Commentary
Twenty years ago, when I was at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, I heard of an Arthur Boyd exhibition in SoHo. Recklessly, without seeing the show, I urged my American friends to see one of Australia’s foremost contemporary painters. The gallery, unknown to me, turned out to be small and unimpressive. There were five or six late paintings, including one of those large, multi-figured bathers, with that disconcerting quality of Boyd at the end of his career, both slapdash and commercial at the same moment. ‘So this is what contemporary Australian painting looks like?’ my companion asked ironically, just within the bounds of good manners.
... (read more)'Alpha and Omega' Nathan Hollier on the establishment of Monash University Publishing
On 8 September 2010, in the foyer of the Robert Blackwood Hall at Monash University, beneath the beautiful ‘Alpha and Omega’ stained-glass window created by Leonard French and connoting humankind’s endless striving for achievement, Monash University ePress became Monash University Publishing. It was very appropriate that the press should be launched by B ...
I visited Randolph Stow on impulse. We had corresponded briefly and since I was passing through London in February 1975, I asked if I might meet him. He kindly invited me to spend the day with him in East Bergholt, a village in Suffolk, two hours from London. Stow had been living there, in Dairy Farm Cottage, for some six years. Six years later, he moved to nearby Harwich.
... (read more)As with so many of the events that mark Israel’s history, the deadly attack on the Gaza flotilla in late May seemed frustratingly – and tragically – to encapsulate many of the arguments, insecurities, defences, and emotions that swirl around the enduring conflict in the Middle East.
... (read more)Why on earth should Australian filmmakers want to try replicating Hollywood? No one can do Hollywood as well as Hollywood can, and the attempts to emulate it have usually, perhaps inevitably, led to flavourless or otherwise misbegotten enterprises. I know that this is the era of international co-productions, and that where the money comes from is undoubtedly influential, but where the creative personnel come from is surely still more so. I want to argue for the cultural significance of the small-scale filmmaking that doesn’t depend on US funding and thereby isn’t subject to the sorts of compromise that such involvement may entail.
... (read more)Biography seems relatively easy to produce, but difficult to write well. It is therefore treated with a certain amount of suspicion by academics. Historians tend to regard it as chatty, not primarily concerned with policy or the identification of social factors; literary people are more sympathetic, but, in order to blot out the prosy or the fact-laden, tend to revert to a default position. Biography for them is basically about writers, and best written by literary academics.
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In October 2009, Shirley Hazzard spoke at the New York launch of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. Hazzard read from People in Glass Houses, her early collection of satirical stories about the UN bureaucracy. Her appearance serves to remind Australian readers that Hazzard continues to occupy a defining, if somewhat attenuated, place within the expansive field of what Nicholas Jose described in 2008, on taking up the annual Harvard Chair of Australian Studies, as ‘writing that engage[s] us with the international arena from the Australian perspective’. Jose went on to cite Hazzard’s most recent novel, The Great Fire (2003), as part of ‘a range of material which Americans would not necessarily think of as Australian’.
... (read more)I was in the house of a friend’s parents recently and noticed, stuck to the fridge door, a poem clipped from a newspaper, among the sundry magnets and notices. Companion to book reviews, its subtleties had taken their fancy as being more than ephemera. Good, I thought, these are poetry readers – an engineer and an art teacher – who can confidently duck and weave among poems that come their way and say, yes, this one’s a pleasure. But do they buy and read collections of poetry? Well, they would more often if …
... (read more)Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature was founded in 1987 as the journal of the American Association of Australian Literary Studies, itself founded the previous year. Both institutions are products of the Hawke era, when the still-simmering question of Australian identity and the Australian film boom of the early 1980s created an ideal state for Australians to be interested in (and to help fund) US literary culture’s own nascent interest in Australia.
From the beginning, it had no problem attracting prestigious contributors. A.D. Hope, Peter Carey, Les Murray, Thea Astley, Rosemary Dobson, and Mudrooroo were all featured in early issues. Even Patrick White consented to be profiled, though not formally interviewed, by our gentlemanly founding fiction editor, Ray Willbanks. Paul Kane, our poetry editor, has always made sure we are vitally engaged with the best and most exciting Australian verse. The journal continues to publish biannually, with most space devoted to refereed academic essays, but also including fiction, poetry, book reviews and the most recent addition – creative non-fiction, a hybrid genre in which regular contributors such as Ouyang Yu, Elizabeth Bernays, and the ‘Trans-Tasman’ figure Stephen Oliver have excelled.
... (read more)A New Literary History of America edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors
