressive. There were five or six late paintings, including one of those large, multi-figured bathers, with that disconcerting quality of Boyd at the end of his career, both slapdash and commercial at the same moment. ‘So this is what contemporary Australian painting looks like?’ my companion asked ironically, just within the bounds of good manners.

Romantic Moderns,like this year’s wisteria in England, is catching the attention of many. Both are very English phenomena; and while Oxbridge colleges and London’s residential streets drip purple blossom, this new title has won the Guardian newspaper’s first book award and been shortlisted for two other eminent prizes. Public interest has been further stimulated by word of mouth, while excellent packaging, in terms of product design and well-chosen illustrations, has turned this book into a popular gift. It is also the subject of much debate. Few would deny that by the late 1930s in England a concerted project of national self-discovery was under way. But surely this was a shameful retreat? Didn’t it mean a return to the past, to safe traditions and to a ‘Little England’ mentality, after the wider and more progressive embrace of international modernism? Or is Alexandra Harris right to talk of a modern English renaissance which, as it unfolded fully in the 1940s, proved bold, timely, necessary, and of undeniable cultural significance?

Would it be indulgent to invoke Leonard Cohen? It’s just that his song ‘Take This Waltz’, which begins ‘Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women’, brings to mind that city’s fin-de-siècle world. In a liquescent poetic mosaic of shoulders and thighs, lilies, hyacinths, moonshine, and dew, I see the women as if painted by Gustav Klimt – portraitist, libertine – someone who ‘climbs to your picture with a garland of freshly cut tears’. And Cohen’s Kafkaesque ‘lobby with nine hundred windows’ stirs up images of Vienna as a city of windows, of watching and being watched. The song (based on a poem by Garcia Lorca) is desirous, death-defying, incessant, sardonic. Like the narrative of Tim Bonyhady’s book, it blends individual and larger histories. We are reminded of a place and time which, for many, was both gorgeous and abject, narcissistic and melancholy. With one foot in the nineteenth century and the other in the twentieth, it was a city waltzing towards immeasurable tragedy.

Bill Clinton discouraged politicians from picking fights with people who bought their ink by the barrel. Mindful of that advice, Lindsay Tanner has waited until the end of a career dedicated to the ‘serious craft of politics’ to remonstrate with the fourth estate about its fundamental unseriousness in reporting the democratic process.

‘Arran Avenue, Hamilton, Brisbane, Australia ... Why Australia? What is Australia, anyway?’ 
(Dante, in David Malouf’s Johnno)

Some footy talk before the book chat: I saw Wayne Carey play once, in Adelaide. He was a puppeteer that day. You would have needed a panoramic view – television doesn’t capture it – to appreciate that his every movement dictated when and where his teammates and opponents ran, jumped, kicked, handballed, tackled, and hit. Carey had it all: strength, stamina, ingenuity, and goal sense; he was a genius in a crisis. According to journalist Mike Sheahan, he was the best player of all time.[1] Yet Carey never won the code’s highest individual award. The AFL awards the Brownlow Medal to the ‘fairest and best player’ in the home and away season, as voted by umpires. On the field, Carey possessed a confidence in his own ability that metastasised into arrogance. He backchatted umpires; he threw his weight around, especially in the early years; he was ‘happy to use low-level violence’.[2] Wayne Carey, often the best, was rarely the fairest.

This fascinating, complex book relies for its success on the simplest of ideas and methodologies. Its publication was the necessary and inevitable follow-on from the hugely successful BBC Radio 4 series, when, over twenty weeks, British Museum (BM) director Neil MacGregor presented short, daily radio commentaries, in thematically conceived groups of five, on one hundred objects carefully selected from the BM’s vast holdings. The fact that a regular, continuing series of radio commentaries on a group of unseen museum objects achieved such popularity – indeed, a kind of cult status – is a testament not only to MacGregor’s skills and reputation as a popular communicator, but also to the method adopted in describing and contextualising each object. It also represents a brilliant marketing coup, demonstrating what the power of the media can do to ignite new interest in what is arguably the most important collection of the material culture of mankind existing anywhere – but displayed in an institution which has traditionally been seen as very worthy and necessary (in the educational, self-improving sense), but perhaps dull. It goes without saying that such a series would never get up in contemporary Australia.

