Art talk

We suspect that this issue of ABR, at eighty pages in the print edition, is our longest yet. There were so many books to accommodate, plus a welcome new cohort of advertisers, especially in the gallery world. We thank all of them for their support.

Art is our chosen theme this month. The first half of the magazine contains a photo-essay by Carol Jerrems and an article on the new wing of the National Gallery of Australia; along with articles on Papunya, Lucian Freud, Brett Whiteley, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Donald Friend, among others.

Special thanks to Christopher Menz – former Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, and the author–curator of many exhibitions – for co-editing the Art issue. We’ll be doing it again next year, along with other themed issues.

 

 

Digital survey

Readers have been inundating us with their views on ABR’s electronic options. We are grateful for your time, your ideas, your support. The survey results will inform our choices in 2011. Happily, most people have embraced the idea of electronic versions of ABR. But some respondents have expressed alarm, fearful that the print edition would disappear. There are no plans whatsoever to eliminate the print edition. Perish the thought! If anything, new electronic forms – adding an important new stream of revenue – will only enhance the print edition.

 

Julia ii

Jacqueline Kent is writing for us again. It’s a wonder she has time. Since Julia Gillard’s ascension to the prime ministership, Ms Kent has been working on a new edition of her biography of Gillard, which appeared in 2009. The updated edition will be published on 22 November. Now Ms Kent is planning a biography of Kenneth Cook, to whom she was married. (She wrote about Cook for us in November 2009; ‘The Unsentimental Bloke: Kenneth Cook and Wake in Fright’). Jacqueline Kent’s review of Reg Grundy’s memoir will appear in the summer issue.

 

 

Culture mulcher

Chong Weng Ho, who generously designed all our covers between 2001 and 2008, returns this month with a spectacular design. Lovers of sophisticated blogging should not miss Chong’s Culture Mulcher, which is hosted, if that’s the right word, by Crikey.

 

Vale David Rowbotham

Distinguished Queensland poet David Rowbotham died in Brisbane on 6 October, aged eighty-six. Rowbotham, who served in the RAAF during World War II, was also a journalist, academic, and broadcaster. Ploughman and Poet, his first volume of poetry, appeared in 1954; Rogue Moons, his final collection, appeared fifty-three years later. He was made AM in 1988, and received the Patrick White Award in 2007.

 

 

December gong

The entrants in the ABR Short Story Competition, worth $2000, are a patient lot. We thank them for their forbearance. We look forward to announcing the winner and to publishing his or her entry in our summer issue. Because of the high quality of fancied entries, we have decided to publish the shortlisted stories on our website and to invite readers to select their favourites. The shortlist will be posted on 1 December. Voting will be conducted via email. The author of the most popular short story will be named in our February issue. Two lucky voters, drawn at random, will win terrific prizes.

 

Give-aways galore

This month, ten new subscribers will receive a copy of The Donald Friend Diaries, edited by Ian Britain (and reviewed by Patrick McCaughey here), with thanks to Text Publishing. Ten existing subscribers who renew for two years will be rewarded with a ticket valued at $90 to the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s next concert in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, or Perth. Twenty other renewing subscribers will receive (courtesy of Potential Films) double passes to James Ivory’s new film, The City of Your Final Destination, which stars Anthony Hopkins, Laura Linney, and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

 

 

Read the review: see the show

New subscribers during ABR’s month of art may prefer to receive free tickets to one of two exhibitions: David to Cézanne at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, or Desert Country at the Art Gallery of South Australia (which is reviewed here). We have ten double passes for each to give away, with thanks to both galleries. Call us on (03) 9429 6700 to ensure that you don’t miss out on a prize.

 

 

CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2010

 

No statues for critics

Dear Editor,

I am sorry that Judith Armstrong should have such difficulty following my point that criticism is in some sense bound to fail because it is a secondary exercise (October 2010). It was Bartók, I think, who remarked that no one ever erected a statue in honour of a critic.

I am an improbable denigrator of criticism, because I not only make a living from it, but also because, at Scripsi, I published some of the most distinguished critics (Susan Sontag, Frank Kermode, Gerard Genette), a practice I continued as editor of The Best Australian Essays.

Geoffrey Hartman’s suggestion that criticism should equal literature won’t bear examination. Can Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations hold a candle to Proust? As I said, the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, and Lawrence’s Classic Studies in American Literature, are some of the greatest twentieth-century writing about literature, but they are not criticism proper, because their truth is the truth of fiction.

