Archive

A common theme unites the five books reviewed here: the effects on Aboriginals of European and Asian settlement in Australia, and the position of Aboriginals in the society that has developed from that settlement. The work of historians, a political scientist and anthropologists, the writings reflect changes in Australian historiography and anthropology. Reece (1979) recently made a plea on behalf of Australian historiography for more to be done by black and white historians to eradicate the tradition that Australian history was a white history beginning with Captain Cook. A parallel plea has been made to anthropologists in Langton’s (1981) criticism of anthropologists for concentrating their research efforts on remote communities. The work of Aboriginal historians is not represented here, but two of these books are indicative of the quantum leap in the quantity and quality of writing an Aboriginal history. Although anthropology is slow to change, a glance through recent bibliographies published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies reveals an increase in the proportion of social anthropological publications on Aboriginal society outside the more remote areas. That trend appears in the content of the volume edited by Howard.

One heady day in the mid I920s, sculptor and Lindsayite recruit Guy Lynch (brother of the elegaic subject of Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’), held forth in a pub at Circular Quay on his plan for Sydney to become an Hellenic city. The Quay itself he saw as a magnificent ampitheatre for the incarnation of the Lindsay group’s Nietzschean dream of Dionysian joy, as revealed in the vital art affirmed as the salvation from the twin vices of bourgeois philistinism and modernistic decadence, the canon that ran from Shakespeare, Rubens and Beethoven, to Norman Lindsay and Hugh McCrae. He-men would lean against pillars, girls would stroll about, and grand opera would be played amongst forests of statues.

Macmillan’s Albert Tucker is a pioneering venture. It is not just another well-arranged, well-printed collection of paintings by a notable painter, it is an endeavour to present the whole conspectus of a painter’s work and mind.

A joke told annually and publicly for fourteen years closes this collection of Ian Turner’s work. From 1965 to 1978, Turner delivered the Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture and so created the site of an imagined overlap between the more formal rituals of the intellectual culture and the rowdy world of spectatordom, the VFL, the most visible and familiar self-presentation of the popular. He fabricated this site for speaking ‘our’ culture by romping around it in careful pastiche.

The letters which form the body of this book are well edited and displayed, the biographical notes, although from necessity they are usually brief, are valuable – in these ways Decie Denholm has been a keen and careful editor. More about the letters later.

The major problem with this approach to history, as Fitzgerald treads it, is that he takes the preoccupations and perspectives of the twentieth century Sunshine State and implants them in a colonial Queensland context. This achieved, Fitzgerald can point to the continuities of Queensland history. I am reminded of my dog, who buries his bones and considers himself smart when he succeeds in digging them up.