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Absolutely Revolting

March 2006, no. 279

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Contents Category: Poem
Custom Article Title: 2006 Porter Prize winner: 'Still Life with Cockles and Shells' by Judith Bishop
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(Italian, c.17th; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

Life breathes in this painting like a child
pretending not to be awake,

or a skink metamorphosed to a stone
but for the flutter in its flank.

You have to lean and listen for the heart
behind the shining paint,

the lips half-open, and the glittering eye.

Velvet of the night. A bald parrot on a parapet
watches to the east.

Ships listing on the waves
neither leave nor approach.

Someone has slain
five other birds: beaks, half-closed,

agonise in all directions.
A wash of unearthly light limes the sunken feathers.

What dreams the painter makes: I seem

to see inside the night
after Apocalypse,

when every soul has risen and sped off,
the violent seas at rest,

ships anchored and abandoned,
shells emptied of their monopods.

Or else the world has ended, but in
some other way;

and the parrot turns to give her
human greeting to the dawn.

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Colin Golvan reviews The Jews in Australia by Suzanne D. Rutland
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Contents Category: Jewish Studies
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Article Title: The age-old question
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It is one of the ironies of Jewish life in Australia that it is at once thriving and dying. The Jewish community drew its contemporary renaissance from the influx of postwar Jews from major centres in Eastern Europe, which were annihilated by the Nazis and their collaborators. Mostly victims of anti-Semitic persecution, the immigrants of the 1930s to 1950s brought a deep awareness and love of their culture and religious practice to an agreeable Australia, bolstering a Jewish community which to that time was predominantly British in origin and largely assimilationist. As Suzanne Rutland points out, in what is essentially a book of record, the immigration from Eastern Europe revitalised Jewish life in Australia.
Book 1 Title: The Jews in Australia
Book Author: Suzanne D. Rutland
Book 1 Biblio: CUP, $39.95 pb, 212 pp
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It is one of the ironies of Jewish life in Australia that it is at once thriving and dying. The Jewish community drew its contemporary renaissance from the influx of postwar Jews from major centres in Eastern Europe, which were annihilated by the Nazis and their collaborators. Mostly victims of anti-Semitic persecution, the immigrants of the 1930s to 1950s brought a deep awareness and love of their culture and religious practice to an agreeable Australia, bolstering a Jewish community which to that time was predominantly British in origin and largely assimilationist. As Suzanne Rutland points out, in what is essentially a book of record, the immigration from Eastern Europe revitalised Jewish life in Australia.

Read more: Colin Golvan reviews 'The Jews in Australia' by Suzanne D. Rutland

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Danielle Wood reviews The Factory by Paddy O’Reilly and Cusp by Josephine Wilson
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: On the cusp
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While the imminent demise of the Australian novel continues to be predicted in the pages of the nation’s broadsheets, a curious thing is happening: two Australian publishing houses are creating new fiction lists. Australian Scholarly Publishing will present its fiction titles under the imprint Thompson Walker, and the University of Western Australia Press has come up with a New Writing series to showcase work from the postgraduate creative writing programmes of Australian universities.
Book 1 Title: The Factory
Book Author: Paddy O’Reilly
Book 1 Biblio: Thompson Walker, $21.95 pb, 255 pp
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Book 2 Title: Cusp
Book 2 Author: Josephine Wilson
Book 2 Biblio: UWA Press, $22.95 pb, 250 pp
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While the imminent demise of the Australian novel continues to be predicted in the pages of the nation’s broadsheets, a curious thing is happening: two Australian publishing houses are creating new fiction lists. Australian Scholarly Publishing will present its fiction titles under the imprint Thompson Walker, and the University of Western Australia Press has come up with a New Writing series to showcase work from the postgraduate creative writing programmes of Australian universities.

Read more: Danielle Wood reviews 'The Factory' by Paddy O’Reilly and 'Cusp' by Josephine Wilson

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Prue Gibson reviews Art + Australia: Debates, dollars & delusions by Patricia Anderson
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Contents Category: Art
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Article Title: Click go the turnstiles
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Art research is an absorbing occupation, not for the faint-hearted. The researcher must brave airless libraries, wrestle with gigantic volumes of old clippings from The Bulletin or the National Times, and listen to ubiquitous taped artist interviews by Hazel de Berg, all the while perched on precarious stools and suffering under low-wattage globes.
Book 1 Title: Art + Australia
Book 1 Subtitle: Debates, dollars & delusions
Book Author: Patricia Anderson
Book 1 Biblio: Pandora Press, $59.95 pb, 619 pp
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Art research is an absorbing occupation, not for the faint-hearted. The researcher must brave airless libraries, wrestle with gigantic volumes of old clippings from The Bulletin or the National Times, and listen to ubiquitous taped artist interviews by Hazel de Berg, all the while perched on precarious stools and suffering under low-wattage globes.

Read more: Prue Gibson reviews 'Art + Australia: Debates, dollars & delusions' by Patricia Anderson

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Anita La Pietra reviews ‘Plastered: The poster art of Australian popular music’ by Murray Walding (with Nick Vukovic)
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Contents Category: Music
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Article Title: Plastered
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Plastered makes an ambitious claim for band posters ‘as barometers of cultural relevance [which] can offer real-time social commentary and political satire’. Although the book never quite substantiates this claim, it is a valuable work, not least because of its beautiful reproductions of band posters. Most of the posters derive primarily from the collection of Nick Vukovic, an inveterate collector. Vukovic is so keen to show off his collection that even posters of little artistic value, ‘designed to get bums off seats and nothing more’, are impeccably and inexplicably reproduced in the book.
Book 1 Title: Plastered
Book 1 Subtitle: The poster art of Australian popular music
Book Author: Murray Walding (with Nick Vukovic)
Book 1 Biblio: Miegunyah, $69.95 hb, 303 pp, 0522851681
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Plastered makes an ambitious claim for band posters ‘as barometers of cultural relevance [which] can offer real-time social commentary and political satire’. Although the book never quite substantiates this claim, it is a valuable work, not least because of its beautiful reproductions of band posters. Most of the posters derive primarily from the collection of Nick Vukovic, an inveterate collector. Vukovic is so keen to show off his collection that even posters of little artistic value, ‘designed to get bums off seats and nothing more’, are impeccably and inexplicably reproduced in the book.

Plastered adopts a non-academic format and outlook. Following a basic chapter structure, interspersed with numerous magazine-style insets, the book covers multiple areas simultaneously: music review; manual of printing techniques; history of Australian music; guide to avoiding arrest; marketing manual and collecting enthusiast’s zine. Sometimes Walding and Vukovic even manage to pay attention to the works themselves.

Read more: Anita La Pietra reviews ‘Plastered: The poster art of Australian popular music’ by Murray Walding...

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Contents Category: Letters
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Article Title: Letters - March 2006
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Walk the path

Dear Editor,

I was stimulated by Tamas Pataki’s essay ‘Against Religion’ (ABR, February 2006). That monotheistic God is a product of infantile separation anxiety is a familiar and plausible view. Pataki’s observation that ‘religious identity easily becomes an instrument of narcissistic assertion and aggression’ also rang true for me. Likewise his remark that ‘bullying is an inseparable feature of monotheism’. Yet the essay was entitled ‘Against Religion’. I’d be interested to hear what Pataki has to say about faiths that don’t fit the monotheistic mould. Are they just as delusional and dangerous to liberality and the rule of law? I’m thinking of religions that stem from the Vedic root (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism).
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Walk the path

Dear Editor,

I was stimulated by Tamas Pataki’s essay ‘Against Religion’ (ABR, February 2006). That monotheistic God is a product of infantile separation anxiety is a familiar and plausible view. Pataki’s observation that ‘religious identity easily becomes an instrument of narcissistic assertion and aggression’ also rang true for me. Likewise his remark that ‘bullying is an inseparable feature of monotheism’. Yet the essay was entitled ‘Against Religion’. I’d be interested to hear what Pataki has to say about faiths that don’t fit the monotheistic mould. Are they just as delusional and dangerous to liberality and the rule of law? I’m thinking of religions that stem from the Vedic root (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism).

