If there is one thing that links the four books under review, it is that they exemplify the evident growth in interest in writing and reading about Australian art and the confidence, optimism and enthusiasm which accompany such growth.

Portrait of an Artist (Vintage, $17.95pb), a biography of William Dobell by Brian Adams, was first published in hardback in 1983. Unlike James Gleeson’s biographical study of 1964 (revised 1969 and 1981) which dealt critically with the artist’s work, Brian Adams’s biography concentrates on events and situations in the life of Dobell.

Almost half of the 345-page book is devoted to the reprint of large sections of the transcript of one of Australia’s most famous court cases. The case gave instant notoriety to the artist and resulted in a sixfold increase in the number of visitors to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The action was brought against Dobell after he was awarded the Archibald Prize for portraiture in 1944 for his painting of Joshua Smith. Much of the case amounted to a battle between the forces of convervatism and modernism. For four days, King’s Counsel, barristers and witnesses fought a battle of wits and words. For four days, every possible aspect of the anatomy of the sitter who was in court and his likeness to the painting, or lack of it, was discussed, argued, counter-argued. Aesthetic considerations never entered the debate. In the end, it was the inability of the traditionalists to convince the court that there could exist an immutable and precise definition of the nature of portraiture which proved to be the basis from which the resolution of the case was made.

Dobell won the case and the plaintiffs were ordered to pay his costs. A subsequent attempt by the plaintiffs to challenge the judgement in the High Court was dismissed by the Solicitor-General on the grounds that the case was ‘devoid of merit’ and did not ‘raise any question of general public importance’. Portrait of an Artist does not add very much to an understanding of the art of Dobell. It does, however, reveal much of the man himself, his homosexuality, his friendships, and his unswerving commitment to art. Effortlessly, Brian Adams builds a picture of a man of great humility in spite of all the honours that over the years were showered upon him, a man of unrelenting humanity and amiability who possessed a staunch sense of justice and integrity. Portrait of an Artist is a very good read indeed. It is a pity that an illustration of the painting of Joshua Smith about which so much is said in the text was not reproduced somewhere in the book.

If Portrait of an Artist suffers from a total absence of illustrations, Aboriginal Australian Art: A Visual Perspective (Mandarin, $34.95pb), by contrast, revels in them. First published ten years ago, and now in its third reprint, Aboriginal Australian Art contains 153 plates. Almost all are in colour and all are accompanied by very useful descriptive annotations at the end of the text. This book joins the already impressive body of work the authors produced together or separately for over thirty years.

Aboriginal Australian Art is an ambitiously titled volume. It seems almost inevitable that a book of its size (only 176 pages), intending to show many examples of Aboriginal art and its many complex levels of meanings, could not afford the breadth of coverage implied by the title. This said, however, Aboriginal Australian Art has much to offer.

Based on extensive research centred, for the most part, in Arnhem Land (Northern Territory) and in Western Australia, this is a study which places artistic endeavours firmly within their socio-cultural context. Aboriginal art is very much a land-based art which traditionally has had its raison d'être in the re-creation of certain mythic conditions as defined in the Dreaming. Artists thus perform the crucial role of re-activator of these conditions and give visible form to spiritual powers.

The Berndts discuss and explain many of the stylistic devices used in Aboriginal art, not as fixed sets of symbols but as tools designed to facilitate the interpretation of meaning, itself dependent on mythological knowledge and familiarity with the land being depicted. Like meandering lines, connecting curves and u­designs, so often seen in Aboriginal works, concentric circles, for example, can mean a variety of things. They can stand for rockholes, soaks, camp fires or hills; it is local and mytho­logical knowledge which will give the work its ritual purpose and its mean­ing.

Ultimately, what this book does is to show the diversity of Aboriginal art whether it is expressed in bark paintings, sculptures, rock paintings, engravings or batiks. It also underlines the variety of the regional patterning of art styles that exists and the intellectual and spiritual aspirations of an art which, in recent times, has come under pressure from external contacts and has shown insistent trends away from traditional forms.

With so many titles to their names and their lifelong success at producing thoughtful and erudite books on Aborigines, the Berndts were obviously comfortable with the idea of collaboration.

A similar sense of comfortable collaboration comes through The Journeyman: A Story of Migrant Life (Picador, $39.95hb), a book which celebrates the individual’s travels through life. The Journeyman consists of a series of twenty woodcuts by the artist Salvatore Zofrea and of a text written by Sally McInerney.

The story begins in a small village of Calabria in Italy when ‘man meets woman at a dance’; the man is Giuseppe Zofrea, the woman Teresa Garigliono. Salvatore is one of their sons. Giuseppe migrates to Australia and for seven years, the family lives dislocated lives until, eventually reunited, it begins its other life. This is a compelling story of hardship and loss, of dreams and yearnings and at times of despair; but in the end it is also a tale of hope.

Sally McInerney has written a beautiful text. It is moving and lyrical, seductive and impassioned. In the chapter titled ‘Woman arrives in Aus­tralia with Youngest Children’, McInerney writes, speaking with the voice of Salvatore:

I had never seen the sea, so some relative took my hand (Salvatore was nine at the time) and led me down towards it in the darkness, and I was aware only of a shapeless seething animal thing at the ragged edge of the world and the horrific roaring of its waves; I thought it wanted to pull me in, and I ran screaming back to the lighted doorways.
A ferry took us across the straits of Messina; there was chaos, huge crowds, monstrous waves, the foreign smells of the ship, the rocking surface underfoot, people crying and waving their handkerchiefs; then we left the little harbour and entered the vast ocean, and then somehow I began to feel safe.

McInerney is as comfortable with her text as Zofrea seems to be with the medium of woodcut. It is obvious that it is a medium the artist enjoys using and uses quite effectively to tell his story, the story of a family, the artist’s family, and of human experiences. Beyond the particular, this is the story of thousands, one, as David Malouf says in his introduction which reflects our ‘moving on from what is known to what is as yet unknown, from childhood to adulthood, from living to whatever lies beyond.’

Salvatore Zofrea is one of hundreds of artists whose name appears in a new book titled A Buyer’s Guide to Australian Art (Mandarin, $17.95 pb) and subtitled ‘Collecting affordable art with confidence’, the last of this month’s offerings.

First and foremost, this is a book of lists for list addicts, the sort who don’t really mind which way they come. There are short lists, long lists, lists in alphabetical order, lists with names piled up on the page in no rational or chronological order whatsoever; the longest is the Directory of Artists which takes up two thirds of the space but is perhaps the main relieving feature. Then there are lists which give much vital information, for example, ‘John Allcot (1888-1972) was active in New South Wales’ or ‘Mary Ann Friend arrived Hobart (c.1830-1838) after first having arrived in Swan River in January 1830’!

Page 10 has a ‘quick’ guide  to style and period (it does warn us) under ‘Heidelberg School (Impressionists)’. Three names are mentioned: Walter Withers, Arthur Streeton and Fred Mc Cubbin; too bad for Tom Roberts, Louis Abrahams, Jane Sutherland, Charles Conder and the rest.

This book makes some glorious statements. One I am particularly fond of is ‘artists seen as naive by one person are often not considered one naive person by another’. But then, and more seriously, there are errors. It will to seriously to mention the one which has Bernard Shaw as having written the manifesto for the Antipodeans exhibition of 1959. I wonder what Professor Bernard Smith thinks of this!

It is a pity that a good idea has fallen so flat on its face. There is certainly a need for an easy to handle, cheap reference book which would give good, no nonsense advice about the state of the art market, particularly in the ‘affordable’ category, to the novice buyer.