Commentary
An Indian fast-food outlet has named itself after Mahatma Gandhi and features a caricature of his face in neon lights. Tacky? Certainly. Only in America? Only in Australia, actually, or at least that’s what a major cable television channel would like to suggest.
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At first, you find the claim that you resemble your parents implausible. Later, you find it unflattering. But there are moments when you glimpse someone in a mirror and only belatedly recognise yourself. These are the moments when you realise – it is in equal parts chastening and reassuring – that if you are moving through time as an image of your parents’ past, their image is waiting for you in mirrors: they are the ghosts that haunt your future, as it were.
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Unlike Flaubert, the ‘hermit of Croisset’, who turned away from his age in an attitude of ironic detachment, Émile Zola (1840–1902) embraced his century in a way no French writer had done since Balzac. Zola’s ambition was to emulate Balzac by writing a comprehensive history of contemporary society. Through the fortunes of his Rougon-Macquart family, he examined methodically the social, sexual, and moral landscape of the late nineteenth century along with its political, financial, and artistic contexts. Zola is the quintessential novelist of modernity, understood in terms of an overwhelming sense of tumultuous change.
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In the teaching of copyright, it is usually said that copyright is an economic right. In Arnhem Land, they think otherwise. In 1990, I attended a meeting of Aboriginal artists in Maningrida. These artists had been involved in a copyright infringement case concerning the unauthorised reproduction of works of art on T-shirts. The case had settled, and the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the division of the spoils. The case involved a number of artists and different infringements by the same infringer.
... (read more)Just before she entered the world of Wonderland, Alice asked: what is the use of a book without pictures? A book in which an imaginative narrative is symbiotically supported and augmented by illustrations can play an important part in the development of a child’s verbal and visual literacy skills. However, a picture book is more than just a story with pictures: it is also a cultural artefact that both reflects and transmits the mores of the country in which it is produced. And a good picture book can do more than simply replicate the visual stereotypes often found in popular culture: it can stretch the imagination, excite curiosity, structure meaning and shape cultural identity.
... (read more)The Sabi sands reserve borders South Africa’s famed Kruger National Park. I spent a memorable few days in one of Sabi Sands’s private game reserves in January 2002, tracking the ‘big five’ at dawn and dusk, eating fine food, and curling up under my bed’s mosquito net to read J.M. Coetzee. While I was rather discomfited by the obsequiousness of some of the black employees, I knew that tourism was the lifeblood of the community. The events of September 11 had impacted even on Africa, and the lodge was eerily quiet.
... (read more)For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own selves.
These words appear towards the end of Erich Auerbach’s study of representation in Western literature, Mimesis. First published in 1946, the book has become a classic of twentieth-century literary criticism, but is almost as famous for the circumstances under which it was composed as for its content. It was written between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul, where Auerbach, a German Jew, was living in exile.
... (read more)The combatants in the so-called ‘History Wars’ have been denouncing each other for about a decade. The main issue is the handling of black–white relations in histories of Australia. There are tangential disputes about the policies of the National Museum and the worth of the historian Manning Clark and his writings, but these are not germane to this article. On the left, television historians, journalists and politicians are concerned to levy blame for terrible acts of European greed and brutality and to bestow praise for acts of Aboriginal resistance; while rightists emphasise the white settlers’ and authorities’ normally good intentions and the small amount of blood shed by comparison with the histories of North and South America, and of Africa. The leading protagonists in both camps have generally been formed by Marxism and retain that absolutist faith that nothing happens by accident, thereby permitting simple assignments of good and evil.
... (read more)‘I can’t believe that you look back and say “I was unkind to people” … you’re not an envious person, you’re not a hateful person, you’ve got – one assumes – plenty of money. So why do you sit there and beat yourself up thinking that you’ve hurt people?’
Poor John Mangos. There he was on Sky News Australia presenting the interview programme Viewpoint last November. His interviewee was the great John Laws, who had a new book to promote and yet another spectacular controversy (this one involving his comments about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s Carson Kressley) to defend.
... (read more)How do dance and music fit together in a choreographic work? Even the briefest look at Australian collaborations across the arts suggests that endeavours vary widely. The National Library of Australia’s collections, which are particularly strong in the areas of music and dance, provide some interesting examples of the synergies that exist between these two art forms and that make cross-art form collaboration a richly rewarding area of study.
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