Read more: Letters - March 2006

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Rose Lucas reviews ‘Phallic Panic: Film, horror and the primal uncanny’ by Barbara Creed
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Contents Category: Film
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Article Title: Womb monsters
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What is a monster? Why are we so recurringly fascinated by graphic representations of the monstrous? And, in particular, what do cinematic images of male monstrosity tell us about the ways in which Western culture produces and views the categories of masculine and feminine?  Barbara Creed’s new book is a direct extension of much of the lively work she did in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993). In Phallic Panic, she moves from her earlier consideration of how we might interpret visions of female monstrosity as evidence of profound anxiety about the role of the woman in phallocentric society, particularly in her vagina dentata manifestations, to an examination of the cultural and psychological implications of male monsters.
Book 1 Title: Phallic Panic
Book 1 Subtitle: Film, horror and the primal uncanny
Book Author: Barbara Creed
Book 1 Biblio: MUP, $32.95 pb, 232 pp, 052285172X
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What is a monster? Why are we so recurringly fascinated by graphic representations of the monstrous? And, in particular, what do cinematic images of male monstrosity tell us about the ways in which Western culture produces and views the categories of masculine and feminine?  Barbara Creed’s new book is a direct extension of much of the lively work she did in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993). In Phallic Panic, she moves from her earlier consideration of how we might interpret visions of female monstrosity as evidence of profound anxiety about the role of the woman in phallocentric society, particularly in her vagina dentata manifestations, to an examination of the cultural and psychological implications of male monsters. 

Read more: Rose Lucas reviews ‘Phallic Panic: Film, horror and the primal uncanny’ by Barbara Creed

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Sarah Russell Scott reviews ‘Jeffrey Smart’ by Barry Pearce
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Contents Category: Art
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Article Title: Making the familiar strange
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This timely monograph presents the life and work of an artist whose paintings have altered the way we see the modern world, particularly the industrial landscapes fringing our cities. Jeffrey Smart’s intensely realised paintings have the effect of making the ‘familiar strange’. They force us to reconsider both our relation to and perception of man-made environments, dominated as they are by factories, apartment blocks, freeways and street signs. Smart’s paintings display a mastery of classical composition, light and perspective as well as revealing the artist’s ongoing concern with the interplay between realism and abstraction. The 252 plates included in this volume allow the reader to appreciate the development of Smart’s unique oeuvre over a period spanning more than sixty years. Accompanying these illustrations is a text by Australian modernist scholar and curator Barry Pearce. This provides a valuable addition to the existing literature on the artist.
Book 1 Title: Jeffrey Smart
Book Author: Barry Pearce
Book 1 Biblio: Beagle Press, $120 hb, 256 pp, 0947349464
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This timely monograph presents the life and work of an artist whose paintings have altered the way we see the modern world, particularly the industrial landscapes fringing our cities. Jeffrey Smart’s intensely realised paintings have the effect of making the ‘familiar strange’. They force us to reconsider both our relation to and perception of man-made environments, dominated as they are by factories, apartment blocks, freeways and street signs. Smart’s paintings display a mastery of classical composition, light and perspective as well as revealing the artist’s ongoing concern with the interplay between realism and abstraction. The 252 plates included in this volume allow the reader to appreciate the development of Smart’s unique oeuvre over a period spanning more than sixty years. Accompanying these illustrations is a text by Australian modernist scholar and curator Barry Pearce. This provides a valuable addition to the existing literature on the artist. 

Read more: Sarah Russell Scott reviews ‘Jeffrey Smart’ by Barry Pearce

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Robert Phiddian reviews ‘The Resurrectionist’ by James Bradley
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Georgian grunge
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The mortality rate for individuals is always one, but for populations it varies from time to time and place to place. London is one of those cities where the mortality rate is high, though not because it has ever been, like the Gold Coast, a city to retire to. For centuries, young people have gone to London seeking riches, celebrity and opportunity. Some, like Dick Whittington, found the streets proverbially paved with gold, but others made their way promptly to the gutter. From the gutter to the grave is but a short step, but not the last one in London during the early days of modern anatomical science, as James Bradley’s new novel illustrates.
Book 1 Title: The Resurrectionist
Book Author: James Bradley
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $32.95 pb, 335 pp, 033042226X
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The mortality rate for individuals is always one, but for populations it varies from time to time and place to place. London is one of those cities where the mortality rate is high, though not because it has ever been, like the Gold Coast, a city to retire to. For centuries, young people have gone to London seeking riches, celebrity and opportunity. Some, like Dick Whittington, found the streets proverbially paved with gold, but others made their way promptly to the gutter. From the gutter to the grave is but a short step, but not the last one in London during the early days of modern anatomical science, as James Bradley’s new novel illustrates. 

Read more: Robert Phiddian reviews ‘The Resurrectionist’ by James Bradley

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Zara Stanhope reviews ‘Stelarc: The monograph’ edited by Marquard Smith
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Contents Category: Art
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Article Title: The problem of the present
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Custom Highlight Text: Copiously illustrated, though in black and white, multivocal yet with an emphatic philosophical tone, this MIT publication distinguishes itself as being at odds with much current Australian art publishing. Although visual arts audiences and readers in Australia constantly bemoan the lack of publishing in this field, Craftsman House and Thames & Hudson have actively taken up the mantle over the last two years, generating monographs on emerging and established artists (see Anthony Gardner’s review of the New Art Series on page 16). Certain state arts agencies have also channelled significant resources into commissioning substantial documents on local practitioners. Generally contextualised by one writer and lavishly illustrated in colour, such monographs are in contrast to this compilation of multiple voices and surprisingly monochrome record of the work of one of Australia’s best-known artists.
Book 1 Title: Stelarc: The monograph
Book Author: Marquard Smith
Book 1 Biblio: MIT Press, $54.95 hb, 269 pp, 0262195186
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Copiously illustrated, though in black and white, multivocal yet with an emphatic philosophical tone, this MIT publication distinguishes itself as being at odds with much current Australian art publishing. Although visual arts audiences and readers in Australia constantly bemoan the lack of publishing in this field, Craftsman House and Thames & Hudson have actively taken up the mantle over the last two years, generating monographs on emerging and established artists (see Anthony Gardner’s review of the New Art Series on page 16). Certain state arts agencies have also channelled significant resources into commissioning substantial documents on local practitioners. Generally contextualised by one writer and lavishly illustrated in colour, such monographs are in contrast to this compilation of multiple voices and surprisingly monochrome record of the work of one of Australia’s best-known artists. 

