Archive
When the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) opened in Canberra last December, more thoughtfulness was evident in its bookshop than the hang. The volumes are arranged by subject and in alphabetical order: the images accord to no principle beyond décor. Here are five writers; there, four scientists. The randomness of the whole embodies a culture of distraction. The root of this muddle is an evasion of whether the Gallery is to be guided by aesthetics or museology. The want of clarity is compounded by concern among staff not to be identified with a history museum.
... (read more)This year sees the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species. It also sees the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns (1759–96). The media have been full of the Darwin anniversaries, but we have heard rather less about Burns, at least in Australia. Yet Burns is arguably as important as Darwin in our cultural formation.
... (read more)Baz Luhrmann’s epic film Australia may not have won any Oscars or attracted hordes of overseas tourists, but it has had at least one positive outcome. HarperCollins reissued Xavier Herbert’s equally epic Capricornia (1938), one of many acknowledged influences on the film, another being Herbert’s even longer novel, Poor Fellow My Country (1975). While visiting New Zealand recently, I was delighted to see the handsome new edition of one of Australia’s greatest novels prominently displayed in bookshops.
... (read more)It is exhilarating and always illuminating to return to Henry Lawson. His is a body of work – slim and fragile though it may be – with which many would confidently claim to be particularly familiar. ‘The Drover’s Wife’, ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’, ‘The Loaded Dog’ and many others are a part of our literary and cultural reference. Yet Lawson’s fiction is so deceptive, seemingly intuitive and ‘natural’, that it is easy to forget just how artful and crafted it is. This is one reason why the Mitchell sketches, for example, held together by a few strokes and much implication, are always potent reminders of how brilliantly and deftly Lawson managed his fiction, how spare, tremulous and scarcely visible are the structural props of his narrative, and how he merged his own experiences into a prose that powerfully transcends its autobiographical provenance. These are some of the reasons why the reissue of a collection like John Barnes’s influential and authoritative take on Lawson is welcome and timely. The addition of John Kinsella’s introduction to sit alongside Barnes’s original 1986 essay makes the whole enterprise even more attractive.
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