Miegunyah

In 1880, John Peter Russell left Sydney to seek an artistic education and, like many painters of the time, ended up in Paris. Vincent van Gogh also migrated to the city’s ateliers, and in 1886 they met. The friendship that developed between the twenty-eight-year-old Australian and the thirty-three-year-old Dutchman continued until the latter’s death four years later. Russell painted a penetrating portrait of Van Gogh that captures both the intensity and untrusting nature of his mentally vulnerable subject. The two men exchanged letters, and Van Gogh sent Russell sketches and photographs.

‘The very rich are different from you and me’, F. Scott Fitzgerald thought; and so he told Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway, who came back with a deflating reply, ‘Yes, they have more money’, boasted that he had won that little exchange. Yet Fitzgerald was right; and he proved it in The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. In the American novel more generally, money creates and defines character; as it does in Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan or Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. Destructive though it may be in these novels, the making of a fortune is an expression of power and a source of drama.

This is a book for people interested in the law, politics and the institutions of public life, areas in which Sir Edward Woodward was actively involved for the last half century. It is a record of achievement and provides an interesting and clear-eyed perspective on many of the important issues of that period.