Read more: Zara Stanhope reviews ‘Stelarc: The monograph’ edited by Marquard Smith

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Jennifer Strauss reviews ‘The Best Australian Poems 2005’ edited by Les Murray
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Contents Category: Australian Poetry
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Article Title: Imprints on the mind
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Annual anthologies of Australian poetry are, or should be, a good way to get an overview of the local poetry scene, as well as an opportunity to greet new poets and to keep in touch with established ones. This selection from more than a hundred poets fulfils that function pretty well, having a range of old and new names, styles and themes, even if the sourcing of the poems does seem weighted in favour of Quadrant, of which Les Murray is poetry editor. It’s the hubris in the title – Best Poems – that makes one cantankerously inclined to point to incomprehensible omissions. Readers with a mind to play that game can scrutinise some of the contenders that Murray passed over by reading Peter Porter’s rival anthology (David McCooey reviewed UQP’s Best Australian Poetry 2005 in the October 2005 issue of ABR). We have to accept, I think, that any anthology cannot help but bear signs of its editor’s preferences and prejudices, and no anthologist can hope to read every poem of the year. What matters, bearing in mind the need to be reasonably representative, is whether the chosen poems are good ones (although Some Good Australian Poems of 2005 might not be a highly marketable title).
Book 1 Title: The Best Australian Poems 2005
Book Author: Les Murray
Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $24.95 pb, 184 pp, 1863951024
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Annual anthologies of Australian poetry are, or should be, a good way to get an overview of the local poetry scene, as well as an opportunity to greet new poets and to keep in touch with established ones. This selection from more than a hundred poets fulfils that function pretty well, having a range of old and new names, styles and themes, even if the sourcing of the poems does seem weighted in favour of Quadrant, of which Les Murray is poetry editor. It’s the hubris in the title – Best Poems – that makes one cantankerously inclined to point to incomprehensible omissions. Readers with a mind to play that game can scrutinise some of the contenders that Murray passed over by reading Peter Porter’s rival anthology (David McCooey reviewed UQP’s Best Australian Poetry 2005 in the October 2005 issue of ABR). We have to accept, I think, that any anthology cannot help but bear signs of its editor’s preferences and prejudices, and no anthologist can hope to read every poem of the year. What matters, bearing in mind the need to be reasonably representative, is whether the chosen poems are good ones (although Some Good Australian Poems of 2005 might not be a highly marketable title). 

Read more: Jennifer Strauss reviews ‘The Best Australian Poems 2005’ edited by Les Murray

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Contents Category: Peter Porter Poetry Prize
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Article Title: Spiders
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I stare from my study window into trees.
Considering all things, I watch the first snow spill
White seeds across the rubble where the barn
Towered over us with its cracked spire
For almost half a century until
Some feckless pot-head changed
The whole thing into fire.
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I stare from my study window into trees.

Considering all things, I watch the first snow spill

White seeds across the rubble where the barn

Towered over us with its cracked spire

For almost half a century until

Some feckless pot-head changed

The whole thing into fire.

Read more: 2006 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist | ‘Spiders’ by Keith Harrison

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Contents Category: Peter Porter Poetry Prize
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Article Title: Back Roads, Local Roads
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canola’s chemical yellow rises above the fence line
Black Poles laze around a dam, ibis and egrets gliding overhead
wattle, casuarina, eucalypt, cypress, radiata

where the bitumen gives way to gravel
taking you deeper into shadows, ditches
tinder undergrowth of a bush block
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canola’s chemical yellow rises above the fence line

Black Poles laze around a dam, ibis and egrets gliding overhead

wattle, casuarina, eucalypt, cypress, radiata

 

where the bitumen gives way to gravel

taking you deeper into shadows, ditches

tinder undergrowth of a bush block

Read more: 2006 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist | ‘Back Roads, Local Roads’ by Brendan Ryan

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Free Article: No
Contents Category: Poetry
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Article Title: Ways of dying
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Philip Salom’s tenth collection of poems offers readers an experience akin to falling over the edge of a well into a frightening subterranean world. The Well Mouth is dark, allusive, ironic, brutal, perplexing and confronting, and so it can be alternately rewarding and irritating. Readers should not miss the explanatory paragraph before the prologue; otherwise they risk being as disoriented as the central narrative consciousness, a woman murdered by corrupt police and dumped down a well. She makes the collection cohere as a kind of ghostly medium, channelling the voices of the newly dead, some of whom are described as ‘whistleblower, brothel madam, long-distance driver, woman lost in the bush, old solider’.
Book 1 Title: The Well Mouth
Book Author: Jeri Kroll
Book 1 Biblio: FACP, $24.95 pb, 93 pp, 1921064242
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Philip Salom’s tenth collection of poems offers readers an experience akin to falling over the edge of a well into a frightening subterranean world. The Well Mouth is dark, allusive, ironic, brutal, perplexing and confronting, and so it can be alternately rewarding and irritating. Readers should not miss the explanatory paragraph before the prologue; otherwise they risk being as disoriented as the central narrative consciousness, a woman murdered by corrupt police and dumped down a well. She makes the collection cohere as a kind of ghostly medium, channelling the voices of the newly dead, some of whom are described as ‘whistleblower, brothel madam, long-distance driver, woman lost in the bush, old solider’. 

Read more: Jeri Kroll reviews ‘The Well Mouth’ by Philip Salom

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Joan Barclay-Lloyd reviews ‘The Felton Illuminated Manuscripts in the National Gallery of Victoria’ by Margaret M. Manion
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Contents Category: Art
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Article Title: Illuminated marvels
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To commemorate the centenary of Alfred Felton’s death in 1904, the National Gallery of Victoria and Macmillan Art Publishing have published the five illuminated medieval manuscripts and the single leaf ac-quired for the Gallery through the Felton Bequest. This stunning volume is profusely illustrated with colour plates taken by the photographic team of the NGV of all the decorative features in the manuscripts; in addition, there are numerous coloured figures of comparative works in other collections. Decorative elements from each Felton manuscript ornament the opening pages of each section, and embellish the title and end pages of the book. In design and illustration, this volume is itself a work of art, with hundreds of coloured images to delight the eye.
Book 1 Title: The Felton Illuminated Manuscripts in the National Gallery of Victoria
Book Author: Margaret M. Manion
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan and the National Gallery of Victoria, $66 pb, 439 pp, 1876832959, $99 hb, 1876832460
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To commemorate the centenary of Alfred Felton’s death in 1904, the National Gallery of Victoria and Macmillan Art Publishing have published the five illuminated medieval manuscripts and the single leaf acquired for the Gallery through the Felton Bequest. This stunning volume is profusely illustrated with colour plates taken by the photographic team of the NGV of all the decorative features in the manuscripts; in addition, there are numerous coloured figures of comparative works in other collections. Decorative elements from each Felton manuscript ornament the opening pages of each section, and embellish the title and end pages of the book. In design and illustration, this volume is itself a work of art, with hundreds of coloured images to delight the eye.

Read more: Joan Barclay-Lloyd reviews ‘The Felton Illuminated Manuscripts in the National Gallery of...

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John Thompson reviews ‘The Big Picture: Diary of a nation’ edited by Max Prisk et al.
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Contents Category: Reference
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Article Title: Of no sect am I
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For 175 years the Sydney Morning Herald has recorded the annals of colony, state and nation, never missing an issue. When the paper was established in 1831, the colony of New South Wales was still being opened up by exploration and settlement. Sydney’s population was little more than 15,000, while the colony itself numbered around 50,000 Europeans, including 20,000 convicts. Less certain was the extent of the indigenous population. To the first Australians, the Herald was initially unsympathetic. It called them savages and in 1838 campaigned against the trial and subsequent hanging of the men involved in the massacre at Myall Creek; to its credit, that view was soon recanted. In 2006 the Herald reflects the aspirations of the majority of Australians for a decent and just reconciliation with the Aboriginal people.
Book 1 Title: The Big Picture
Book 1 Subtitle: Diary of a nation
Book Author: Max Prisk, Tony Stephens, and Michael Bowers
Book 1 Biblio: Doubleday, $70 hb, 379 pp, 1864710985
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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For 175 years the Sydney Morning Herald has recorded the annals of colony, state and nation, never missing an issue. When the paper was established in 1831, the colony of New South Wales was still being opened up by exploration and settlement. Sydney’s population was little more than 15,000, while the colony itself numbered around 50,000 Europeans, including 20,000 convicts. Less certain was the extent of the indigenous population. To the first Australians, the Herald was initially unsympathetic. It called them savages and in 1838 campaigned against the trial and subsequent hanging of the men involved in the massacre at Myall Creek; to its credit, that view was soon recanted. In 2006 the Herald reflects the aspirations of the majority of Australians for a decent and just reconciliation with the Aboriginal people.

Read more: John Thompson reviews ‘The Big Picture: Diary of a nation’ edited by Max Prisk et al.

