Non Fiction

The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, to take a random example, indicates the challenges facing anyone undertaking a definitive and detailed account of modernism. According to the Dictionary’s author, J.A. Cuddon, modernism is: ‘A comprehensive but vague term for a movement (or tendency) [that] pertains to all the creative arts, especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture.’ As he notes, it is a matter for debate as to whether modernism, ‘as an innovative and revivifying movement’, was essentially over by the late 1940s or persisted well beyond that period. The ‘vagueness’ of the term ‘modernism’ and of its definitions reflects the diversity of artists, works and ideas that it encompasses; and the implicit contradiction of Cuddon’s pairing of the adjectives ‘innovative’ and ‘revivifying’ is suggestive of modernism’s emphasis on both radical originality and engagement with (rather than uncomplicated rejection of) the past.

Of late, there has been a welcome surge in the study of British migrants in Australia. James Jupp’s The English in Australia (2004) provided one of the first overviews since the 1960s. Andrew Hassam followed migrant Britons from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, and younger scholars such as Sara Wills, Carole Hamilton-Barwick and Lorraine Proctor have begun to explore the local intricacies of settlement and identity. Given both the subject – numerically the largest of the postwar migrant groups – and the growth in historical and sociological accounts of immigration and multiculturalism since the 1970s, the surge has been a long time coming.

Roy Ward Baker is quoted as saying ‘realism is my forte’. But Geoff Mayer’s book reveals that over a fifty-eight-year career in film and television, Baker was much more than just a ‘realist’. Baker began as a ‘gopher’ at Gainsborough Studios in 1934, but he is best known for directing what is perhaps the definitive film on the Titanic disaster, A Night to Remember (1958). He also directed horror productions for Hammer Films, including The Vampire Lovers (1960) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967). He ended his career at seventy-two with an episode of the British television series The Good Guys (1992). It is due to this long and diverse career that Baker has not been embraced as an auteur, a filmmaker who is able to project a consistent personal vision across a range of films. However, in Roy Ward Baker, Geoff Mayer, of La Trobe University, situates Baker as an auteur, tracing the vicissitudes of his career to provide a comprehensive and intriguing study of the filmmaker and his films, as well as his industrial, social, and political contexts.

Beyond Belief is yet another account of the atomic tests that were conducted in Australia between 1952 and 1962. It does not deal with nuclear strategy, the technical aspects of nuclear weapons or their delivery systems. It is weak on secondary sources, and there is no reference to archival records. The absence of footnoting makes it of limited use for detailed scholarship. It relies to a great extent on the 1984-85 McClelland Royal Commission for a discussion of the reasons behind the bomb tests, the so-called ‘Black Mist’ incident, the undeclared use of Cobalt in the trials and the poor oversight of the Australian Atomic Weapons Test Safety Commission. The section of the book, based on the writing of Alan Parkinson, dealing with the problems in cleaning up the test sites is useful, but hardly new.

Picturesque Pursuits is a pioneering survey of a neglected area within Australian cultural history: the lives and works of colonial women artists. Caroline Jordan places her analysis of this subject within a broader social, political and historical frame. This approach allows her to reveal the multifaceted importance of an art tradition that was often interwoven with women’s daily domestic life. Evidently, colonial women’s art does not conform to traditional notions of a studio based ‘high art’, and its significance extends beyond the limited definitions of this category. As Jordan points out, most women artists produced works that were confined to the lower-value genres of miniatures, botanical studies, picturesque sketches and scrapbook collages. Their works were often small-scale mixed-media pieces of varying technical proficiency. The fact that the majority of colonial women’s art is found in libraries and archives rather than in the major galleries has further con- tributed to its virtual exclusion from the high-art canon.

Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson – partners in life and work – made three documentaries in the Papua New Guinea Highlands: First Contact (1983), Joe Leahy’s Neighbours (1989) and Black Harvest (1992). These films have won several awards which is fitting, given that each exemplifies what is possible in the medium of observational filmmaking, where the drama evolving from real situations outdoes anything that could be imagined in a Hollywood studio. Of course, they were shrewd in their choice of subject. With its mixture of cultures and traditions, PNG offers plenty of conflict, the essential salt in the documentary pie. Anderson and Connolly had a special taste for salt – who else would have recognised local mayoral elections as a site of grand drama as they did for Rats in the Ranks (1996)?

Robert Murphy, in his contribution to this collection of essays on The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, focuses on a little-seen example of the ‘British noir tradition’, Robert Hamer’s The Long Memory (1952). Murphy makes a convincing case for The Long Memory, placing it in the frame with other, better-known contributions to the genre such as John Boulting’s Brighton Rock (1947), Hamer’s own, earlier It Never Rains on Sundays (1947) and, best known of all, Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). The Long Memory, Murphy concludes, is ‘a good example of the invisibility of British cinema’, and in that striking phrase he seems to imply that the fate of forgotten or neglected British films such as The Long Memory is to be doubly invisible, relegated to an also-ran position within a national cinema that has itself been unfairly relegated over the years.

I remember Richard Waterhouse as my lecturer in American colonial history at Sydney University in 1978. Then in his late twenties, he stood at the lectern as if itching to break free, arms flailing, feet shifting, constantly pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose; every lecture had its moment of vaudeville. After daily suffering the monotone perorations of those who stood entombed in their academic gowns, I enjoyed his lectures, which seemed driven by an infectious curiosity about the past. Perhaps it was also the material that captured the students’ imagination. American history, laced as it was with any number of grand and naïve utopias, could be read as epic and tragic drama, a constant fall from grace.

Written in hotel rooms while working as a professional actor in various indigenous film, television and theatre productions, Peter Docker’s Someone Else’s Country is a deeply sensitive and at times intensely visceral engagement with contemporary indigenous culture. A work of non-fiction (the names are fictionalised), it is also a powerful historical document, which has at its heart the struggle of a non-indigenous author trying to find an authentic position from which to discuss the indigenous culture with which he largely identifies.

This is the last of David McKnight’s quartet of books on the Lardil people of Mornington Island, with whom he has worked from his first field trip in 1966 until his most recent in 2001. (For reviews in these pages of two of them, From Hunting to Drinking and Going the Whiteman’s Way, see the October 2004 and the February 2005 issues, respectively.) The title is characteristically challenging. A struggle for power in what we are always being assured was a tranquilly ordered society? Most of us have seen the pretty diagrams representing ‘traditional Aboriginal marriage practice’. How could violence and sorcery intrude on those elegant, iron-clad arrangements? Where all is prescribed, how can there be a struggle for power? And power over what?