Geraldine Brooks has an extraordinary radar for a good story, a curiosity that has carried her, and her readers, from Year of Wonders (2001), set during England’s plague of 1666; to March andthe American Civil War; to medieval Spain and the People of the Book (2008).Her latest novel, Caleb’s Crossing, is set closer to the place Brooks calls home – in the early settlement of Great Harbor on the island we now know as Martha’s Vineyard. It is a place that features heavily in the modern-day mythology surrounding the Kennedy clan, but back in the 1600s the island was party to a much more profound tragedy: the displacement of the Native American Indian.

Rodney Hall is the author of more than thirty books. He has won the Miles Franklin Award twice, for Just Relations (1982) and The Grisly Wife (1994). Many of his novels and poems have been published internationally. Rodney lives in Melbourne.

Why do you write?

I write for a reader, any reader – just one – who is willing to participate on a creative level in the experience of my book. I do not plan my novels, and I think if I ever did I would lose interest in finishing them. Nor do I ever alter the order in which the narrative unfolds. Otherwise, how would I keep track of what my reader knows and doesn’t know? I don’t care about plot. Instead, the aim is to transmogrify experience. What drives me is the music of the sentence. It’s all about a shared energy with the reader. That’s what fires me up.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

I dream a great deal, sometimes waking midway through and plunging back in. I am very much against any attempt to interfere or interpret dreams (i.e. strip them of the intangible by imposing logic on what is intrinsically non-logical).

This is the second major retrospective of the art of Eugene von Guérard (1811–1901). In 1980 he was seen as Nature-inspired, like the German Romantics and the Humboldtian visionaries Frederick Church and Thomas Moran (American painters of von Guérard’s own generation). This time, the viewpoint is science.

Percy Lindsay was the eldest and least well-known of the remarkable Lindsay brothers (the others were Norman, Lionel, and Darryl). He was born at Creswick, Victoria, in 1870, where he received his initial artistic training before moving to Melbourne in 1895. It was there that year that he first exhibited paintings, in a group show that included such luminaries as David Davies, E. Phillips Fox, and Walter Withers (the latter also taught him). Lindsay continued exhibiting his paintings until 1951: he had seven solo exhibitions between 1926 and 1935. In 1901 he took up illustrative work, which he produced for the remainder of his career. Lindsay married in 1907 and moved to Sydney in 1918, where he lived until his death in 1952.

Art, Love and Life accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Queensland Art Gallery. This substantial book contains eight short essays by six authors, with a brief checklist of the works included in the exhibition towards the end of the publication. There is also a useful chronology.

This is a wonderfully ambitious book. There has been no other publication on Australian art photography that so richly illustrates a period: 400 illustrations from 1980 to the present, by 190 individual photographers. And their work looks impressive – diverse, energetic, sophisticated. The selection is satisfyingly broad, covering an eclectic range of approaches, styles, and concerns.

The painter and outdoor draughtsman John Wolseley is utterly unusual among artists in this country. Marvellously accomplished yet old-fashioned, he could be seen as an artist who cheekily leapt from  traditional to postmodern without passing through any of the intermediate stages. His deeply natural pictures can’t be categorised easily, for all that they are entrancing. In Lines for Birds, they are reproduced side by side with the comparably responsive poems of Barry Hill.

Encompassing installation, sculpture, drawing, photography, and the moving image, Patricia Piccinini’s fifteen-year survey exhibition of sixty-five works at the Art Gallery of South Australia coincides with the period of her exploration of issues surrounding genetic modification/manipulation in the biotech era. Piccinini’s investigations are, as the exhibition’s title suggests, cautionary tales.

The Hare With Amber Eyes tells the migration story of ‘a very large collection of very small objects’, specifically 264 netsuke (pronounced like ‘jet ski’, from the Japanese characters for ne and tsuke, meaning ‘root’ and ‘attach’). Netsuke are small pieces of ivory, wood, metal, ceramic, or some other material, carved or otherwise decorated, and perforated for use as a toggle that tucks behind the belt or sash of a kosode or kimono (obi). From it a purse or more usually a small box with compartments (inro) may be suspended by a stout silken cord, and fastened with sliding beads (ojime). Netsuke evolved in seventeenth-century Japan to embrace an almost limitless number of decorative forms and shapes, increasingly prized, through the eighteenth century, as miniature sculptures on their own, nevertheless conforming to the basic requirement of their original function: namely, to allow a cord to be threaded through some sort of eye – in the case of the eponymous hare with the amber eyes this is achieved by the contrivance of a cocked hind leg; such strategies became more and more ingenious as netsuke proliferated – and also adhering to a roughly uniform size of between one and two inches in diameter, occasionally more. Ideally, netsuke nestle comfortably in the palm of the hand. Indeed, part of their aesthetic appeal is to the sense of touch, so deployed.

The Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award is the major event on the Indigenous visual arts calendar. Its significance rests with the quality art exhibited under the mantle of the award and the crowd it attracts to Darwin every August. Artists from disparate communities mingle to cement relationships through shared kinship, songlines, and history. Excited coordinators from community cooperatives mix with urbane curators and gallery owners – projects are conceived. Collectors jostle to reserve the best works.

In May 1990, Betty Churcher, then director of the National Gallery of Australia, Bill Wright, deputy director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and I stood outside what had once been the seat of Count Ostermann. This impressive building sits right off the Garden Ring, which surrounds inner Moscow. It is now the All-Russian Decorative, Applied and Folk Art Museum. All three of us, on our first trip to Moscow, were investigating the possibility of putting together a major exhibition of Russian and Soviet art.

A native of Western Australia, Goldie Goldbloom now resides in Chicago with her eight children, whom she gleefully admits, in her amusing introduction to this volume of short stories, to trouncing regularly at Scrabble, ‘with little or no compunction’. Her lyrical and inventive use of language in these eighteen stories comes as no surprise, then. More puzzling is that only four of these original, often charming tales have been published previously.

This is a book of rather brief short stories, few of which exceed a dozen pages. This leaves room for nineteen stories in a fairly short collection. Most of them read easily, each one effortlessly displacing its predecessor. There are, of course, standouts, to which I shall return, but the most striking overall characteristic is the distinctively personalised tone. The wide variety of personae notwithstanding, the voice is first person in more than half of the stories. Even when this is not the case, Halligan’s project is still to explore, intently and imaginatively, the mind of another. Anyone may idly wonder what is going through the thoughtful head of the bespectacled man sitting opposite her on a tram, but Halligan delves forensically to make her revelations.

Mary Watson’s tale begins in Brisbane in the 1870s, when, aged nineteen, she flees an abusive and drunkard father and finds employment as a pianist in a whorehouse in Cooktown run by a Frenchman, Charley Boule. Determined to improve her prospects, she secretly signs on to more lucrative employment: spying on smuggling rackets. It is not clear what is being smuggled – it might be guns – but within a year Mary has dug herself deeper into espionage. She marries a bêche-de-mer fisherman, and goes to live with him on isolated Lizard Island, off the Queensland coast. There, she continues her dangerous and covert work, signalling messages to ships in passage along the coast.

Stories of the impact of European discovery, exploration, invasion, and settlement on Australia are naturally a source of fascination to novelists. The microcosm of the island of Tasmania, with its cruel yet beautiful landscape and its unforgiving weather, offers these stories with a special kind of eerie horror. Against this setting, the stories emerge both in concert and in counterpoint, describing the stains which forever disfigure and haunt the place. Tasmania was less of a frontier in the American sense of the word than it was a dead end.

Milan Zorec, protagonist of I Hate Martin Amis Et Al., walks into the London office of a literary agency that has rejected his novel and terrorises the agent before going to jail, where he decides to travel to besieged Sarajevo in order to vent his spleen by assassinating innocent civilians. In the light of this, and for other reasons, a reviewer of this disquieting, artful novel must be careful.

How would Dennis Keith – or, if we’re using the language of legends, DK – characterise it? ‘The Life was this mythic world where you could surf as much as you want, every day, any day, go anywhere [...] Getting waves was everything, every day.’ In Malcolm Knox’s exceptional new novel, this world – with its singular focus, and its sacred ecstasies – is revealed in a language both new to Knox and rare in commercial Australian publishing.

Faces in the Clouds begins with a drunken soldier arriving at a hospital in which his second son is fighting for breath. The struggle of the soldier’s twin sons, Stephen and Lawrence, continues throughout the novel, from their vividly described early years in an army barracks to their lives as young adults.