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Contents Category: Peter Porter Poetry Prize
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Article Title: Boy
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The tough and rumble of the schoolyard
is always welcome relief from a room
papered with whispers, where every night

he must taste the salted honey of his pain
or else listen to the chorus of lies
that they hiss at one another in the dark.
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The tough and rumble of the schoolyard
is always welcome relief from a room
papered with whispers, where every night

he must taste the salted honey of his pain
or else listen to the chorus of lies
that they hiss at one another in the dark.

Read more: 2006 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist | ‘Boy’ by Alex Skovron

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Article Title: Braid
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Max remembers the first time they made love
when she arrived travel-dusty & sweaty
after complications
getting from Basrah to Baghdad. Much afterwards
while they were lying together very close
she’d told him of a pet she’d had, when small:
had given it its scientific name – Macropanesthia rhinoceros.
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Max remembers the first time they made love

when she arrived travel-dusty & sweaty

after complications

getting from Basrah to Baghdad. Much afterwards

while they were lying together very close

she’d told him of a pet she’d had, when small:

had given it its scientific name – Macropanesthia rhinoceros.

Read more: 2006 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist | ‘Braid’ by J.S. Harry

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Article Title: Her Heart Is Embroidered
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It wounds, this shift of scale.

As I stand on the balls of my feet
back on my heels only once
to keep even for the painting
and myself clear from excess
of feeling: balanced to look
and half hearing her sleepily say:
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It wounds, this shift of scale.

As I stand on the balls of my feet
back on my heels only once
to keep even for the painting
and myself clear from excess
of feeling: balanced to look
and half hearing her sleepily say:

Read more: ‘Her Heart Is Embroidered’ a poem by Barry Hill

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Contents Category: Peter Porter Poetry Prize
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Article Title: Mallee
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I. Claim

Wild birds rise before us, making the noise of a multitude clapping hands.
The men fire, fire again and still they rise, they rise clear out of range and
where they were they leave such wakes of light, they are tearing the blue-black
shadows out of the river; their wing tumult is shadows escaping air. Act
flung back to motives, they arc away from us and scatter till I am fierce
for what I cannot remember and still they rise, the vault is dark with their applause.
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I. Claim

Wild birds rise before us, making the noise of a multitude clapping hands.
The men fire, fire again and still they rise, they rise clear out of range and
where they were they leave such wakes of light, they are tearing the blue-black
shadows out of the river; their wing tumult is shadows escaping air. Act
flung back to motives, they arc away from us and scatter till I am fierce
for what I cannot remember and still they rise, the vault is dark with their applause.

Read more: 2006 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist | ‘Mallee’ by Lisa Gorton

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Maria Takolander reviews ‘Westerly vol. 50, November 2005’ edited by Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell, and ‘Australian Literary Studies vol. 22, no. 2, 2005’ edited by Anne Pender and Leigh Dale
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As an academic teaching in literary studies, I regularly feel compelled to justify my job, particularly in the light of dwindling enrolments. Literary journals and the writers who feature in them, judging by the latest issue of Westerly, also feel pressure to defend their relevance, primarily due to their small audiences. Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell, in an editorial commemorating fifty years of Westerly, pay tribute to the ‘creative and intellectual enthusiasm’ that drives the journal and celebrate its survival in a culture they believe is becoming increasingly visually, rather than verbally, literate. Tracy Ryan, one of the contributors, alludes to a different obstacle: public resentment. Her poem ‘Curriculum Vitae’ summarises public attitudes to writers: ‘Narcissism, egotism, think the world owes you a living, / God’s gift.’ What to do in the face of such indifference and even dislike?
Book 1 Title: Westerly vol. 50, November 2005
Book Author: Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell
Book 1 Biblio: $24.95 pb, 296 pp, 0975003631
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Book 2 Title: Australian Literary Studies vol. 22, no. 2, 2005
Book 2 Author: Anne Pender and Leigh Dale
Book 2 Biblio: $45 pb, 136 pp, 0702235601
Book 2 Author Type: Editor
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As an academic teaching in literary studies, I regularly feel compelled to justify my job, particularly in the light of dwindling enrolments. Literary journals and the writers who feature in them, judging by the latest issue of Westerly, also feel pressure to defend their relevance, primarily due to their small audiences. Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell, in an editorial commemorating fifty years of Westerly, pay tribute to the ‘creative and intellectual enthusiasm’ that drives the journal and celebrate its survival in a culture they believe is becoming increasingly visually, rather than verbally, literate. Tracy Ryan, one of the contributors, alludes to a different obstacle: public resentment. Her poem ‘Curriculum Vitae’ summarises public attitudes to writers: ‘Narcissism, egotism, think the world owes you a living, / God’s gift.’ What to do in the face of such indifference and even dislike?

Read more: Maria Takolander reviews ‘Westerly vol. 50, November 2005’ edited by Delys Bird and Dennis...

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Melinda Harvey reviews ‘The God of Spring’ by Arabella Edge
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Disaster has always shadowed the traveller. Today’s adventurers differ from their forebears only in the kinds of calamity they have cause to fear. Arabella Edge’s second novel – like her first, the award-winning The Company (2000) – will have readers thanking their lucky stars that shipwreck, at least, has gone the way of history. As its cover suggests, The God of Spring centres on Théodore Géricault’s masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa (1819) – its painting, its painter and the real event it depicts.
Book 1 Title: The God of Spring
Book Author: Arabella Edge
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $32.95 pb, 344 pp, 0330422065
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Disaster has always shadowed the traveller. Today’s adventurers differ from their forebears only in the kinds of calamity they have cause to fear. Arabella Edge’s second novel – like her first, the award-winning The Company (2000) – will have readers thanking their lucky stars that shipwreck, at least, has gone the way of history. As its cover suggests, The God of Spring centres on Théodore Géricault’s masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa (1819) – its painting, its painter and the real event it depicts.

Read more: Melinda Harvey reviews ‘The God of Spring’ by Arabella Edge

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Luke Morgan reviews ‘Inside Australia’ by Antony Gormley
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Imagine turning up in Menzies, 132 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie and 729 east of Perth in Western Australia, and then inviting the town’s inhabitants to take their clothes off. This is exactly what the British artist Antony Gormley did in June 2002. Improbably perhaps, after some coaxing, 131 people in Menzies, and later in Perth, agreed. Inside Australia documents Gormley’s remarkable artistic project to make and install more than fifty ‘insiders’ over ten square kilometres on Lake Ballard, a salt lake near Menzies. The first step in this process was to take full-body scans of anyone who was willing, to capture each individual’s unique three-dimensional geometry. All the scans were then ‘gormleyised’, that is, reduced by two-thirds. Next, polystyrene models were made from the digital files. Finally, metal figures were cast from the models in the VEEM foundry in Perth.
Book 1 Title: Inside Australia
Book Author: Antony Gormley
Book 1 Biblio: Thames & Hudson, $69.95 hb, 176 pp, 0500512620
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Imagine turning up in Menzies, 132 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie and 729 east of Perth in Western Australia, and then inviting the town’s inhabitants to take their clothes off. This is exactly what the British artist Antony Gormley did in June 2002. Improbably perhaps, after some coaxing, 131 people in Menzies, and later in Perth, agreed. Inside Australia documents Gormley’s remarkable artistic project to make and install more than fifty ‘insiders’ over ten square kilometres on Lake Ballard, a salt lake near Menzies. The first step in this process was to take full-body scans of anyone who was willing, to capture each individual’s unique three-dimensional geometry. All the scans were then ‘gormleyised’, that is, reduced by two-thirds. Next, polystyrene models were made from the digital files. Finally, metal figures were cast from the models in the VEEM foundry in Perth.

