John Rickard

Arts Highlights of the Year

November 2015, no. 376

To highlight Australian Book Review's arts coverage and to celebrate some of the year's memorable concerts, operas, films, ballets, plays, and exhibitions, we invited a group of critics and arts professionals to nominate their favourites – and to nominate one production they are looking forward to in 2016. (We indicate which works were reviewed in Arts Up ...

Why Acting Matters by David Thomson & Great Shakespeare Actors by Stanley Wells

by John Rickard •

August 2015, no. 373

John Rickard reviews 'Why Acting Matters' by David Thomson and 'Great Shakespeare Actors' by Stanley Wells

Why Acting Matters has on its cover the face of an ape; well, actually it’s Andy Serkis playing Caesar, ‘the top ape’ in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). The point of this rather unexpected image from a movie not discussed in the book is, the blurb tells us, that ‘acting is baked into our primate DNA’. These two books, however, by elder ...

My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall by John Major

by John Rickard •

November 2013, no. 356

John Rickard reviews 'My Old Man: A personal history of music hall' by John Major

Many years ago, when I was struggling to make a living as an actor–singer in England, I spent six months in the chorus at the London Palladium, in a show breezily titled Let Yourself Go, whose star was former Goon Harry Secombe. It was hard work: two performances nightly, plus a matinee on Saturday. Years later, I realised that this demanding regimen was inherited from the days of music hall, when it was morphing into what was called variety, of which Let Yourself Go was a latter-day example.

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Norman Haire and the Study of Sex by Diana Wyndham

by John Rickard •

February 2013, no. 348

John Rickard reviews 'Norman Haire and the Study of Sex' by Diana Wyndham

Norman Haire was born in Sydney’s Paddington in 1892, the year in which the word ‘homosexual’ is said to have entered the English language in the translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. It was a coincidence Haire might have enjoyed, though for a man given to speaking his mind he was always discreet about his homosexuality.

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A Wild History: Life and death on the Victoria River frontier by Darrell Lewis

by John Rickard •

September 2012, no. 344

John Rickard reviews 'A Wild History: Life and death on the Victoria River frontier' by Darrell Lewis

Darrell Lewis first encountered the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory in 1971 when he worked as a field assistant for the Bureau of Mineral Resources. ‘There was an aura about the country which fired my imagination,’ he writes. Since then, as an historian and archaeologist, he has become an auth ...

Race and the Modern Exotic: Three 'Australian' women on global display by Angela Woollacott

by John Rickard •

April 2012, no. 340

John Rickard reviews 'Race and the Modern Exotic: Three "Australian" women on global display' by Angela Woollacott

Annette Kellerman, described by Angela Woollacott as ‘swimmer, diver, vaudeville performer, lecturer, writer and a silent-film star’, has been rediscovered in recent years. In 1994 Sydney’s Marrickville Council renamed its Enmore Park Swimming Pool, upgrading it from a humble pool to the Annette Kellerman Aquatic Centre, in honour of the international celebrity, who briefly lived in the neighbourhood as a small child. A 2003 documentary by Michael Cordell celebrated ‘The Original Mermaid’. Now Woollacott presents her, in the company of two other performers, as creating ‘newly modern, racially ambiguous Australian femininities’. Her sisters in racial ambiguity are none other than film star Merle Oberon, whose claim to have been born in Tasmania began to be debunked not long after her death in 1979 (hence the inverted commas necessary for ‘Australian’ in the subtitle), and Rose Quong, performer and writer, whose fascinating story will be unknown to most of us, and is the real discovery of this book.

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Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

by John Rickard •

March 2012, no. 339

I first saw Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1957 in London, of all places. I remember feeling some pride in seeing the symbolic kewpie doll presiding over the New Theatre in the heart of the West End. June Jago’s performance as Olive has stayed with me over the years; Philip Hope-Wallace, the Guardian reviewer, described her as ‘all chin and elbows, but as genuine a dramatic actress as you could find’, which suggested an element of surprise that she should be ‘found’ in Australia. Jago had been in the original 1955 Union Rep production and placed her stamp on Olive: she was to be a hard act to follow. When The Doll came to London, it had already won itself a unique place in Australian drama, but there had been some concern about how the Brits would receive a play about rough canecutters and free-and-easy barmaids. But critics like Hope-Wallace – and the influential Kenneth Tynan – hailed ‘this harsh, cawing, strongly felt play’. The imperial imprimatur sealed the success of The Doll. Its later failure on Broadway could be dismissed as a judgement on American audiences rather than on the play.

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‘This harsh, cawing, strongly felt play’

by John Rickard •

February 2012, no. 338

I first saw Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1957 in London, of all places. I remember feeling some pride in seeing the symbolic kewpie doll presiding over the New Theatre in the heart of the West End. June Jago’s performance as Olive has stayed with me over the years; Philip Hope-Wallace, the Guardian reviewer, described her as ‘all chin and elbows, but as genuine a dramatic actress as you could find’, which suggested an element of surprise that she should be ‘found’ in Australia. Jago had been in the original 1955 Union Rep production and placed her stamp on Olive: she was to be a hard act to follow. When The Doll came to London it had already won itself a unique place in Australian drama, but there had been some concern about how the Brits would receive a play about rough canecutters and free-and-easy barmaids. But critics like Hope-Wallace hailed ‘this harsh, cawing, strongly felt play’. The imperial imprimatur sealed the success of The Doll. Its later failure on Broadway could be dismissed as a judgement on American audiences rather than the play.

... (read more)

Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia by Penny Russell

by John Rickard •

February 2011, no. 328

Lacking a titled aristocracy and the leisured class that went with it, Australian colonial society encouraged an egalitarianism of manners. This, however, did not reflect the absence of social stratification: rather, as it has been argued, it was a means of being reconciled to it in a new setting ...

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Not Dark Yet: A Personal History by David Walker

by John Rickard •

April 2011, no. 330

It is perhaps not surprising that historians, as they edge towards retirement, should consider the possibility of reviewing their own life history. So, for example, among the generation of postwar historians, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Bernard Smith added powerful stories to our stock of Australian childhoods, while W.K. Hancock and Manning Clark, managing two volumes apiece, focused more on the life trajectory and career path. Now, at a time when there appears to be a growing appetite for biography and memoir, one senses that another generation of historians might be sizing up the options.

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