We don’t think that Dr Johnson’s Life of Milton (probably the greatest act of criticism in the language) is the equal of Paradise Lost, nor do we think that Hazlitt can equal the Romantic poets. Coleridge and Eliot are great critics, but greater poets. Henry James’s prefaces do not have the significance of The Portrait of a Lady. In Judith’s own patch, as a Russianist, the labyrinthine pedantry of Nabokov’s study of Onegin and his book about Gogol are not on par with Lolita or Speak, Memory. The latter is a masterpiece of non-fiction, but one of the things we have to accept as critics is that criticism is a very small part of this. This is clearer with the other arts: Tynan is not Olivier or Peter Brook, Truffaut as a critic was not the equal of Hitchcock (or Truffaut as film-maker).

On other matters: I did not mean to give the impression that I could write in newspapers at whatever length on subjects of my choice. Of course, I wish I could. It is true, however, that our Saturday supplements do pay homage to literature. The film The Last Station allowed me to write a cover story about Tolstoy for The Weekend Australian, and Judith to write about it at somewhat shorter length for The Age.

I meant it when I said that a world that loses the distinction between art and trash surrenders itself to purely commercial imperatives. I also meant it when I said to the girl in the audience, aglow with enthusiasm for what she was studying, that some books were much better than others and that, as she grew older, she would realise that the refusal on the part of her teachers to act on this apprehension was a cop-out. I rehearsed these arguments at what may well have been excessive length at the Wheeler Centre, and I’m surprised to be seen as having scanted them.

Peter Craven, Fitzroy, Vic.

 

Colonial mindset

Dear Editor,

At the end of an otherwise complimentary review of Mike Carlton’s Cruiser: The Life and Loss of HMAS Perth and Her Crew (October 2010), Geoffrey Blainey lets his Anglophile prejudices show. He thinks Carlton gives too much credence to folklore praising Curtin and the trade unions in the late 1930s, and inaccurately condemns perfidious England and blindly loyal Australia. ‘The contradictory evidence,’ Blainey writes, ‘seems to be forgotten.’

What contradictory evidence? Carlton accurately recounts some notorious examples of Churchill’s disdain for Australia’s wartime interests, including his secret pact with Roosevelt to defeat Hitler before addressing the Pacific conflict against Japan. Churchill was reluctant, in the face of the strongest protestations from Curtin, to return Australian divisions from the Middle East to Australia to defend the country from approaching Japanese forces. Most reprehensible was his attempt to divert elements of the 7^th Division to Rangoon to face certain annihilation at the hands of much superior Japanese forces advancing from Thailand.

The fact is that writers such as Carlton, and even more persuasively, Graham Freudenberg in Churchill and Australia (2008), recount a history too often ignored or glossed over by conservative Australian and British historians. Throughout the 1930s, Australians collectively put their trust in a British lie: that the Royal Navy would from its redoubt in Singapore capably defend Australia from whatever peril lurked to the north. In exchange, Australia confidently placed at Britain’s disposal whatever naval and military forces we had to fight in theatres far removed from Australia.

We still have such a colonial mindset, exchanging our British protector for an American one. It will be our fault if we find the good faith we have constructed about the reliability of American military support to be as groundless as the faith we invested in Britain.

Richard Broinowski, Paddington, NSW

 

 

CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2010

The initial idea was for a new front door at the National Gallery of Australia. At least that is how Ron Radford, director of the Gallery, presented it to the one thousand or so guests in his remarks at the official opening of Andrew Andersons’ and PTW Architects’ Stage One ‘New Look’ at the NGA on Thursday, 30 September. Clearly, for the money involved and time taken it is much more than that, but doors certainly are a feature of the new wing. Newcomers to the NGA will now be able to find the entrance – a vast improvement. The main doors are visible from the street. For those who might miss them or even the building while driving past, there is a substantial new sign at street level on King Edward Terrace, emblazoned NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA, in raised metal letters. Large outdoor sculptures by George Baldessin and Thanakupi, and the remarkable site-specific, commissioned work by James Turrell, Within without, make it clear that this is definitely an art gallery.

The Mondrians in Paths to Abstraction 1867–1917, Terence Maloon’s beautiful, refined exhibition held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from June to September this year, and the Gauguins in Ron Radford’s more spectacular Masterpieces from Paris that closed at the National Gallery in April, were drawcards. We last saw a group of Mondrians in 1961; Gauguin had never been properly seen in Australia. The exhibitions and the related books together amounted to a superb and very up-to-date two-part lesson in the history of modernism.