Read more: Luke Morgan reviews ‘Inside Australia’ by Antony Gormley

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Michelle Griffin reviews ‘Carry Me Down’ by M.J. Hyland
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Just how old is John Egan? In a letter to the Guinness Book of Records, he says he is eleven. But the narrative voice of this queer, tormented Irish lad is not that of other boy heroes on the cusp of puberty, the opinionated braggarts whose boasts and fears and primary-coloured perspectives propel their stories. Instead, John’s story lurches from the distractions of the very young to a kind of preternatural knowingness. No wonder John makes everyone around him uneasy. He makes the reader uncomfortable, too.
Book 1 Title: Carry Me Down
Book Author: M.J. Hyland
Book 1 Biblio: Text, $29.95 pb, 304 pp
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Just how old is John Egan? In a letter to the Guinness Book of Records, he says he is eleven. But the narrative voice of this queer, tormented Irish lad is not that of other boy heroes on the cusp of puberty, the opinionated braggarts whose boasts and fears and primary-coloured perspectives propel their stories. Instead, John’s story lurches from the distractions of the very young to a kind of preternatural knowingness. No wonder John makes everyone around him uneasy. He makes the reader uncomfortable, too.

Read more: Michelle Griffin reviews ‘Carry Me Down’ by M.J. Hyland

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Julie Roberts reviews ‘Nerli: An Italian painter in the South Pacific’ by Michael Dunn
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Article Title: A suggestive sketch
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Girolamo Nerli, Michael Dunn writes in Nerli: An Italian Painter in the South Pacific, was ‘an uneven painter who ranged from the good to the downright bad’. It says much about the difficult development of the visual arts in Australia and New Zealand that someone with such apparently modest abilities should be worthy of such a lavishly illustrated and comprehensive study – especially in these days of constraint in art-historical publishing. Nerli has generally been depicted as a flamboyant Continental whose European heritage and thick Italian accent imbued him with an authority that made local artists and philistines alike listen receptively to his views. As a foreigner, he was permitted to be ‘irreverent, avant-garde and daring’, in ways denied local artists. Nerli’s place in Australian art history is assured by his association with the Heidelberg School artists, while his brief but influential role as Frances Hodgkin’s teacher secures his place in New Zealand’s art history. In this, the first published extended study of Nerli’s time in Australia and New Zealand (including a foray to Samoa), Dunn seeks a ‘fresh appraisal of the man and his achievements’.
Book 1 Title: Nerli
Book 1 Subtitle: An Italian painter in the South Pacific
Book Author: Michael Dunn
Book 1 Biblio: Auckland University Press, $79.95 hb, 160 pp, 1869403355
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Girolamo Nerli, Michael Dunn writes in Nerli: An Italian Painter in the South Pacific, was ‘an uneven painter who ranged from the good to the downright bad’. It says much about the difficult development of the visual arts in Australia and New Zealand that someone with such apparently modest abilities should be worthy of such a lavishly illustrated and comprehensive study – especially in these days of constraint in art-historical publishing. Nerli has generally been depicted as a flamboyant Continental whose European heritage and thick Italian accent imbued him with an authority that made local artists and philistines alike listen receptively to his views. As a foreigner, he was permitted to be ‘irreverent, avant-garde and daring’, in ways denied local artists. Nerli’s place in Australian art history is assured by his association with the Heidelberg School artists, while his brief but influential role as Frances Hodgkin’s teacher secures his place in New Zealand’s art history. In this, the first published extended study of Nerli’s time in Australia and New Zealand (including a foray to Samoa), Dunn seeks a ‘fresh appraisal of the man and his achievements’.

Read more: Julie Roberts reviews ‘Nerli: An Italian painter in the South Pacific’ by Michael Dunn

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Jason Smith reviews ‘Fiona Hall’ by Julie Ewington
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Article Title: Scavenging meaning
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For her participation in the 2002 Adelaide Biennial, Fiona Hall encapsulated her recent practice and its emphases on the fragilities of ecosystems, and on the instability of the social and political structures on which our cultures are based. She stated that ‘now we know that the seemingly infinite, disparate variety of living matter on earth, of which we are but a part, is life’s giant, polymorphic skin, encasing us all, inside which we dwell in kindred, genetic proximity’. And so it is that the seemingly infinite possibilities and disparate conceptual and material elements of Hall’s extra-ordinary practice are integrated between the covers of Julie Ewington’s outstanding monograph, Fiona Hall, which was published to coincide with the Queensland Art Gallery’s focused survey of the artist’s work since 1990.
Book 1 Title: Fiona Hall
Book Author: Julie Ewington
Book 1 Biblio: Piper Press, $88 hb, 192 pp, 0975190113
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For her participation in the 2002 Adelaide Biennial, Fiona Hall encapsulated her recent practice and its emphases on the fragilities of ecosystems, and on the instability of the social and political structures on which our cultures are based. She stated that ‘now we know that the seemingly infinite, disparate variety of living matter on earth, of which we are but a part, is life’s giant, polymorphic skin, encasing us all, inside which we dwell in kindred, genetic proximity’. And so it is that the seemingly infinite possibilities and disparate conceptual and material elements of Hall’s extra-ordinary practice are integrated between the covers of Julie Ewington’s outstanding monograph, Fiona Hall, which was published to coincide with the Queensland Art Gallery’s focused survey of the artist’s work since 1990.

Read more: Jason Smith reviews ‘Fiona Hall’ by Julie Ewington

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Neil Clerehan reviews ‘Collins: The story of Australia’s premier street’ by Judith Raphael Buckrich and ‘Go! Melbourne: Melbourne in the sixties’ edited by Seamus O’Hanlon and Tanja Luckins
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Article Title: Melbourne’s fashions
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Two new books with Melbourne as their subject couldn’t be more disparate in size, form, content and accuracy. Collins: The Story of Australia’s Premier Street is a big, well-designed book. It has a mysterious provenance and more than a smattering of inaccuracies: but it has pictures. These are mostly from the State Library of Victoria, and even those dating from the early years of outside photography provide clear details of the buildings and people of the time. They will enchant even those who dare think that our premier street is not so very different from the main streets of Manchester or Madison.
Book 1 Title: Collins
Book 1 Subtitle: The story of Australia’s premier street
Book Author: Judith Raphael Buckrich (with Keith Dunstan, Rohan Storey and Marc Strizic)
Book 1 Biblio: Arcadia, $89.95 hb, 270 pp, 1740970578
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Book 2 Title: Go! Melbourne
Book 2 Subtitle: Melbourne in the sixties
Book 2 Author: Seamus O’Hanlon and Tanja Luckins
Book 2 Biblio: Circa Press, $34.95 pb, 306 pp, 0975780204
Book 2 Author Type: Editor
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Two new books with Melbourne as their subject couldn’t be more disparate in size, form, content and accuracy. Collins: The Story of Australia’s Premier Street is a big, well-designed book. It has a mysterious provenance and more than a smattering of inaccuracies: but it has pictures. These are mostly from the State Library of Victoria, and even those dating from the early years of outside photography provide clear details of the buildings and people of the time. They will enchant even those who dare think that our premier street is not so very different from the main streets of Manchester or Madison.

Read more: Neil Clerehan reviews ‘Collins: The story of Australia’s premier street’ by Judith Raphael...