The Sublime

at 86 and 91 they are still together
more or less
and greet me at the door
as if I am the punchline to a joke
they were just recalling

my mother staggers sideways in the drive
my father reaches out for a wall, a rail, an arm
with the urgency telephones demand

they know what it is now
and do their best to hide this knowledge from us
agreeing to be forgetful and ever more frail
they can’t help grinning at the picture they must make

they expect to be driven to appointments
they say are medical or therapeutic

my mother toys with the idea of a new knee
my father trembles to the tiny drum machine
beneath his ribs

and their eyes go cloudy, their ears a solid silent blue,
their mouths half open to let out the unspoken
because they know what it is
and now they want it more than this old world

the small days come, flowers in the garden,
drugs delivered to the door, postcards in the box outside

she has a sturdy stick to hold down against this earth
tapping as if to wake someone down there

a warning they are coming

David Walsh is a tease; he enjoys wordplay. The founder and owner of the Museum of Old and New Art (he prefers Mona, not MONA) concedes that his private playground is entirely a matter of self-gratification, like ‘the sin of Onan’. Hence the cheeky titles ‘Monanism’ for his inaugural exhibition of some 460 works, and Monanisms for the beautifully produced picture book of 115 selections from the collection (Monanisms: Museum of Old and New Art, $80 hb, 378 pp, 9780980805802). Many of the latter are not included in the inaugural exhibition, and will be presented later.

By way of an exhibition catalogue, which Monanisms is not, there is a new-technology option. Substituting for labels, an iPod device, called The O, contains information that you can email to your home computer. My printout checklist of sixteen pages included a lot of accidental duplicate hits, and three pages of ‘Missed Works’.

The book is a bibliographic tease. The colophon assigns it to a corporate author, ‘Museum of Old and New Art (Tas.)’. Another page identifies ‘Contributors: David Walsh, Elizabeth Mead/with: Jane Clark, Damian Cowell, Gregory Barsimian, Tim Walsh’. Book-buyers like to know who did what, and they eventually read that crucial research was contributed by Jane Clark, Mary Lijnzaad, and Delia Nicholls, that the editor (meaning copy-editor) was Linda Michael, and the superb designer was Leigh Carmichael.

Carmichael devised the playful Curator-Rater, an inserted cardboard disc that rotates under a perforated black page. Sixteen favourite works are named on the page, and when the underlying rotator marks a particular work with Mona’s signature colour (the in-your-face shade known as ‘Shocking Pink’ that appears in all Carmichael’s printed ephemera), its curatorial score appears in another perforation. Cassandra Laing’s drawing Darwin’s girls scored 340; Andres Serrano’s The morgue, a photograph of an Aids victim’s corpse, scored twelve. I couldn’t work out what the rating system meant. The sequence of illustrations is systematic, too, but I couldn’t work that out either.

Mead, a young staffer, wrote up most of the notes about the works from Walsh’s comments and various research sources, including interviews with artists and curators. Some works have no accompanying text, others have many pages. Walsh himself is sole author of quite a few texts, among which are a crucial five-paragraph preface, a four-page introduction, and a brief afterword. Jane Clark’s contributions are usually straight art-history essays about older works.

Mona commissioned Melbourne garage-punk musician Damian Cowell to compose fifteen songs inspired by art in the collection. His lyrics are printed in the book, and the songs, constituting an album titled Vs Art, are in an audio-disc insert. Touring the exhibition with The O, you can call up Cowell’s Melbourne burning while gazing at Arthur Boyd’s eponymous painting. American artist Gregory Barsimian provides a note about his own sculpture. The last contributor, the late Tim Walsh, was David’s elder brother; a poem of his, titled ‘A Professor of History Greets his Students’, accompanies an Egyptian figurine of a baboon.

David Walsh chose everything. He, not curatorial scouts Olivier Varenne in Europe or Jane Clark and others in Australia, made the final decisions on works bought for the collection. He decided which works would be illustrated in the book. He is thus the prime author of the book, and prime curator of the exhibition.

Walsh’s modesty about his part in the book-making, and the unusually ‘flat’ management structure of Mona, are attractive qualities. His peculiar immodesty in the crucial, brief preface is oddly endearing. He imagines his forty-nine-year-old self waking up four decades ago in the mean streets of a poor Hobart suburb:

The mirror said pigeon chest, dark hair, tiny dick, flat stomach … There is nothing in the ’burbs in 1970 … My brother says he’s insane ... I don’t eat meat mum …School, Mass, people believe in God? Unformed, uniformed girls. Is it wrong to wish I was a pædophile? I can tolerate almost everything …
I invent a gambling system. Make a money-mine. Turns out, it ain’t so great getting rich ... What to do? ... A man in a white coat ... says something like, “He is highly delusional, believes he is building a museum, changing the world”.