What to do with Whiteley? Forget the gutsy audacity and visual energy; in Bernard Smith’s estimation he was ‘egocentric, pseudo-profound and self-pitying’ (Australian Painting 1788–2000). Smith could not abide Whiteley’s ‘incapacity for detachment’; his cult of personality, poured into every last crevice of his work. With the hegemony of the social and theoretical construction of art, the actual person of the artist has been an increasing problem for art critics. Whiteley’s work, driven by personality and fuelled by sensation, is easily viewed as a romantic indulgence.

‘I kept thinking: if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ David Hockney’s assessment of the craggy countenance of W.H. Auden is clipped and convenient, but I suspect Auden would have been far more interesting on the subject of sitting for Hockney. Given the concentration and quality of the encounters between English portrait painters or sculptors and their subjects, it is slightly odd that more writers have not published accounts of the experience of sitting for their portrait.

For some sixty years Donald Friend kept a diary, making his final entry just days before his death in 1989 at the age of seventy-four. The National Library of Australia published them in four massive volumes between 2001 and 2006. They were intractable. You needed an axe to cut through the stream of consciousness which flowed from an uncensoring pen.

During the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) held this August in far north Queensland, the city was buzzing with the visit of many of the country’s leading contributors to contemporary indigenous arts and culture. I ran into some of the most significant visual, performing and literary indigenous artists and arts professionals, many with hereditary links to the region, such as internationally renowned artists Vernon Ah Kee, Ken Thaiday Sr, and Daniel Boyd, and leading arts advocates, mingling with emerging artistic practitioners.

There is so much beauty around us if only we could take the time to open our eyes and perceive it. And then share it. Love is the key word.
(Carol Jerrems, A Book About Australian Women)

In 1973, Carol Jerrems photographed a little girl, Caroline Slade, at her fourth birthday party in Toorak. Standing coyly with hands clasped, she stares at the camera, head tilted. Her pleated, patterned frock and white tights meld with the floral wallpaper background. Here, Jerrems displays her compositional flair, evident in the decorative synergy between foreground and background. Jerrems purposefully placed Caroline Slade as the first arresting image for her only publication, A Book About Australian Women, a compendium of 131 portraits of women dating from 1968 to 1974. Published by Outback Press, a small experimental publishing house in Fitzroy, Jerrems was meticulous about the book’s design and layout, labouring for hours in her bedroom to determine the sequencing of images. Virginia Fraser contributed anonymous interviews or prose portraits of a variety of women. Elizabeth Reid, the first women’s adviser to the federal government, launched A Book About Australian Women at the Arts Council Gallery, in Sydney.

By 1975 the rise of feminism culminated in International Women’s Year, with the groundswell of women’s rights gaining momentum. Against this buoyant optimism, Jerrems flexed her lens on women from all walks of life including ‘women’s liberationists, Aboriginal spokeswomen, activists, revolutionaries, teachers, students, drop-outs’. Preoccupied by subcultures or marginal groups, she found ways to infiltrate these communities and to capture pockets of life in the world of film-makers, photographers, and other creators living in group houses during the 1970s, as well as sharpies whom she taught at Heidelberg Technical School.

By the mid 1970s, Jerrems deployed a directorial role, increasingly posing her sitters and insinuating fictional relationships. Juliet Holding Vale Street (1976) was photographed in Paul Cox’s backyard in Murray Street, Prahran. Jerrems’s most famous image – Vale Street (1975) – is held by Juliet Bacskai. Ivy hangs down framing the composition while mimicking the tendrils of foliage in Vale Street. Jerrems skilfully utilises the play of light and dark and the photographic convention of inserting an image within an image, referring back to her own practice.

Lynn (1976) continues Jerrems’s depiction of single portraits of women who are assertively positioned in the centre of the photographic frame, gazing directly at the camera. A shadow in the shape of a cross is cast across Lynn Gailey, who stands somewhat defiantly in the offices of Smart Street Films in Sydney’s Bondi Junction, the company set up by film-maker Esben Storm (Jerrems’s boyfriend) and Haydn Keenan. Jerrems uses natural light to accentuate mood as her approach became consensual and participatory.

