Encyclopedias

There is no denying the ‘dynastic monument’ that is the fourth edition of the The New McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art. Three generations of McCullochs have contributed to this volume, which covers everything from Anita Aarons to Reinis Zusters. With the added title ‘New McCulloch’s’ giving it a personal touch, this edition has more than 8000 listings and includes an extra 1500 entries on artists, awards, directors, critics, exhibitions and galleries; and essays on topics such as abstraction, new media, surrealism and women artists. It is well promoted and marketed, with special editions for the AGNSW and the NGV. It is beautifully produced and an impressive achievement. But is it really Australia’s art ‘bible’?

This Encyclopedia – claimed by the publishers to be the first for Melbourne – is an immense undertaking. The sheer numbers are staggering: 1500-odd articles, 850,000 words, 250 illustrations, nineteen maps and twenty-one tables, produced over a period of nearly ten years by an army comprising two principal editors, five associate editors, fifteen working parties and 440 authors (to say nothing of administrative and publishing staff). Fourteen notable residents offer more reflective pieces on ‘My Melbourne’, ranging from Stephanie Alexander on ‘Eating Melbourne’ and Barry Dickins on St Paul’s Cathedral (his ‘favourite place of anarchy’), to Barry Humphries’ elegiac meditation on ‘the days of Gladstone bags and gloves and hats and glads, / Before Melbourne had been Starbucked, and the trams plastered with ads’.

In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty, among his various pronouncements to Alice, pontificates on the meanings of names. After describing the name Alice’ as ‘a stupid name enough’, Humpty Dumpty asks her what the name Alice means. Alice is doubtful: ‘Must a name mean something?’ And Humpty Dumpty retorts: ‘Of course it must ... My name means the shape I am – and a good handsome shape it is, too.’ The question of the meaning of Alice’s name is left unanswered in Lewis Carroll’s text, but it is answered in William Noble’s Names from Here and Far: The New Holland Dictionary of Names. Alice, we are told, is an English form of the name Adelaide, which in turn is a compound from the Germanic words athel, meaning ‘noble’, and Hilda, meaning ‘heroine’, or heid, meaning ‘kind’. Thus Alice means something like ‘nobly born’.

Science Fiction (speculative fiction, sf, sci-fi, whatever) is not much more than a century old. H.G. Wells called his pioneering efforts ‘scientific romances’, still a good name, and his wonderfully fecund The Time Machine and War of the Worlds were published as late as 1895 and 1898. So Australia as a Europeanised nation is even younger than this ‘space age’ genre. If you push it back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818, its birth coincides with white settlement. Time enough, you’d think, to grow plenty of Aussie sf.

The general editor introduces the Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia with a number of challenging statements. He does not want it to be ‘just another encyclopaedia’. He has made it his policy, he writes, to have no ‘academic-style text references, linguists and other students of Aboriginal studies rarely appear, and there are no “studies suggest that” ... This encyclopaedia also aims to tum the usual convention on its head by presenting an Australia with no white people except as they impinge on Aboriginal society.’