Reference

Studies of ‘regional modernisms’ have frequently framed the non-metropolitan in strictly Northern Hemisphere terms, construing London or New York as centres of innovation, and cities and towns further afield – but still in the same country or region as those art-world capitals – as the belated adopters of phenomena that are often perceived as the province of metropolitan actors and audiences. Margot Osborne’s monumental volume The Adelaide Art Scene: Becoming contemporary 1939-2000 tells a far more complex story of modernism’s reach, impact, and legacies in twentieth-century art practice. In forensic detail, Osborne and her contributors explore the ways in which modernism’s significance was expressed in and affected a city that found itself both connected to and rival with Sydney and Melbourne, as well as with the established international centres. Whether through the training or travel of artists who called South Australia home at one point or another in their lives, Adelaide has been an important node in those movements for longer than many might imagine.

Gerry Wilkes has done the state a great deal of service, and he should get full credit once again, as the eclipsed terrain of Australian literature emerges into the sunlight: which it seems to be doing right now, to judge from some recent movements in publishing. So let’s keep abreast of our language, all the while: that is to say, of our dominant or mainstream language, amid whatever others we have to offer.

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.

The first volume of the Australian Dictionary of Biography appeared in 1966, the sixteenth in 2002, by which stage the series included persons who had died prior to 1981. This one-volume Supplement includes those who were for one reason or another omitted from the main volumes. It is an impressive achievement. There are 504 biographies, written by 399 authors. Almost all are well written and carefully researched, with up-to-date lists of sources. The editor and his associates have had the Herculean task of melding all these biographies into a work of reference in which the entries have a consistency in the type of information presented, while at the same time allowing for the individuality of each subject and author. In this, they have succeeded admirably. The volume has the air of authority.

‘It is escape not from life, but from literature.’

       (Marjorie Nicolson on the detective genre,

       ‘The Professor and the Detective’, 1929)

I began reading crime fiction in the 1950s and became serious about it in the 1960s, searching out what  scholarship there was then about its history and development, its types and practitioners. So I am probably an atypical reader (and reviewer) of these two books. I read them with the pleasure of familiarity and recognition, being reminded of things I hadn’t thought of in a long time. No little part of that pleasure lies in seeing how others assemble and weigh the components of this genre’s history.

The internet, like its big sister, the electronic computer, is a Little Frankenstein of the Cold War – one of the countless bright ideas brought shuddering to life with the financial backing of the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the feverish aftermath of the launching of Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite, by the Soviet Union in 1957. And why did the US military finance the research and development of a medium that would, thirty years down the track, turn the Amazon into a cheap place to buy books and forever pervert the meaning of a humble can of Spam? In a word: Armageddon.

According to the conventional wisdom, Australians are not overly fond of official orations. Russel Ward’s so-called ‘typical Australian’ was ‘taciturn rather than talkative’, and John La Nauze, biographer of Alfred Deakin, noted that Australians were ‘inclined to associate sophisticated speaking with condescension or insincerity’. Alfred Deakin’s eloquence, he added, was ‘surpassingly rare’ in Australia. For Robin Boyd, it was probably just as well, for when Australians deigned to open pursed lips it revealed not only bad teeth, but ‘worse words’. The appearance of these two collections of Australian speeches – and another is due for release shortly, from Melbourne University Press – flies in the face of this orthodoxy. And it buries the myth that public cynicism towards political speechmaking – for politicians dominate both collections – has reached such stratospheric heights that we would all prefer a quiet doze than be subject even to an exuberant flight of rhetoric. Clearly, no matter how often speeches are spurned as chronic windbaggery, they retain the capacity to give meaning to the life of the nation and the affairs of state.

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’.