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Peter Rose reviews ‘Great Music Makers’ by Louis Kahan (intro. Michael Shmith)
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Article Title: ‘Great Music Makers’ review
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ABR readers may be more familiar with Louis Kahan’s illustrations for Clem Christesen’s Meanjin or with his portrait of Patrick White (which won the Archibald Prize in 1965) than with his sketches of musicians, but this stylish book from Macmillan Art Publishing reveals not just the fluidity of Kahan’s style but also his passion for music and music-makers. And what a range of artists he could draw on (mostly at rehearsals) during the second half of his life. Present-day concert-goers, inured to leaner rostrums resulting from high fees and a faded currency, will marvel at the list of luminaries who performed here during the three decades after the war. There is Claudio Arrau (1947), grave and poetic; Otto Klemperer (1950), Olympian, bespectacled; a young Lorin Maazel (1961), gaunt and driven like a Schiele self-portrait; Luciano Pavarotti (1965) before the years of glory and girth; and Marian Anderson (1971), mighty in her sensible hat.
Book 1 Title: Great Music Makers
Book Author: Louis Kahan
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan Art, $88 hb, 144 pp, 1876832894, $66 pb, 1876832886
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ABR readers may be more familiar with Louis Kahan’s illustrations for Clem Christesen’s Meanjin or with his portrait of Patrick White (which won the Archibald Prize in 1965) than with his sketches of musicians, but this stylish book from Macmillan Art Publishing reveals not just the fluidity of Kahan’s style but also his passion for music and music-makers. And what a range of artists he could draw on (mostly at rehearsals) during the second half of his life. Present-day concert-goers, inured to leaner rostrums resulting from high fees and a faded currency, will marvel at the list of luminaries who performed here during the three decades after the war. There is Claudio Arrau (1947), grave and poetic; Otto Klemperer (1950), Olympian, bespectacled; a young Lorin Maazel (1961), gaunt and driven like a Schiele self-portrait; Luciano Pavarotti (1965) before the years of glory and girth; and Marian Anderson (1971), mighty in her sensible hat.

Read more: Peter Rose reviews ‘Great Music Makers’ by Louis Kahan (intro. Michael Shmith)

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Donna Merwick reviews ‘Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway slaves of the American revolution and their global quest for liberty’ by Cassandra Pybus
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Article Title: Administrative flotsam
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Until about twenty years ago, historians of colonial North America were writing about it as ‘this strange New World’. Whether because of distance or a native frontier, inflated (or skewed) visions, J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s new man, the American, was thought to have been born on an unknown and therefore malleable physical and institutional landscape. Everything could, as it were, begin from scratch – and that’s the way the Americans wanted it. Today, historians have repositioned the colonies within the seventeenth – and eighteenth – century Atlantic World. In these studies, North American colonials simply lived English, Dutch and French lives overseas. It was not just that they replicated the home country’s customs and institutions in Philadelphia, Charleston or Montreal: that we’ve known. They used an available Atlantic World: black slaves ran to British ships on the Atlantic and served as sailors; New England merchants travelled to the Caribbean; Dutch New Netherlanders as assiduously carried on business with Amsterdam wholesalers as with retailers on Manhattan Island; British soldiers stationed on the African coast found themselves shipped to South Carolina.
Book 1 Title: Epic Journeys of Freedom
Book 1 Subtitle: Runaway slaves of the American revolution and their global quest for liberty
Book Author: Cassandra Pybus
Book 1 Biblio: Beacon Press, US$26.95 hb, 294 pp, 080705514X
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Until about twenty years ago, historians of colonial North America were writing about it as ‘this strange New World’. Whether because of distance or a native frontier, inflated (or skewed) visions, J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s new man, the American, was thought to have been born on an unknown and therefore malleable physical and institutional landscape. Everything could, as it were, begin from scratch – and that’s the way the Americans wanted it. Today, historians have repositioned the colonies within the seventeenth – and eighteenth – century Atlantic World. In these studies, North American colonials simply lived English, Dutch and French lives overseas. It was not just that they replicated the home country’s customs and institutions in Philadelphia, Charleston or Montreal: that we’ve known. They used an available Atlantic World: black slaves ran to British ships on the Atlantic and served as sailors; New England merchants travelled to the Caribbean; Dutch New Netherlanders as assiduously carried on business with Amsterdam wholesalers as with retailers on Manhattan Island; British soldiers stationed on the African coast found themselves shipped to South Carolina.

Read more: Donna Merwick reviews ‘Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway slaves of the American revolution and...

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Article Title: Australian Art Criticism and Its Discontents
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Australian art criticism is a toothless pander that may not even exist. At least that is what some of this country’s most prominent critics, past and present, think. Christopher Heathcote, for example, who was senior art critic for The Age during the early 1990s, believes that art criticism has ‘been shut down by vested, mainly institutional, interests’ and that the system rewards only the ‘most servile conformists’.1 In his opinion: ‘Serve out your time brown-nosing the bureaucracy, and you too will land a cushy sinecure in some part of the museo-academic ziggurat.’
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‘Without wishing to be rude, in my view what you are doing is a pointless exercise. There is no art criticism in Australia today, and hasn’t been for some years.’
                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Christopher Heathcote

Australian art criticism is a toothless pander that may not even exist. At least that is what some of this country’s most prominent critics, past and present, think. Christopher Heathcote, for example, who was senior art critic for The Age during the early 1990s, believes that art criticism has ‘been shut down by vested, mainly institutional, interests’ and that the system rewards only the ‘most servile conformists’.1 In his opinion: ‘Serve out your time brown-nosing the bureaucracy, and you too will land a cushy sinecure in some part of the museo-academic ziggurat.’

Read more: La Trobe University Essay | ‘Australian Art Criticism and Its Discontents’ by Luke Morgan

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Article Title: Art Museums in an Age of Bread and Circuses
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the brave new world of Museum Expansion Incorporated. Do you have an overstuffed museum? Is it situated, perhaps, next to an urban area in need of a makeover: some rotting docklands, say, or an abandoned flour mill? Are you privy, alternatively, to plans for a combined retail/office/residential development in need of that one extra component to give it the ultimate lift? Then buttonhole a politician eager for a good news story for a change, generate a pile of capital works grant applications, and take out some philanthropists for a really long lunch. You are now free to commission an architect or two. Either young and keen, or old and eminent, it doesn’t much matter as long as they have a creative vision expansive enough to sustain an innovative piece of ‘destination’ architecture.
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the brave new world of Museum Expansion Incorporated. Do you have an overstuffed museum? Is it situated, perhaps, next to an urban area in need of a makeover: some rotting docklands, say, or an abandoned flour mill? Are you privy, alternatively, to plans for a combined retail/office/residential development in need of that one extra component to give it the ultimate lift? Then buttonhole a politician eager for a good news story for a change, generate a pile of capital works grant applications, and take out some philanthropists for a really long lunch. You are now free to commission an architect or two. Either young and keen, or old and eminent, it doesn’t much matter as long as they have a creative vision expansive enough to sustain an innovative piece of ‘destination’ architecture.

Read more: ‘Art Museums in an Age of Bread and Circuses’ by Christopher R. Marshall

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Article Title: My slinky beaver hat
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Some weeks ago, I visited my friend Leideke Galema, a Dutch nun who lives in comfortable retirement on the outskirts of Arnhem in the eastern Netherlands. I knew Miss Galema years ago when, living in the belfry of the church of S. Agnese in Agone on the Piazza Navona in Rome, she and her co-religious Miss Koet hired me as a general dogsbody, telephone-answerer, plant-waterer and errand-runner. It was heaven.
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Some weeks ago, I visited my friend Leideke Galema, a Dutch nun who lives in comfortable retirement on the outskirts of Arnhem in the eastern Netherlands. I knew Miss Galema years ago when, living in the belfry of the church of S. Agnese in Agone on the Piazza Navona in Rome, she and her co-religious Miss Koet hired me as a general dogsbody, telephone-answerer, plant-waterer and errand-runner. It was heaven.

Read more: ‘My slinky beaver hat’ by Angus Trumble

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Christopher Menz reviews ‘Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius’ by Nikolaus Pevsner
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‘All machinery may be beautiful, when it is undecorated even. Do not seek to decorate it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the line of the strength and the line of the beauty being one.’

Although ridiculed in his own day as a fashion victim in dress and manners, Oscar Wilde, the exemplar of the excesses of the Aesthetic Movement, is not normally quoted in design histories. Being Wilde, what he wrote above is probably not in praise of the machine, but its inclusion in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (first published in 1936) shows the breadth of reference in this excellent and now classic introduction to modern design and twentieth-century modernism.
Book 1 Title: Pioneers of Modern Design
Book 1 Subtitle: From William Morris to Walter Gropius
Book Author: Nikolaus Pevsner
Book 1 Biblio: Yale University Press, $85 hb, 192 pp, 0300105711
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‘All machinery may be beautiful, when it is undecorated even. Do not seek to decorate it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the line of the strength and the line of the beauty being one.’