The preface emphasises the dark hair and flat stomach at the age of nine in order to dramatise the final illustration, David Walsh Portrait,2010, a photograph by Andres Serrano. Physiological changes are visible at forty-nine; we see the mature atheist seated full-frontal naked, gazing sullenly at the reader, with greying hair and a sagging stomach.

The ambition to change the world was not entirely delusional. Walsh has already changed hometown Hobart, and Tasmania. The place – free admission helps – is abuzz with demographics seldom encountered in art museums. Sixteen-year-old free-range boys (not in school groups) are enthralled by James Angus’s dimension-shifting Mack Truck, its front jammed into the wall of a narrow corridor, its rear end visible in a nearby gallery space, but mostly missed. They have patience with video art, loll happily on beanbags to gaze at ceiling projections. One lady remarked, ‘It’s the first time I’ve mixed with lots of bogans in an art museum; isn’t that marvellous?’ By early May there had been an astonishing 163,000 visitors over three and a half months, seventy per cent of them locals, many repeat visitors; the others had come specially from elsewhere in Australia or overseas. 

Museum of Old and New Art (photographed by Leigh Carmichael)  

On the ferry back to Hobart, a stylish woman was making notes. An artist’s statement about the long corridor installation of 150 life-size porcelain Cunts…and other Conversations, ‘by Greg Taylor and friends’, is available in the Artwank section of The O. It tells that the clay had been sculpted by Greg in 2008–09 from close observation of 150 friends, ranging in age ‘from eighteen to seventy-eight …Catholic, Protestant, Salvation Army, and Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Pagans, Witches and Atheists … teachers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, writers, actors, musicians, artists, life models, students, architects and theologians … heterosexual, bisexual, lesbians. Some were virgins. All of them want one thing: for young women to be free of growing up with fear, ignorance and loathing of their bodies and sexuality.’ The note-maker on the ferry had written, ‘It was like my first time at a nude beach, surprised that every tit was different.’

Vox pop interviews in the Hobart press stated that what they called ‘the 150 vaginas’ was far and away the favourite for women. They found it ‘empowering’, but I wonder if that is a conventional response, easily offered to the most surprising work, and one of the largest.Taylor’s unusually interesting Cunts, on display in ‘Monanism’, is not illustrated or discussed in the book Monanisms.

The men’s favourite was the largest work, well publicised in advance: Sidney Nolan’s vast 1620-sheet Snake, 1970–72, forty-four metres wide. Children, less preconditioned, went for Erwin Wurm’s cartoonish anti-obesity sculpture, Fat car, 2006, a sleek Porsche Carrera encased in scarlet foam. Both are in the book, Snake illustrated in a six-page foldout, with an essay by Walsh, who says, characteristically contradictory, ‘It’s the largest modernist work ever made in Australia. I don’t know this for a fact. I could find out … I don’t need to because it should be so, it must be so … it forced a layout on the museum that now seems ideal.’

Some women have found Mona too blokey. Others have called Walsh ‘adolescent’ and ‘a nice boy’, which might be cautious appreciation of his enthusiasm. Well, the collection is a self-proclaimed, let-it-all-hang-out expression of one man’s own interests. However, some modern blokes are feminists. This one has adjusted the orthography of the museum from impersonal-corporate MONA to seductive feminine Mona. He attempts even-handed representation for women artists: sculptures by Australian Fiona Hall are conspicuous, and videos by Serbian Marina Abramoviæ.

He is even-handed, too, about gendered subject matter: a vulva in Del Kathryn Barton’s canvas Making love with love confronts you, while, nearby, you encounter inflamed penises and nipples in a series of watercolours by Balint Zsako. Barton’s painting visually rhymes the vulva with a row of pansies, and quick-witted parents of small children who enter one of the orange-red zones on the museum floor plan – ‘Parental discretion advised … Recommended for ages 15 and over’ – have an answer to questions about the Cunts: ‘They’re flowers, dear.’ Even-handedness extends to sexualities, even to primal, mythic bestiality. An ancient bronze of the god Zeus in the form of a swan mating with Leda, Queen of Sparta, is displayed near Russian artist Oleg Kulik’s 1997 performance-documentation photograph of a crouching man apparently being buggered by a homosexual mastiff. Titled Family of the future, 9, Kulik’s work was the hardest to take. It is not in the book, and The O has no comment. Google reveals that it is the climactic piece in a series where a beautiful white-skinned naked man is otherwise seen peaceably relaxed, lying among drowsy black-furred companion animals. Walsh has told us he can tolerate almost everything, and it would have helped us begin to tolerate this work if The O had provided contextual information.

