Archive

Charles Osborne, who was born in Brisbane in 1927 and moved to London in 1953, is a prolific writer, broadcaster and opera critic. His latest offering, The Opera Lover’s Companion, sets out to guide its reader through 175 of the world’s most popular operas. Osborne correctly states that ‘the staples of the operatic diet today are the major works of five great composers – Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Strauss’ – and certain works by other luminaries. The operas of sixty-seven composers are included, but that core quintet gives us almost a third of the operas in this volume. Interestingly, in opera’s four hundred-year history, the vast majority of the most frequently performed works fall within the period between Mozart’s first featured opera, Mitridate, rè di Ponto (1770) and Strauss’s last, Capriccio (1942).

As with The New Kobbé’s Opera Book (1997), the list reveals a re-evaluation of many previously neglected operas, in particular some lesser-known works of Handel, Rossini, Donizetti, Massenet, and Strauss, which have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Doubtless this also reflects the dearth of modern operas and the scarcity of contemporary composers who know what their audiences want. Any opera company ignoring box office appeal does so at its peril, and a book such as this should be mandatory reading.

If you are regretting the passage of another summer and feeling nostalgic about the lost freedoms of youth, Sonya Hartnett’s latest novel, Surrender, may serve as a useful tonic. In Hartnett’s world, children possess little and control less, dependent as they are on adults and on their own capacity to manipulate, or charm ...

In the old days, it was easy. The eagle was a large bird with sharp talons for gripping and a hooked beak for tearing prey; the swallow was a fast-flying bird that left our shores each winter to seek warmer climes. But since Charles Darwin, we can’t say that anymore, because the very language of such descriptions implies purpose – either will (the swallow somehow knowing, planning, its migration) or design.

Multiculturalism has been in a state of political and theoretical decline for more than a decade. Sneja Gunew’s latest book addresses this loss of political commitment and theoretical engagement with one of the most challenging issues of contemporary society. Her effort to reposition the debate is based on the belief that it is necessary to establish new comparative studies of multiculturalism. In the past, multiculturalism was trapped within a national discourse on identity and rights. This tended to confine debate to pragmatic accounts of social policy, folkloric versions of culture and the classic liberal definition of citizenship. Gunew argues that this approach is inadequate given the global flows and transnational links of diasporic communities. Today, multiculturalism needs to be grasped as a process that is both situated in a specific setting and connected to broader forces. In the context of globalisation, the understanding of multiculturalism requires a more complex model of cultural dynamics and social agency.

Rooms do furnish a book. This book was inspired by a 1930s interior in a photograph that art historian Bruce Adams came upon when interviewing Sydney painter Grace Crowley (1890–1979) at her home in 1973. Two years later, Adams visited the building that had intrigued him: Moly-Sabata, on the left bank of the Rhone about sixty kilometres south of Lyon. In this account of the artists who lived there from the late 1920s to early 1950s, a big-faced, stiffly dressed, middle-aged Australian makes her presence felt. In contextualising expatriate painter Anne Dangar’s twenty-one-year tenure in the art colony, Adams shows what her aspirations were, why she turned herself into a village potter, and the political use that was made of her work.

Owls have captured the human imagination as much as any group of birds. Mysterious, nocturnal hunters with haunting, far-carrying calls, silent flight, and prominent, forward-facing eyes, owls evoke a range of emotions from fear and awe to delight and a deep concern for their welfare.

No Australian native son blazed brighter than Hugh D. McIntosh (1876–1942). Here is a lively biography of a Sydney boy who left school aged seven and rose to be the Squire of Broome Park in Kent, the stately seat of Lord Kitchener. McIntosh – contender though he became for a seat in the House of Commons – remained always an Australian. At Broome Park, a cricket pitch was laid down with ten tons of Australian earth, imported so that the visiting Australian Test team might practice on their native soil. The McIntosh ‘coat of arms’ came not from the College of Heralds but from the studio of his old mate Norman Lindsay. The very doctor who delivered him at birth was Charles Mackellar, father of that Dorothea who celebrated our ‘sunburnt country’.

Gideon Haigh likes cricket, literature and history, and his writings on cricket are accordingly shrewd, learned and illuminating. He writes particularly well of Jack Gregory and of George Headley. Gregory was the embodiment of the Anzac legend: tall, bronzed, blue-eyed, an artilleryman in the Great War. He played for an AIF eleven in England after the war, took dazzling close catches, demolished Cambridge University with ferocious fast bowling and went on to test match triumphs with Australia against Eng-land in the 1920s. Injuries that so often cut down bowlers of explosive pace curtailed his career. Headley, on the other hand, was a batsman in the early West Indian sides, a black man in teams of mixed race captained always by whites, representing a divided nation of particularist energies. Haigh writes with great understanding of the immense difficulty of maintaining form, as Headley did, in a team that always lost.

From the first paragraph, Terri Janke’s Butterfly Song makes its intentions clear: this is a novel about the love of the land and the palpable connection to the ancestral home. ‘They say if you live on an island for too long, you merge with it. Your bones become the sands, your blood the ocean. Your flesh is the fertile ground. Your heart becomes the stories, dances, songs. The island is part of your makeup …’ This is why Tarena Shaw feels an odd sense of belonging when she first steps foot on Thursday Island, her grandparents’ birthplace. Though she has never been there before, the memories and myths that have been passed down the family tree have guaranteed a spiritual bond between the black-suited city slicker and the tropical island with water like a ‘living gemstone’.