Although ridiculed in his own day as a fashion victim in dress and manners, Oscar Wilde, the exemplar of the excesses of the Aesthetic Movement, is not normally quoted in design histories. Being Wilde, what he wrote above is probably not in praise of the machine, but its inclusion in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (first published in 1936) shows the breadth of reference in this excellent and now classic introduction to modern design and twentieth-century modernism.

Read more: Christopher Menz reviews ‘Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius’ by...

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Damian Smith reviews ‘Margaret Preston’ by Deborah Edwards (with Rose Peel et al.) and ‘The Prints of Margaret Preston: A catalogue raisonné’ by Roger Butler
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There is something immensely satisfying about a work so ambitious and comprehensive as Deborah Edwards’s Margaret Preston, published by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to accompany its current retrospective on this pre-eminent Australian modernist. From the outset, we are introduced to Preston’s perennial capacity to stimulate not only debate but also downright factionalism. The introductory chapter takes the form of multiple quotes, leaving no doubt that Preston continues to ignite debate over issues surrounding an authentic Australian vision.
Book 1 Title: Margaret Preston
Book Author: Deborah Edwards (with Rose Peel et al.)
Book 1 Biblio: Art Gallery of New South Wales, $50 pb, 300 pp, 0734763743
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Book 2 Title: The Prints of Margaret Preston
Book 2 Subtitle: A catalogue raisonné
Book 2 Author: Roger Butler
Book 2 Biblio: National Gallery of Australia, $89 pb, 382 pp, 064225185X, $120 hb, 0642541914
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There is something immensely satisfying about a work so ambitious and comprehensive as Deborah Edwards’s Margaret Preston, published by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to accompany its current retrospective on this pre-eminent Australian modernist. From the outset, we are introduced to Preston’s perennial capacity to stimulate not only debate but also downright factionalism. The introductory chapter takes the form of multiple quotes, leaving no doubt that Preston continues to ignite debate over issues surrounding an authentic Australian vision.

Read more: Damian Smith reviews ‘Margaret Preston’ by Deborah Edwards (with Rose Peel et al.) and ‘The Prints...

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Catherine Bell reviews ‘Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art: Masculinities, vol. 6, no. 1, 2005’ edited by Karen Burns et al.
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Article Title: Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art
Article Subtitle: Masculinities, vol. 6, no. 1, 2005
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Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art has dedicated its latest issue to the theme of ‘Masculinities’. This is a timely contribution to debates about the construction of male identity in visual and popular culture in the wake of Brokeback Mountain. The controversy this film has generated has focused on the love affair between two cowboys and the threat seemingly posed to an archetypal bastion of manhood, but if you remove the queer element, you have a work that isn’t so different from conventional films such as The Man from Snowy River. A similar quandary is posed by Ross Moore’s standout essay on James Gleeson and the ‘de-gayification’ of his paintings by art writers. Gleeson may have avoided decades of controversy, but delete the queer reading from his imagery and he becomes unproblematically Australia’s greatest surrealist painter.
Book 1 Title: Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art
Book 1 Subtitle: Masculinities, vol. 6, no. 1, 2005
Book Author: Karen Burns et al.
Book 1 Biblio: Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, $29 pb, 150 pp
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Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art has dedicated its latest issue to the theme of ‘Masculinities’. This is a timely contribution to debates about the construction of male identity in visual and popular culture in the wake of Brokeback Mountain. The controversy this film has generated has focused on the love affair between two cowboys and the threat seemingly posed to an archetypal bastion of manhood, but if you remove the queer element, you have a work that isn’t so different from conventional films such as The Man from Snowy River. A similar quandary is posed by Ross Moore’s standout essay on James Gleeson and the ‘de-gayification’ of his paintings by art writers. Gleeson may have avoided decades of controversy, but delete the queer reading from his imagery and he becomes unproblematically Australia’s greatest surrealist painter.

Read more: Catherine Bell reviews ‘Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art: Masculinities, vol. 6, no. 1,...

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Allan Patience reviews ‘A Trial Separation: Australia and the decolonisation of Papua New Guinea’ by Donald Denoon
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Contents Category: Australian History
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Article Title: Conundrum in PNG
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This book is a milestone in the historiography of Australia and Papua New Guinea. It puts paid to sterile debates about whether PNG’s independence came too early. ‘Decolonisation,’ Professor Donald Denoon concludes, ‘is by no means complete and independence is a work in progress.’ What happened on 16 September 1975 was the beginning of a ‘trial separation’: ‘Australian rule over the territory was not a marriage made in heaven, and it could never be consummated by full integration. Yet those countries are so close in so many ways that the divorce cannot easily be made absolute.’
Book 1 Title: A Trial Separation
Book 1 Subtitle: Australia and the decolonisation of Papua New Guinea
Book Author: Donald Denoon
Book 1 Biblio: Pandanus, $45 pb, 228 pp
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This book is a milestone in the historiography of Australia and Papua New Guinea. It puts paid to sterile debates about whether PNG’s independence came too early. ‘Decolonisation,’ Professor Donald Denoon concludes, ‘is by no means complete and independence is a work in progress.’ What happened on 16 September 1975 was the beginning of a ‘trial separation’: ‘Australian rule over the territory was not a marriage made in heaven, and it could never be consummated by full integration. Yet those countries are so close in so many ways that the divorce cannot easily be made absolute.’

Read more: Allan Patience reviews ‘A Trial Separation: Australia and the decolonisation of Papua New Guinea’...

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Caroline Jordan reviews ‘The World of Thea Proctor’ by Barry Humphries et al.
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Contents Category: Art
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Article Title: Silken universe
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Thea Proctor’s long career spanned the 1900s to the 1960s. Sadly, she lived to see her reputation decline. Barry Humphries, in private life a noted art collector, relates here how his characteristic appreciation of the aesthetically démodé led him to seek out Proctor’s acquaintance in the 1960s. A new generation of professional curators sniffily dismissed the grande dame, then in her eighties, as a ‘minor artist’, more important as a teacher and passionate champion of other modernists than in her own right. To Proctor, though, an aesthetic reputation was everything. ‘If I have not got that a life’s work is wasted,’ she despaired to a friend.
Book 1 Title: The World of Thea Proctor
Book Author: Barry Humphries, Andrew Sayers, and Sarah Engledow
Book 1 Biblio: National Portrait Gallery/Craftsman House, $55 pb, 185 pp
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Thea Proctor’s long career spanned the 1900s to the 1960s. Sadly, she lived to see her reputation decline. Barry Humphries, in private life a noted art collector, relates here how his characteristic appreciation of the aesthetically démodé led him to seek out Proctor’s acquaintance in the 1960s. A new generation of professional curators sniffily dismissed the grande dame, then in her eighties, as a ‘minor artist’, more important as a teacher and passionate champion of other modernists than in her own right. To Proctor, though, an aesthetic reputation was everything. ‘If I have not got that a life’s work is wasted,’ she despaired to a friend.

Read more: Caroline Jordan reviews ‘The World of Thea Proctor’ by Barry Humphries et al.