The press, some years ago, latched onto a catchy remark of Walsh’s: ‘It will be a museum about sex and death.’ That is too simple. His true interest is a rather bleak atheistic belief that gods and afterlives are dangerous delusions; we are mere organisms, like plants and our fellow-animals, all of whom have to obey the biological imperatives of birth, growth, feeding, ageing, mutating, breeding, and dying. We should also continuously attempt to measure and test the world scientifically. Some of the most telling works at Mona are about mathematics and digital technology.

Considerate to our fellow-organisms, Walsh still doesn’t eat meat. The much-noticed digestion machine, Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca Professional, 2010, a handsome industrial mechanism, suspended in the air, is fed each morning with leftovers from the Mona café, poos daily at two p.m., and is fed again two hours later. Its stinkiness is a reminder that a taste for equally stinky cheeses can be acquired. Nearby is one of Mona’s masterpieces, Jannis Kounellis’s Untitled, 1998, a seven-metre-wide metal frame containing elegantly placed sides of beef, hung on hooks; over the five days of each supply, its stink competes with Cloaca’s. Mercifully, fresh meat is hung only on special occasions, such as the ten days of Mona’s opening, or for Easter. At other times, nooses of strong rope substitute for the suspended flesh.

While we live, suggests Walsh, we should enjoy the animal pleasures of food and drink and sex and sociability. Three years ago, he initiated a summer festival in Hobart called mona foma, the second acronym standing for Festival Of Music and Art. Walsh links it to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle (1963), where beautiful Mona follows the scriptures of the ‘Books of Bokonon’ and ‘lives by the foma – harmless untruths – that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy’. A pagan paradise is here on earth.

Some objects, but not people, achieve afterlives because of beauty. At Mona, these include Egyptian funerary wares of characterful animals, and gold and silver Greek coins, among which is a ravishing Syracusan image of the nymph Arethusa celebrating the mystery of pure spring water. There are, too, the fake Meso-American carvings that were once exhibited as originals in the short-lived Moorilla Museum of Antiquities. Now displayed in a water-filled glass case, the ‘fishy’ objects are nevertheless beautiful: harmless untruths.

Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1998, iron, meat, ropes, steel hooks, 352 x 782 cm, courtesy of MONA Museum of Old and New Art  

Few paintings at Mona rise to great heights of object-and-idea, the best qualification for an afterlife.  Damien Hirst’s monochrome black panel textured with dead flies is an impressive surprise. Other works by the once-hyped Young British Artists of the 1990s have begun to lose their aesthetic force. Easel paintings by Walsh’s favourite Australian, Sidney Nolan, are fine, though not the vast Snake, probably conceived for the more intimate spaces of an opera-house foyer, and too distanced in its misguided, cavernous space at Mona.

Walsh’s preface falsified the nothingness of the suburbs in 1970. Highly conspicuous on the shore beyond the young David’s Glenorchy, Claudio Alcorso’s private Moorilla estate included a vineyard and winery, a modern cube house for the tycoon–aesthete and his art, and a garden where the public came for classical music. The gambling system developed by Walsh and his fellow students of mathematics at the University of Tasmania eventually enabled them to buy Moorilla as a wine-making investment, and as a place to exhibit investment antiquities from Africa, the Mediterranean, and Meso-America. Walsh’s Mona – he bought out Moorilla from the other three gamblers when the idea for a Wunderkammer museum of antiquities mingled with avant-gardism took hold of him – has grown upon what was already the most interesting private place in Tasmania.

Walsh’s Melbourne-based architect, Nonda Katsalidis, says the exterior is ‘more a colour-matching landscape piece for the casuarinas than architecture’; his brutalist waterfront cliff face of rusted Corten steel panels and concrete honeycomb now supports Roy Grounds’s white house, which has become the foyer from which visitors descend, by lift or circular staircase, through three levels of underground museum. The ideal approach is by ferry, from which a stately flight of steps leads as if to an ancient Greek temple that turns out to be a mountain-viewing terrace with an Astroturf tennis court, where, after museum hours, Walsh plays games of geometrical skill. From there we double back with surprise to the entrance wall of the once classical house, now pasted over with a huge wavy fun-fair mirror.

