Christopher Menz

Here are two welcome additions to a long list of cookery publications in Australia promoting Gallic cuisine. French or French-style cookery in this country has come a long way since Ted Moloney and Deke Coleman’s charming but slight Oh, for a French Wife! was published by Ure Smith in 1952. Both Michel Roux: The Collection and Diane Holuigue’s A Lifetime of Cooking, Teaching and Writing from the French Kitchen demand a level of culinary skill, dedication, time, equipment, and household budget unimaginable for most Australian home cooks sixty years ago. Michel Roux is a Michelin-starred French chef and long-time resident in the United Kingdom. Diane Holuigue is a well-known, Melbourne-based Australian cookery teacher and writer. Through their cooking and publications, both have been hugely influential: Roux internationally, Holuigue in Australia.

Not that many Australian houses lend themselves to being the subject of a 240-page monograph. Whatever their architectural or historical merit, usually there is not enough material to warrant more than a chapter in a larger volume. Our government houses are different: not only do numerous documents and photographs survive in public records, but furnishings survive, and there is also the history of the occupants and visitors to enliven the story.

My Umbrian Kitchen – part memoir, part recipe book – reflects the Umbrian-Australian life of its author, Italian-born Patrizia Simone, who, with her husband, opened her first restaurant in Bright in north-eastern Victoria twenty-six years ago. This publication draws on her wealth of experience in the kitchen, decades of cooking, and the rich culinary heritage of her native Umbria. We follow Simone’s journey from the borgo (hamlet) at Collestrada to nearby Perugia, where her parents moved in search of work while she was in her teens. The book commences with an evocative description of the borgo, the source of her culinary vocation, which sets the framework for the dialogue between Umbria and Bright: Umbrian cuisine adapted for her restaurant, and for Australia.

The Cookbook Library is an eminently readable and informative survey of the development of European (and North American) culinary literature from antiquity until the early nineteenth century, from Greek and Roman texts to Antonin Carême. The project, inspired by Anne Willan and Mark Cherniavsky’s extensive personal cookbook library, draws on Willan’s considerable professional cookery expertise: in addition to setting up her own cookery school in Paris, La Varenne, in 1975, Willan has published extensively on French cookery and is a leading authority on the subject. But this is much more than a catalogue of an indisputably fine private collection. It covers the subject broadly, way beyond the confines of the couple’s own substantial holdings and their linguistic comfort.

The contemporary jewellery movement grew from a desire among postwar practitioners to explore both the expressive qualities in jewellery and the use of non-traditional materials. The move away from traditional gold and diamonds was partly economic – consider today’s price of gold – and partly ideological. Jewellery should be appreciated for what it is, on its own terms, not for its carats.

Reading this book is like taking a stroll through the exhibition with which it was published to coincide, in the wonderful company of its thirty-one expert, articulate, and enthusiastic authors. Visions Past and Present: Celebrating 40 Years – as both book and exhibition – celebrates the University of Melbourne’s art museum: launched as the University Art Gallery in 1972 and known since 1998 as the Ian Potter Museum of Art, in Swanston Street, Parkville. The exhibition continues until 26 August (free and open to all). The book – a handbook of collection highlights rather than a catalogue – will have a much longer shelf life.

A thirty-year correspondence between two Australian artists is notable, but when the artists are father and daughter it is doubly interesting. Hans Heysen and Nora Heysen corresponded regularly throughout their lives: Hans writing from The Cedars, the family house near Hahndorf, in the Adelaide Hills; and Nora from Sydney, London, New Guinea, Pacific Islands, or wherever she happened to be. Hans Heysen is celebrated for his landscape paintings – those South Australian views of eucalypts in a landscape, which changed the way generations looked at the Australian countryside – and for his desert landscapes of the Flinders Ranges. Nora, the only one of his nine children to become an artist, is known for her still lifes and portraits. Their work is well represented in Australian public collections. Hans was unquestionably the better artist, and always had the greater reputation. Nora, however, won major prizes (including, somewhat controversially, the 1938 Archibald Prize) and managed to forge an independent career for herself; she by no means lived in her father’s shadow.

Who says printed books are dead and that the e-book is the future? Ars Sacra, weighing in at eleven kilos, with eight hundred pages and two thousand colour images, sets a new standard for the coffee-table book. While an iPad version would be lighter and not require a reinforced table, justice can only be done to this large-format book in printed form. Spanning late antiquity to the present, Ars Sacra presents the Christian artistic tradition through its greatest monuments and works of art. While many of the illustrations are familiar – Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque are well covered – the photographs are superb. Some buildings have multiple images and those from Poland and Russia, for instance, show the important regional architectural styles that developed away from the sphere of Rome.