In 1979, Jerrems moved to Hobart to take up a teaching position. There, she developed debilitating physical symptoms that were eventually diagnosed as a rare liver disease. During her ninety-nine days in hospital, she bravely turned the camera on herself, recording with unflinching detail her bodily decline. Isolated from her coterie of friends and family, Jerrems’s self-portraits were sent to Sydney for processing by her friend, Roger Scott. Jerrems’s short, compressed career includes numerous self-portraits with mirrors, posing and reflecting herself with intimate ease, but it is this final image of a young photographer on the brink of death that continues to haunt us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everyone, I suspect, has a favourite photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Mine shows two couples picnicking beside what I have always thought was the Marne River but turns out to be somewhere else altogether. Juvisy (1938), as it is now titled, depicts urban workers relaxing near a man-made pond in the suburbs of Paris. This is indicative of the exhaustive research of Peter Galassi and his colleagues, who have brought to light a huge amount of new information on Cartier-Bresson and his photographs. Their book has been published to accompany a Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where Galassi is chief curator of photography.

For those who saw the recent Rupert Bunny retrospective in Sydney, Melbourne, or Adelaide, where there were accompanying lecture programs, an informative audio guide, a lively children’s guide, and frilly knickers and parasols afterwards in the gallery shop, Rupert Bunny: Artist in Paris is a fine record of the exhibition. If you missed the show, this book provides a very good ‘virtual tour’, with works grouped both chronologically and thematically, all exhibits reproduced, plus full-page details of the artist’s fin-de-siècle beauties, decorative idylls and poetic mythological subjects. It is also a great deal more.

One of the notable things about living in a small country is that you can enjoy many first-rate second-rate things. Given the post-Renaissance domination of the visual arts by painting, prints have for a long time been driven into a supplementary role by artists, historians, and the market, and, as a result, have tended to be treated as minor works, curios, or historical illustrations. Because, moreover, Australia was a far-flung colony of the British Empire for much of its modern history, treated by its masters as ancillary to ‘the main game’, this situation mitigated against the acquisition of many exceptional paintings. Australians bought prints instead. State galleries acquired staggering print collections, from Dürer through to Rembrandt, Piranesi, Blake and Goya to the present. As its subtitle suggests, A Beautiful Line: Italian Prints from Mantegna to Piranesi showcases one important local collection, in Adelaide. Running the gamut from Renaissance to Rococo, the exhibition presents 135 prints ranging from the iconic to the obscure, culminating with works by such luminaries as Canaletto and Giambattista Tiepolo.

In the relatively small field of Australian photographic publishing, Frank Hurley has attracted more than his share of attention. The reasons are clear: in the contemporary world, bound by prohibitions, Hurley is a photographer–adventurer of heroic proportions.

The most widely known story of Australian art is about the beginnings of Papunya Tula. It has, says Vivien Johnson, been ‘retold so often that it almost has the force of Dreaming’. Its force is not just due to the story’s frequent telling, but also to the crime with which it begins, which was the making of prohibited images.

An appropriately elegant publication, Khai Liew is the eleventh in the Wakefield Press series of monographs on South Australian artists, which was initiated by the South Australian Living Artists Festival (SALA) and is assisted by Arts SA.

If you were to tell me that a book had been written that covered a century of art in Asia, from 1900 to 2000, and that its geographic range moved from Japan to Pakistan and Indonesia, to Nepal, the Australian outback, and Cambodia, I would initially ask how many volumes it contained. That such a book exists, in a fairly slim volume, is tribute to the skills of its author, Alison Carroll. How has she done it?

Imagine living in a world also inhabited by the spirits of the ancestors, whose goodwill is essential to the ongoing fertility and prosperity of the community. Life, Death and Magic: 2000 Years of Southeast Asian Ancestral Art reveals this view of the cosmos, and explores the relationship between art and the world of the ancestors in South-East Asia. It is published in association with the ground-breaking exhibition of the same name curated by Robyn Maxwell, Senior Curator of Asian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, where it was recently on display.

Arnold Shore: Pioneer Modernist, by Rob Haysom, fills in the gap between late Impressionism, tonal Meldrumism, and Fred Williams. Attractively presented and illustrated, Haysom’s well-written and informative text examines Arnold Shore’s personal insecurity and the searching nature of his alla prima art, especially his concern with texture and colour; and his contribution as an art teacher and long-time critic.