The lowest level is the most extensive. After the long descent into darkness we are greeted by a bar – absinthe is available – and a scatter of bizarre fake-baroque armchairs and sofas, intended to evoke an Enlightenment salon for exchange of stimulating ideas. A great wall of live Triassic sandstone evokes geological time-scales. The first of many taxidermy works of art occur here, and others emphasising biological processes. Further along are conventional white-cube spaces intended for future temporary exhibitions. In the inaugural Monanism selection, one of these rooms is sparsely installed with little besides Conrad Shawcross’s Loop system quintet, a kinetic whirling-light piece, and Kandinsky’s watercolour Aufstieg (Rising); music and dance come to mind, the empty floor suggests a ballroom, and, on enquiry, we learn that Walsh still spends time dancing in nightclubs as well as drinking in bars.

Another white-cube space pretends to be for leftover paintings crowded onto mesh storage racks, but Damien Hirst’s dead flies are here, and the arrangement allows you to read the words pasted onto its reverse, and to inspect both sides of a double-sided Sidney Nolan. Also lurking here is a tiny pencil drawing of a mild bloke and a beer, by a little-known American, Jeff Gabel. Regardless of when you punch it into The O, it comes out at the beginning of the saved tour; we suspect it might be Walsh’s favourite work.

At the far end of this lowest level, a tunnel leads to the MONA Library, a beautiful and very respectful conversion of the Roy Grounds roundhouse built in 1958 for Alcorso’s parents as a companion to his classic square. Not accessible when the museum opened in January, it was completed and opened on 7 May.

Sculptures provide the big thrills. The Kounellis meat piece is one, and its monumentality suits the cavernous Snake space. A couple of book-related works are peculiarly Monanistic. Wilfred Prieto’s Untitled (White Library), 2004–06, is a walk-in room, lined with shelves of blank white books, which also rest on reading tables, all engulfed in blazing light – an amazement in the otherwise dark and shadowy museum; books are vehicles for mental enlightenment. Anselm Kiefer’s Sternenfall: Shevirath Ha Kelim (Falling stars: The Breaking of the Vessels), 2007, is a five-metre-high iron bookcase filled with book leaves of lead and broken glass, standing on a floor covered in broken glass. It has an outdoor pavilion to itself, reached beyond the Library. Daylight or starlight streams in the windows: light at the end of a dark tunnel from the underground museum. The title refers to Jewish liturgical song, the materials to alchemical and chemical transformation, and the image to the Kristallnacht riots of 1938, when Nazis instructed police to seize Jewish archives from synagogues in Germany and Austria, and destroy knowledge along with the Jewish race. The power of books had to be destroyed.

Walsh never graduated in mathematics. He found, as they say in such cases, that his formal studies interfered with his reading. The undergraduate computer nerd, an enthusiastic autodidact, says he consumed ‘ten books a day on ancient civilisations and science’. Walsh is, above all, mad about books.

He also loves abstract ideas. He was delighted with Leigh Carmichael’s design for the Mona logo. It is a multiplication sign beside a plus sign, to signify the mathematician gambler. Or a cancellation mark beside a cross of crucifixion. Or a kiss before a sexual act that might generate an addition to the great chain of biological continuity. May many more of Mona’s books stream from magical Moorilla peninsula, once called Large Frying-pan Island, but let them focus more on the ideas in individual works of art. Monanisms and ‘Monanism’ stew the works into a bouillabaisse of David Walsh’s responses.

Monanism, the inaugural exhibition at the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, 21 January–19 July 2011. The book Monanisms: Museum of Old and New Art is also available in luxury binding at $300 in a signed and numbered edition of 360 copies. See page 9 for more details.

It takes fifteen minutes of screen time before Karen (Shai Pittman), the young Aboriginal heroine of Beck Cole’s Here I Am, finds a room of her own. Before this, we have seen her riding away from prison in a taxi, blissfully feeling the wind on her face; walking through dark Adelaide streets, clutching a box of treasured possessions; and prostituting herself to a stranger in a pub in exchange for a night’s accommodation.

