Archive

Major historical figures generally attract multiple biographies. Napoleon and Nelson have, reputedly, amassed more than 200 biographies each – with successive waves of interest reflecting the constant need for reinterpretation. But at some point we must strike a declining marginal utility as we tally the titles – biography as running soap opera appears a postmodern accoutrement. In Australia, we have not yet managed to produce a biography of each prime minister – then along comes another on the ‘Little Digger’ Billy Hughes (1862–1952), without doubt one of our most colourful political leaders and written-about subjects. If not 200 titles, then there is certainly a small bookshelf full of respectable studies and serious essays on him, not to mention his own books and the many cameo appearances he makes in political memoirs and other works of his generation. So, do we need another interpretation? Indeed, does this ‘short life’ of ‘King Billy’ offer a new interpretation? Why did Aneurin Hughes – his namesake but no relation, and more on that later – commit to this laborious project?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.