Binocular vision

Stephanie Trigg

 

Imagination, Books and Community in Medieval Europe
edited by Gregory Kratzmann
Macmillan Art Publishing and the State Library of Victoria, $99 hb, 256 pp, 9781921394331

 

In cinema the trope is familiar: an old book opens and gorgeous drawings and illuminations gradually come to life, replaced by real or animated characters. Or the book magically opens at the right page for the seeker to find just the information he or she needs, without the need to comb through hundreds of pages of text. It is easy to see how the idea of a book opening up a world became so popular – and not just in film. Books have become persistent symbols of the imagination: the idea of entering another time or place, simply by turning a page, is irresistible.

Placed on a coffee table – its likely destination – this handsome book will have its greatest appeal to the idle browser. With its generous illustrations of remarkably beautiful early and antique maps of the world, Matthew Richardson’s book provides an elegant showcase for some singular treasures of early world mapping to be found principally in the collections of the State Library of Victoria, but with a number of illustrations also sourced from the University of Melbourne’s Cultural Collections. A product of Melbourne University Publishing’s Miegunyah imprint, the volume follows others of a similar type that have drawn on the unusually rich holdings of Melbourne’s State Library, one of this country’s great cultural treasure houses: Richard Aitken’s Botanical Riches: Stories of Botanical Exploration(2006); Des Cowley and Clare Williamson’s The World of the Book (2007); and Juliet O’Conor’s Bottersnikes and Other Lost Things: A Celebration of Australian Illustrated Children’s Books (2009).

For an Australian collector to have amassed one substantial and internationally recognised collection of Victorian art during the late twentieth century is unusual. Having parted with the first and replaced it with a second, amassed in the twenty-first, is extraordinary. But then John Schaeffer – whose second collection was the subject of a catalogue and recent exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, entitled Victorian Visions: Nineteenth-Century Art from the John Schaeffer Collection – is no ordinary collector. He is one of the leading collectors of Victorian art. While some of the famous names – Rossetti and Burne-Jones – are represented by designs and drawings;there are major paintings by J.W. Waterhouse and William Holman Hunt, and others, that have been included in recent international touring exhibitions and that would enhance any of the three principal Australian collections of Victorian pictures, the state galleries in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney.

Australian Historical Studies (AHS), which can be traced back to the 1940s, has developed into one of Australia’s leading social science journals. The standard of scholarship is consistently high, and the honour of having one’s article accepted in such an established and selective publication is keenly sought.

From Menzies to Gillard, from the Cold War to Pacific solutions, the history of Overland magazine offers a leftist version of post-World War II Australian political, cultural and literary life. This issue of Overland is its two hundredth. As Jeff Sparrow, the current Editor, points out, survival is an achievement: ‘The “little magazine” is a peculiar animal. The life cycle of the species generally follows a predictable pattern: birth (usually marked by the ritual issuing of manifestos) and rapid growth, followed by financial crisis, paralysis and death, a cycle that typically unfolds within the span of six months or so.’ Sparrow, one of Australia’s more penetrating commentators, might have granted himself more space to discuss the future of Overland, and, more broadly, to reflect on challenges facing activists who challenge the assumption that capitalism can save – is saving – the world.

Lloyd Jones’s Booker-shortlisted ‘breakthrough’ novel Mister Pip (2006) began life as a collection of random memories and myths written on a wall, designed to be actively pieced together by the reader. ‘I was trying to avoid narrative because, when you write it, sometimes it’s like a runaway bloody thing, it’s voracious,’ Jones told The Age’s Stephanie Bunbury in 2008. ‘The story is being manufactured rather than created; I wanted to avoid that.’ Of course, he eventually succumbed and gave the story a strong central narrative – indeed, a voracious, runaway narrative.

Hand Me Down World is Jones’s ninth work of fiction, and his first book since Mister Pip. It combines the page-turning quality of Pip with the innovative fragmented narrative style that Jones had reluctantly abandoned. It follows the fate of an unnamed African woman (a hotel maid working on the Tunisian coast, who adopts the name ‘Ines’) who is tricked into giving up her baby, which propels her on a journey across Europe to retrieve her stolen child. We learn Ines’s story through a succession of witness–narrators: her friend and colleague at the hotel; a truck driver who picks her up in Sicily; her employer in Berlin; and the Italian inspector responsible for tracking her down, among others.

Hand Me Down World actively engages the reader in the process of constructing the novel, sifting through individual accounts much as the investigating inspector does, weighing different points of view, balancing them against Ines’s firsthand account of her experience, which, teasingly, we don’t encounter until the final third of the novel. This device makes the reader hyperaware of the fact that they are, like the various narrators, bringing their own cultural assumptions and life experience to their reading. Jones plants false seeds of information from his unreliable narrators, resulting in contrasting stories and forcing decisions about whom to believe – a process that mirrors how we encounter people in real life.