As people around the world watch events in the United States, many will agree that it is indeed an exceptional, if conflicted, nation. The sole superpower, with the world’s largest economy and the most powerful military ever known, is hugely in debt, and struggles agonisingly just to produce a federal budget. The nation with the world’s best universities and hospitals has an inequitable education and health system, decaying public infrastructure, and high rates of imprisonment. The American people fought a war of independence, developed electricity and telephony, adopted decimal currency, founded the United Nations, put men and women in space, created rock and roll, and devised the Internet; yet to this day they perpetuate creationism, capital punishment, gun rights, and imperial measurement. The country’s full military capacity is too lethal to be used for most purposes, yet its weapons industry continues to produce increasingly sophisticated killing machines. Less than one per cent of Americans surveyed by the New York Times and CBS News in late 2010 and early 2011 considered abortion to be the most important problem facing the United States, yet Republicans who approve huge sums for killing foreigners oppose funding abortions for Americans.

In a review on quite another subject for ABR’s recent summer issue (‘Barry by Edna’, December 2010–January 2011), I had occasion to invoke the career of Michael Holroyd, ‘reigning, if ailing, king of English biographers’, as I dubbed him. On the basis of his well-publicised illness, I sadly but confidently declared that Holroyd’s joint biographical study of the Irving and Terry theatrical dynasties, A Strange Eventful History (2008), was ‘likely to be his last’. How delightful now to be proved wrong with the appearance of A Book of Secrets.

Witnesses to War, an ambitious book, is part of a larger project by the C.E.W. Bean Foundation to commemorate the work of Australian war correspondents. Fay Anderson and Richard Trembath, setting out to document the performance of Australian war correspondents, have tackled complex material. They deal with an enormous cast of characters and various interwoven themes, including the struggle against military censorship, how journalists have observed their duty to neutral coverage (or not), and the changing technology of reporting war – from sending stories by carrier pigeon or steamship in World War I to today’s live telecasts by journalists direct from battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book fills an important gap. Until now, Phillip Knightley’s more general work, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker (1975, 2004), has served as the final authority in this field. Knightley is a patron of the Foundation and an important influence.

The title of this new book on the Vietnam War comes from the final verse cycle of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1869). As Arthur lies dying, he reflects ‘that we / Shall never more ... Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds’. This Arthurian borrowing for the title of a book about an obscure battle fought by Australians in Vietnam during the 1968 Tet Offensive is not overweening. That infamous year, the war’s ubiquity on television gave the conflict a frisson of newness that coincided with political upheavals in Europe and with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy. Vietnam was not the first of the new wars; it was the last of the old wars. Gerard Windsor’s Arthurian title is both poignant and entirely apt.

When the English zoologist John Gould died in London in February 1881, he was renowned for his scientific and descriptive studies, principally of birds – those found in his native Britain, the Himalayas, Europe, Australia, North America, and New Guinea – but also of Australian mammals. In the course of his self-made career, Gould produced forty-one large volumes, handsomely illustrated with 3000 plates. These were the work of several artistic collaborators, including, importantly, his wife, Elizabeth, and – early and briefly – Edward Lear, famous later in his own right for his limericks and as a masterly writer of nonsense verse and prose. In addition to his great published works of natural history, Gould was the author of many learned papers and the recipient of high honours from scientific societies. As a leader in his field, he interacted as an equal with aristocratic men of science and affairs; the members of the governing class of his day.

A matter of style

Stephanie Owen Reeder

Once upon a time, Australian picture books were easy to pick because of their distinctive artwork, which often featured Australia’s unique landscape and its flora and fauna. Nowadays, many Australian illustrators adopt a more universal style.

When Tessa wakes up in hospital, she has no idea who she is or how she came to be there. The only clues are the ‘long, thin, striping slashes’ scarring her back. With no way of knowing who or where her family is, Tessa is sent to Cascade Falls College, an exclusive girls’ boarding school on the outskirts of Hobart. She befriends the ‘untouchables’, a group of quirky scholarship students, and joins them in their mission to dethrone Charlotte Lord, ‘the biggest princess this side of England’, and her perfect posse. However, there is a more serious battle raging beneath the schoolgirl rivalry, and students are beginning to disappear in mysterious circumstances. If Tessa is to save her friends, she must remember who she is before the full moon rises.