Archive

If Australian art has sometimes been perceived as wanting in style and opulence, recent art museum exhibitions and monographs examining the art and artists of the Edwardian era tell another story and reveal that there is abundant glamour in Australian art. The Edwardians (2004) and George W. Lambert Retrospective (2007) – both from the National Gallery of Australia – and Bertram Mackennal (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007) have succeeded in presenting Australian art in the grand manner from this most extravagant period.

Pamela Bone has written a remarkably brave book. She writes about how the chemotherapy which she underwent after the diagnosis of multiple myeloma in 2004 robbed her of the fearlessness of her life as journalist, human rights activist, feminist, and public speaker. She pays tribute to the late British journalist John Diamond, who insisted that writing about his cancer was not brave at all. Bone disagrees: ‘I think he was very brave. And although he is dead, his voice, with its decency and wit, speaks to me from the pages of his book.’ Bravery, decency and wit are among many words that could equally be used to characterise Bones’s own voice, which mercifully is still strong, always profoundly intelligent and humane as she addresses the big questions of death and dying, poverty and injustice, all the while paying tribute to the love of family and friends, the dedicated and good-humoured care of health professionals, and the kindness of strangers.

This impressive volume surpasses most assumptions about the scope, depth and eloquence of an exhibition catalogue. Curator and editor Terence Lane has gathered together thirteen of Australia’s leading art historians, historians and curators, all recognised experts in their fields.

Among those in the field, Bob Noye was known for his exhaustive collection of, and research into, the history of nineteenth-century South Australian photography. The website he established was the most detailed information available on the topic, yet he was extremely secretive about his holdings. When Noye died suddenly in 2002, several institutions vied for his collection, with the Art Gallery of South Australia the fortunate recipient of the Noye family’s goodwill. With generous funding assistance, AGSA acquired the collection, which comprised nearly five thousand photographs and negatives, plus his research archive. This publication, and the exhibition it accompanies ­– the first to focus on the first hundred years of South Australian photography – is dedicated to Noye and is founded upon his passion.

Against The Grain celebrates two iconoclastic Australian historians: Manning Clark and Brian Fitzpatrick. Comprising papers from a 2006 conference organised by two of their daughters, both distinguished academics, Against the Grain offers critical thoughts and reminiscences of family members, friends, colleagues, students and academic successors of the two men.

Angela Gardner’s Parts of Speech is a lengthy first collection that ranges from experiments in ‘language’ poetry to meditations on science, the Iraq war, art and memory. It is an ambitious but rather uncertain book. The five-page title poem is in the mode of Peter Minter (who supplies an approving blurb). There are some original images and gritty, memorable lines (‘hookangles that held hold / while mortality / threadscrews experience’), but these are imprisoned by a relentlessly unvaried rhythm that makes it difficult for a reader to find a way in. And there is something merely conventional about the way this poem earnestly contrasts the freedoms of parrot, sky and elephant with the presumed artificiality of language, ‘mute text’ and ‘discredited Euclidean geometry’. This poem was too passive; it needed to be more of a genuine – serious and adventurous – interrogation of language. Similarly, ‘Embedded’ attempts to look at the Iraq war as a problem of rhetoric (‘the President’s words’) – an interesting idea, but Gardner’s own heavyhanded moral rhetoric remains surprisingly unexamined, and the reader’s approval is taken for granted.

In 1961 the Tasmanian Historical Research Association published Clifford Craig’s Engravers of Van Diemen’s Land, which proved to be the first of several books in which Craig attempted to document every nineteenth-century print with a Tasmanian subject produced in Tasmania, mainland Australia and overseas. Craig, in the next two decades, produced follow-up volumes expanding the area covered and including recently discovered prints. His work remains unique in Australia. Sadly no other collector, scholar, curator or librarian has taken up the challenge and attempted to document the printed images of another state.

This volume of Southerly, combining the first two issues for 2007, is a celebration of Elizabeth Webby’s contribution to Australian literature. Noel Rowe and Bernadette Brennan, the editors principally responsible for this issue, describe it as ‘a tribute to a brilliant career’. There are contributions from academic colleagues, generations of poets and writers of short fiction, and a number of ex-students, many of whom ‘have gone on to distinguished academic careers’.

Andrew Bacevich is a former West Point graduate, a principled man on the conservative side of politics who considered it wrong for wealthy citizens to leave the fighting of America’s wars to the poor and disadvantaged. He had fought in Vietnam, and his son, a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the United States Army, had volunteered for duty in Iraq. Just before Bacevich Sr was to attend the Sydney Writers’ Festival in June 2007, he received word that his son had been killed in Iraq. He cancelled his engagement in Sydney, and sent a poignant letter explaining his absence. It is a great pity that he was unable to come. The book that Bacevich was due to speak about is one of the most trenchant accounts I have read about contemporary American military culture. It should give any thinking Australian pause about the growing influence of American doctrine, strategy, training, equipment and choice of weapons over the Australian Defence Force.