By repeatedly drawing attention to its constructed narrative (‘Some of the things I will say now are what she told me’), Jones never lets his reader forget their responsibility in interpreting the story. This sifting and balancing of information is mirrored within the narrative, too. Ines must ‘make up the whole out of a few details’ when imagining her stolen son’s life. And her blind employer must construct reality ‘out of scraps’ relayed to him by his trusted seeing-eye guides, combined with his necessarily limited experience.

A central concern of Hand Me Down World, like Mister Pip, is the collision of two worlds, and the resulting fallout. This is embodied in the initial setting of the coastal hotel overlooking Europe, where poor African staff serve wealthy white guests and those lucky few who have crossed over into their world of wealth and privilege. Jones is very good at portraying the absurdities and excesses of Western culture through an outsider’s eyes, as in this description of watching hotel guests play in the sea:

The women wade then sit down as they would getting into a bath. The men plunge and then they swim angrily ... Then they stop as if wherever they were hoping to get to has unexpectedly arrived. So they stop and they lie there with their faces turned up to the sky.

The Third World and First World characters glancingly regard one another as they would another species – with curiosity and a degree of detachment. Ines is compared to a dog, or a pet, throughout the various narratives, from the Italian truck driver who explicitly, scornfully, refers to her as such, to the blind man who hires her for ‘guide-dog duties’. While the anthropological approach works beautifully at an observational level, the resulting metaphors can be heavy-handed (‘I am a dog she has pulled off her prize pedigree’). Jones deftly demonstrates the integral role of luck and timing in determining a person’s fate. Central to this is the accident of birth, and whether we are ‘born beneath a mountain of rubbish’, as Ines’s African hotel colleague reflects on her beginnings, or ‘born a tourist’.

The real project of this novel is one of enticing the reader to walk in the shoes of an ‘illegal’ African refugee, to cross the line into regarding as human the people we experience as ‘other’. Hand Me Down World cleverly reflects a patchwork of Western views about Third World refugees, including an eccentric snail collector who unquestioningly takes Ines in, knowing her situation, and the American food writer (a wonderfully unsympathetic creation) who refers to her as an ‘alien’, an uncomfortably familiar term for the reader, made new and shameful by the appalled Italian villager who narrates the incident. But there are moments where Hand Me Down World shifts from nuanced portrait into polemics. (‘A human being is of no more value than a sack of rice. A human being is merchandise.’)

It is hard to fault an overdose of compassion, though. Overall, this is a beautifully constructed, genuinely affecting book with immense heart and a varied cast of expertly inhabited characters, each with his or her own distinctive voice and milieu. One character reflects, summing up what could be Jones’s mission statement for the novel: ‘I used to find myself saying, I can’t imagine. But, I’ve since found out, you can – it’s just a case of wanting to.’

 

 

CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2010

Between the wars, the dominant mode of Australian fiction was the saga: tales of land-taking and nation-building, melodramas within families across generations, characters shaped by loneliness and obsession, struggles against fire, flood, and drought, and the anguish of married life. In the fiction of Eleanor Dark, ‘M. Barnard Eldershaw’, Xavier Herbert, ‘Louis Kaye’, and Brian Penton among others, Australia’s history was written (this before the professionalisation of the academic discipline of History). It was the saga tradition that Patrick White reworked in The Tree of Man (1955), as did Colleen McCullough in The Thornbirds (1977). In recent decades, this territory has been ceded to the television miniseries, with some notable exceptions: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) and now the triumph of Roger McDonald’s When Colts Ran, whose cast acts against the backdrop of the national story from the early 1930s to the near present.

W

ith book thirty-one arriving as its author approaches his seventy-eighth birthday, the numbers are stacking up for Philip Roth. Yet while it is more than fifty years since his publishing début with Goodbye Columbus (1959), he seems to have locked on to an accelerating production line at a time when many of his contemporaries are in rocking chairs. That is an image with no relevance to Roth, given his energised mind, his curiosity-driven questing, and his self-confessed need ‘to make serious mischief’.