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Daniel Thomas reviews ‘Exiles and Emigrants: Epic journeys to Australia in the Victorian era’ by Patricia Tryon Macdonald
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This exhibition book from the National Gallery of Victoria is enthralling. It presents the imagery of British emigration, hitherto unstudied; fifteen million people fled during Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901). There is a mix of art history with social history: major and minor paintings and popular-culture prints; memorabilia and relics. A wedding ring salvaged from the dreadful 1857 wreck of the emigrant ship Dunbar reminds us that there was only one survivor when, at the end of the voyage, she crashed into Sydney Heads.
Book 1 Title: Exiles and Emigrants
Book 1 Subtitle: Epic journeys to Australia in the Victorian era
Book Author: Patricia Tryon Macdonald
Book 1 Biblio: National Gallery of Victoria, $39.95 pb, 144 pp, $49.95 hb, 0724102620
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This exhibition book from the National Gallery of Victoria is enthralling. It presents the imagery of British emigration, hitherto unstudied; fifteen million people fled during Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901). There is a mix of art history with social history: major and minor paintings and popular-culture prints; memorabilia and relics. A wedding ring salvaged from the dreadful 1857 wreck of the emigrant ship Dunbar reminds us that there was only one survivor when, at the end of the voyage, she crashed into Sydney Heads.

Read more: Daniel Thomas reviews ‘Exiles and Emigrants: Epic journeys to Australia in the Victorian era’ by...

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Denise O’Dea reviews ‘The Apricot Colonel’ by Marion Halligan
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Article Title: Shrewd editorial advice
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The heroine of Marion Halligan’s latest novel has little time for reviewers. More often than not, she complains, they are ‘patronising ignorant nobodies’ who wouldn’t know a book from a biscuit. I will not hazard a biscuit metaphor, but I will venture a complaint. The Apricot Colonel is as elegantly written as any of Halligan’s novels. It provides the linguistic curios, surprising digressions and insights into storytelling that made Lovers’ Knots (1992), The Fog Garden (2001) and The Point (2003), among others, so exciting. Next to these, The Apricot Colonel is startlingly slight. In Halligan’s best novels, strong story lines tether the witty digressions and thoughtful asides together. In The Apricot Colonel, the plot never seems quite sturdy enough to hold them.
Book 1 Title: The Apricot Colonel
Book Author: Marion Halligan
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $19.95 pb, 276 pp, 1741147662
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The heroine of Marion Halligan’s latest novel has little time for reviewers. More often than not, she complains, they are ‘patronising ignorant nobodies’ who wouldn’t know a book from a biscuit. I will not hazard a biscuit metaphor, but I will venture a complaint. The Apricot Colonel is as elegantly written as any of Halligan’s novels. It provides the linguistic curios, surprising digressions and insights into storytelling that made Lovers’ Knots (1992), The Fog Garden (2001) and The Point (2003), among others, so exciting. Next to these, The Apricot Colonel is startlingly slight. In Halligan’s best novels, strong story lines tether the witty digressions and thoughtful asides together. In The Apricot Colonel, the plot never seems quite sturdy enough to hold them.

Read more: Denise O’Dea reviews ‘The Apricot Colonel’ by Marion Halligan

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Contents Category: Advances
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Article Title: Advances | March 2006
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Ten years ago, the venerable essay was a kind of Australian fossil, rare as compassion in a bourse. They still figured in the learned journals, but other sightings were infrequent. When the current Editor of ABR proposed the first major anthology of Australian essays to his then colleagues at OUP, it was doubtless perceived as yet another instance of his eccentricity, but when it was published in 1997 Imre Salusinszky’s Oxford Book of Australian Essays was greeted with enthusiasm. Other anthologies followed in the 1990s, including the first of the Black Inc. Best Australian Essays, a series that now runs to eight volumes. Never has the essay form been more visible, more necessary, more popular, give or take the odd skirmish. Tamas Pataki’s ‘Against Religion’, published in our February issue, is a fine example of how essays can captivate and get under people’s skin. No other essay has so polarised our readers or generated as much correspondence, ranging from a kind of epistolary sigh of relief that ‘someone has said it at last’ to indignation at Dr Pataki’s supposed temerities (see our Letters pages, and there are more to come). That’s a good thing, and ABR looks forward to presenting other views on the subject, plus a response from Dr Pataki in the April issue.
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The Calibre Prize – worth $10,000

Ten years ago, the venerable essay was a kind of Australian fossil, rare as compassion in a bourse. They still figured in the learned journals, but other sightings were infrequent. When the current Editor of ABR proposed the first major anthology of Australian essays to his then colleagues at OUP, it was doubtless perceived as yet another instance of his eccentricity, but when it was published in 1997 Imre Salusinszky’s Oxford Book of Australian Essays was greeted with enthusiasm. Other anthologies followed in the 1990s, including the first of the Black Inc. Best Australian Essays, a series that now runs to eight volumes. Never has the essay form been more visible, more necessary, more popular, give or take the odd skirmish. Tamas Pataki’s ‘Against Religion’, published in our February issue, is a fine example of how essays can captivate and get under people’s skin. No other essay has so polarised our readers or generated as much correspondence, ranging from a kind of epistolary sigh of relief that ‘someone has said it at last’ to indignation at Dr Pataki’s supposed temerities (see our Letters pages, and there are more to come). That’s a good thing, and ABR looks forward to presenting other views on the subject, plus a response from Dr Pataki in the April issue.

Read more: Advances | March 2006

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Anthony Gardner reviews four books
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Contents Category: Art
Subheading: Anthony Gardner reviews Johanna Fahey, Alexie Glass, Justin Paton, and Ingrid Periz
Custom Article Title: Hermetic parameters
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Article Title: Hermetic parameters
Article Subtitle: Anthony Gardner reviews Johanna Fahey, Alexie Glass, Justin Paton, and Ingrid Periz
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There is no doubt that the state of writing about contemporary Australian art would be in dire straits without the support of Craftsman House. In the past two decades, this small Sydney-based publisher has plugged significant gaps in the field with some of its most influential texts: Vivien Johnson’s ground-breaking work on Australia’s Western Desert painters (1994); Charles Green’s thorough mapping of Australian art since 1970 (Peripheral Vision, 1995); and one of the first, and still most concise, English-language surveys of Soviet and early post-Soviet art, immediately spring to mind. This is not to say that all of these initiatives were limited to the thrall of academia. In collaboration with the magazine Art and Australia, Craftsman House produced a series of monographs on emerging and mid-career Australian artists at a time when their CVs generally hinged on catalogue essays or the occasional review. The effect was complementary: alongside the advocacy of artists such as Janet Laurence, H.J. Wedge and Hossein Valamanesh came the franking of a new wave of important local critics: not just Green and Johnson, but Chris McAuliffe, Paul Carter, Benjamin Genocchio and Ashley Crawford as well.
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David Noonan: Before and now
by Johanna Fahey
Craftsman House, $39.95 pb, 111 pp, 0975196588

Lisa Roet: Uncommon observations
by Alexie Glass
Craftsman House, $39.95 pb, 112 pp, 0975196596

Ricky Swallow: Field recordings
by Justin Paton
Craftsman House, $39.95 pb, 112 pp, 0975196510

Adam Cullen: Scars last longer
by Ingrid Periz
Craftsman House, $39.95 pb, 112 pp, 0975196529

 

There is no doubt that the state of writing about contemporary Australian art would be in dire straits without the support of Craftsman House. In the past two decades, this small Sydney-based publisher has plugged significant gaps in the field with some of its most influential texts: Vivien Johnson’s ground-breaking work on Australia’s Western Desert painters (1994); Charles Green’s thorough mapping of Australian art since 1970 (Peripheral Vision, 1995); and one of the first, and still most concise, English-language surveys of Soviet and early post-Soviet art, immediately spring to mind. This is not to say that all of these initiatives were limited to the thrall of academia. In collaboration with the magazine Art and Australia, Craftsman House produced a series of monographs on emerging and mid-career Australian artists at a time when their CVs generally hinged on catalogue essays or the occasional review. The effect was complementary: alongside the advocacy of artists such as Janet Laurence, H.J. Wedge and Hossein Valamanesh came the franking of a new wave of important local critics: not just Green and Johnson, but Chris McAuliffe, Paul Carter, Benjamin Genocchio and Ashley Crawford as well.

Read more: Anthony Gardner reviews four books

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