Turns of phrase

Not all neuroscientists possess as many interests or deploy as many talents as Ian Gibbins, who will deliver the 2007 Flinders University/Australian Book Review Annual Lecture on Wednesday, November 14. Professor Gibbins, who originally trained as a zoologist, is Professor of Anatomy and Histology at Flinders University. His research involves advanced microscopy and electrical recording techniques that allow the communication between nerve cells to be studied. His work in this field has been recognised by an honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Professor Gibbins, who serves on the advisory committee of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, often writes for ABR – but never, until this month, as a poet. His poem ‘Field Guide’, which received an Honourable Mention in the 2007 ABR Poetry Prize, appears on page 27.

Professor Gibbins’s Annual Lecture is titled ‘Body, Brain and the New Science of Communication: Turns of Phrase, Figures of Speech’. It will commence at 6.45 p.m. on November 14, in the Grainger Studio, Hindley Street, Adelaide. This is a free public lecture. (Full details appear on page 9.) ABR readers are urged to reserve seats early. Professor Gibbins’s highly original and cross-disciplinary lectures are always very popular.

Vale Steve J. Spears (1951–2007)

Few Australian dramatists begin their artistic careers with international successes while in their mid-twenties. Ray Lawler was in his early thirties when Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) made him famous. Even David Williamson, precocious and prolific, was nearing thirty when his first full-length play, The Coming of Stork, was performed at La Mama in 1970, to be followed a year later by The Removalists. Steve J. Spears’s one-actor play The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin, first produced in 1976, was a tour de force for the 25-year-old playwright. No one who saw those early productions in Australia or London or New York will forget the brio of the language – not to mention the late great Gordon Chater’s extraordinary performance (and entrance), which took him, too, around the world and won him several awards. Spears, who has died in Adelaide at the age of fifty-six, went on to write a dozen other plays, including The Death of George Reeves (1979) and Glory (1988), plus a volume of autobiographical essays, In Search of the Bodgie (1989). He also worked as an actor and singer on television, radio and the stage. Several years ago, he returned to South Australia, his home state.

Art talk

ABR is most grateful to Professor Jaynie Anderson, Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, for co-editing with Peter Rose the art-related pages of this issue. As always, our art issue carries reviews and commentaries by leading art historians, curators and gallery directors. These include regular contributors such as Isobel Crombie, Christopher Menz and Daniel Thomas. This year we welcome several newcomers to our pages, including Patricia Fullerton, Vivien Gaston and Susan Lowish. Professor Anderson herself – despite her many other commitments, including the forthcoming 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA), of which she is the convenor – contributes a fascinating article on Australia’s slowness to appreciate indigenous art.

Nobel Prize for Literature

The Swedish Academy has awarded Doris Lessing the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. The British novelist, at eighty-seven, is the oldest person to win the Nobel Prize. She left school when she was thirteen. Lessing, whose novels include The Golden Notebook (1962) and The Good Terrorist (1985), is only the eleventh woman to have won the prize, which was first awarded in 1901.

Gift subscription special

This month, all ABR subscribers who purchase one gift subscription for the special price of $65 – or two or more for $60 each – will go into the draw to win a copy of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (ASP, 3 vols, $140), The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics (OUP, $99.95), or David Malouf’s The Complete Stories (Knopf, $45).

CORRECTIONS

There is some disagreement about the publication date of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. In the October 2007 issue of ABR, an editorial change to James Ley’s review of Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife, specifying 1622 (when it was mentioned in a book catalogue) as the publication date, led to an inadvertent distortion of Ley’s meaning (‘Ann may have had a role in the publication of the First Folio, which appeared in 1622, three months after her death’). Ann in fact died on 6 August 1623. The First Folio was entered in the Stationer’s Register on 8 November 1623. Silly us for believing a publisher’s catalogue.