For a book featuring a lot of sex, The Romantic – whose title could be ironic, acerbic, or hopeful – disgust is not the most obvious predominant motif readers might expect. Yet it punctuates the text, cutting the protagonist, Kate, as she travels through Italy with a stack of Romantic poetry and a desire for freedom – to be ‘a ghost’. Il buon tempo verrà: the good time is coming, she records in her notebook, borrowing words that Shelley had inscribed on a ring. Future tense: Il buon tempo is not part of her present.

Maggie Mackellar’s stunning new memoir, When It Rains, narrates her journey through the disorienting landscape of loss and mourning. As a young academic, pregnant with her second child and uncomplicatedly in love with her athletic husband, the boundaries of Mackellar’s world seem fairly secure. With her husband’s sudden psychic disintegration and suicide, the foundations of that world collapse. She gives birth to a son, struggles to juggle single motherhood and an academic career, and, with her mother’s help, learns to appreciate small moments of beauty amid the pain.

Pablo Picasso, Vollard Suite, plate 97

Night’s the ground beneath my feet
since I learned to walk with you.
Scented guide with birds and flowers on your breath,

it’s no earth, but a sea we walk across.
These sailors, pulling out from shore,
delivered our desertion.

In this new life of mine,
my heart keeps coming on
its every old error, grassed over

as if natural convexities,
the quickly earthed parts of who I am,
underground until the brass of a song

blew in a resurrection mood.
I’d have eaten you alive, girl,
had you come to me trembling around the spiral wall,

dust closing on your fingertips: and then.
Now your eyes are my dominion
which your feet traverse directly,

and your fingers are the chords that stagger me.

On the day that I finished reading Into the Woods, I opened the newspaper to a report that Gunns was withdrawing from native forest logging to base its future business entirely on plantation-grown timber. Given that Gunns controls almost eighty-five per cent of the wood products traded in Tasmania, this has raised hopes of an end to the decades-old forest war in the island-state.

The 2010 federal election fell on my wife’s birthday: 21 August. Being political tragics, we didn’t stop for birthday cake. Instead, we handed out roughly 1600 how-to-vote cards for the Australian Labor Party in suburban Melbourne. Our local polling booth is the Vista Valley Kindergarten, in Bulleen. This kindergarten cum polling booth, which sits in more of a gully than a valley and offers no vistas, is located in the north-eastern corner of the electorate of Menzies, held by ultraconservative Liberal frontbencher Kevin Andrews. The battle for Vista Valley mirrored the national poll. In the Vista Valley count, the ALP’s primary vote collapsed, the Greens’ soared, more people voted informal than backed Family First, yet, thanks to the preferences of Greens voters, Labor fell across the line by four votes.

Delia Falconer’s Sydney, the third in a series from NewSouth in which leading Australian authors write about their hometowns, is like its harbour, brimful with tones, vivid with contemplation.

Sydney has had a strong tradition of writers enraptured by the city – in the twentieth century, for example, Patrick White, Christina Stead, Kenneth Slessor – yet their notations form the high notes. Beneath the brash metallic sounds of the growing metropolis and its burgeoning colonial life, Falconer suggests, lay another more sonorous tone, that of the Eora nation whose ‘pervasive disappearance has led to ubiquity, to a pregnant presence’: ‘There are times especially when the autumn mists blur the edges of the harbour, and the king tides rise, when one feels ghostly; when this place feels sentient, and thus more alive, than oneself.’

Early in this magisterial and exhaustively researched examination of Duke Ellington’s role in American music and society, the author offers a succinct summary of the musician’s significance as an American artist. It is worth quoting at length, as it encapsulates most of the questions addressed over the book’s 577 pages of text and almost 100 densely packed pages of notes:

In Elements of Criticism (1762), the Scottish philosopher Lord Kames writes of the remarkable congruence between real presence, the product of our ‘external senses’, and ideal presence, which appears when art presents something so vividly to our ‘internal’ senses that we forget that it is not actually before us. Ideal presence, he writes, is like a‘waking dream’, the appearances of which are indistinguishable from real presence while we are within its spaces. For readers who associate immersive realities with modern digital media, Kames’s argument is surprising, even though it could be argued that in the twenty-first century literature is still the most powerful medium available for producing immersive realities. Kames assumes that literature’s ‘waking dreams’ will be judged by the standards of the actual world; but as early as the last decades of the eighteenth century and first decades of the next, the development of genres such as Gothic fictions, coupled with the emergence of new entertainment media such as the panorama and phantasmagoria, had drawn attention to the extent to which ideal realities – ‘fictitious entities’ and ‘imaginary nonentities’, in Jeremy Bentham’s terminology – could shape rather than simply represent the real. This is the cultural context in which Keats’s life (1795–1821), dilemmas and oeuvre make sense.

