Review

For nearly 100 years before any public art gallery entered the field, the main institutional collectors of Australian photography were state libraries. Primarily, they bought photographs for their informational value; the maker of the image was of relatively little concern to them. What mattered was the subject: what the photograph told the interested viewer about the people, places, and events of an evolving nation.

Victoria’s coastal borough of Queenscliff is fortunate indeed to have esteemed poet and scholar Barry Hill (a local resident since 1975) as its official historian. He combines an eye for events that will resonate as part of the ‘big picture’ of Australian history with a local’s affection and instinct for the telling details that pinpoint the intrinsic character of the place.

This book was partially written in the Queenscliff Historical Museum: at a mess table recovered from a shipwreck, surrounded by vintage diving equipment, a skull recovered from the sea, music boxes and silver teapots. It is an apt metaphor for the character of the town: on one hand, a sedate seaside resort known in its heyday for its boarding houses, grand hotels and ‘solid respectability’; on the other, a notorious shipwreck site and home to both a military barracks and, more recently, an Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) training ground for spies.

Photography was introduced to Australia in the 1840s, with the first photograph being taken in May 1841, in Sydney. Since then, photographic images, in all their permutations (including the more recent digital images), have become ubiquitous and indispensable parts of our daily lives. Family snapshots, holiday mementoes, news and sporting images, advertisements, book illustrations and passport photographs contribute to the phenomenal quantity of photographs in existence.

The Macquarie Dictionary was first published with great fanfare in 1981. Three years later, the publishers, Macquarie Library, since taken over by Macmillan, issued an offshoot of the main dictionary bearing the twee marketing-driven title Aussie Talk. The more formal explanatory subtitle, The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms, gave a clearer idea of the scope of the book and also revealed that it was intended to compete with Professor Gerry Wilkes’s very successful Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms, which had been published in 1978.

When five Chinese set themselves ablaze in Tiananmen Square in January 2001, Falun Gong made world headlines. Horrified disciples of the spiritual and qigong (like t’ai chi) organisation claimed that none of the five was a member and dissociated themselves from the tragedy, in which one person died. Today, Falun Gong still sees itself as a victim of a government conspiracy to discredit its 100 million faithful. Sydney-based Jennifer Zeng asks: why did police, some thirty fire engines and cameramen arrive within a minute? How did they get distant, mid-range and close-up images of the self-immolation from so many different angles unless it had been prearranged? Zeng suggests answers to these and other questions in Witnessing History.

Like many a portentous new (electronic) media advocate today, the US photographer Paul Strand opined in his 1922 essay ‘Photography and the New God’ that photography unified science and art and therefore offered a new creative path. God talk was not inappropriate, because the period also saw the widespread sway of vitalism, the metaphysical doctrine that living organisms possess a non-physical inner force or energy that lends them life.

Two of Kathleen Riley’s aims are clearly, if somewhat grandly, spelt out in her prologue: to redress the omission of Nigel Hawthorne ‘from theatre histories of the latter half of the twentieth century’; and to ‘present a new appraisal of post-war theatre by focusing on the personal journey of one of Britain’s finest […] actors’. Another, unspoken explicitly, is to articulate the ‘deep passion for the theatre’ aroused in her by Alan Bennett’s writing and Hawthorne’s portrayal of The Madness of George III. She manages in the first, fails (as anyone might) in the second, and succeeds only too well in the third. Riley’s book is little short of a 380-page fan letter, with all the substantial virtues and vices of such an exercise: undeniable zeal, energy, and commitment, but a lamentable lack of critical distance.

The eighteenth-century French Academician Buffon gave the world the aphorism ‘Le style est l’homme même’. It makes a fine epitaph for H.G. Kippax. Harry Kippax was a distinguished journalist and, for more than thirty years, until his retirement in 1989, a theatre critic of singular authority and style. In the late 1950s, while employed by the Sydney Morning Herald, he began to write thoughtful freelance reviews under the pseudonym Brek in the fortnightly periodical Nation; in 1966 the SMH’s editor J.D. Pringle press-ganged him into the theatre critic’s chair.

In the 1740s a little-known English excise officer and master of a charity school published a frank memoir of his life. John Cannon wrote extensively of his partnerships and his marriage, and also of his sexual exploits. Beginning at the age of twelve, he was taught to masturbate by a school friend and he continued with this until his early twenties. From this time, he had regular sexual contact with a variety of women, including one relationship of ten years. Yet he rarely had sexual intercourse. Instead, his very active sexual life was filled with kissing and erotic fondling: for Cannon, penetrative sex was saved almost exclusively for marriage.