Once in a seminar long ago, I heard Peter Steele quote one of Winston Churchill’s more disagreeable opinions, noting that Churchill was allowed to say such things ‘because he was Churchill’. This Churchillian self-definition, or certitude, or authority, or prowess, animates much of Steele’s own writings: Steele says this because he is Steele. Nor does he need to be disagreeable to do so.

These three volumes, reprints of books published in the 1970s and 1980s, appear in the Art Box Series by Picaro Press. Reasonably priced, they will give contemporary readers a sense of the seedbed of Australian poetry a few decades ago. These volumes do just that. It would be hard to imagine a more eclectic selection of styles and approaches. Read together, they communicate the dynamics of the changes in poetry during those seminal decades.

Many Australian picture book authors and illustrators continue to develop the genre in exciting and unusual ways. For example, Jeannie Baker’s Mirror (Walker Books, $39.95 hb, 44 pp, 9781406309140) challenges the very notion of a picture book. It contains dual narratives that are presented as two separate books in one. These books are designed to be opened and read simultaneously – one from left to right, the other from right to left.

The birth of Tom Downs on the banks of the Murray River in South Australia tragically coincided with the death of his mother. His premature arrival – in the breech position – subsequently informs how his life is played out. Now fifteen and illiterate, he is considered by some in the rural community of Swan Reach as rather backward (hence his nickname, ‘Mot’). But Tom is adept with his hands, and his ability is extensive when it comes to fixing any piece of machinery. He is a sensitive, imaginative boy, irrepressibly drawn to the rugged beauty of his birthplace. Though raised by caring foster parents, Tom still feels an outsider kinship with the desperate recluses who live on the river’s edge. Familial relations, racial discrimination and adolescent angst are all explored in Big River Little Fish,and a surprising twist at the end further draws out the complexities of Tom’s character.

What could be more timely than an argument for the humanities? They are poorly served in our schools and universities, and badly need champions. Martha Nussbaum, a distinguished philosopher at the University of Chicago, is well placed to affirm their importance. I read her book with eager anticipation and mounting disappointment.

It employs a familiar device, proclaiming a dire crisis of education that threatens our capacity for creativity, critical judgement, concern for others and even democracy, so that ‘the future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance’. It proclaims the remedy, a humane education that will give all young people the capacity to be citizens of the world. It draws inspiration from exemplars of such education – such as Rousseau, John Dewey and Rabindranath Tagore – and celebrates present-day experiments without any explanation as to why they have not been more widely imitated. It is an alarmist tract that gives little evidence for the predicament it diagnoses. It is a poor history and provides an unpersuasive account of why it happened. Most of all, its argument on behalf of the humanities sells them short.

Herz Bergner arrived in Melbourne in 1938, having left Warsaw after Hitler’s rise to power. Already a published Yiddish short story writer, he joined a group of progressive Yiddish-speaking writers and thinkers who often gathered at the Kadimah Library in Carlton. As information about the Holocaust began to reach these shores, Bergner argued passionately for an increase in European immigration to Australia. He also began work on a novel in Yiddish about a boatload of Jewish refugees (and some others) adrift on the high seas, supposedly destined for Australia.

This republication of Susan Magarey’s 1985 biography of Catherine Helen Spence commemorates the anniversary of her death, aged eighty-five, in April 1910. In an enlarged and attractive new paperback format, with a revised introduction, its cover sketch of Spence, with upraised hand, in mid-speech, emphasises the key subject, both actual and metaphorical, of women’s public speaking. Remarkable as a writer and as a political and social reformer, Spence’s status as one of Australia’s earliest female public intellectuals is best represented in her more immediately transgressive role as public speaker, a graphic unbridling of the female voice.

The unaltered text of this biography tells the story of a life, a colony and, ultimately, a nation, the personal made political in the parallel liberation of a socially constrained spinster’s life and the intellectual and social growth of South Australia, both colonial products of the Enlightenment. The woman whose portrait graced our $5 note in 2001, marking a century of Federation, provocatively described herself, in her eighties, as a New Woman. But she shifted the term’s suggestion of sexual autonomy to a claim for women’s responsibility to the state, an ambitious erasure of the nineteenth century’s doctrine of gendered, separate spheres.