Review

Lina Bryans’s painting The Babe is Wise captures the ‘insouciant chic’ of the New Woman in 1940: independent and self-assured, the subject stares at the viewer from beneath a sharply angled hat. A portrait of the artist’s close friend, author Jean Campbell (whose novel inspired the painting’s title), The Babe is Wise became Bryans’s most famous painting, and its subject captures the artist’s own attitude to life.

Gillian Forwood’s handsome new book, Lina Bryans: Rare Modern 1909–2000, recalls the life and work of a brave, unconventional and generous woman who single-mindedly pursued a career as an artist from the late 1930s until her death three years ago. This lavish Miegunyah Press publication serves both author and artist well, reproducing numerous images in colour, many for the first time.

A fascination with the kinds of abodes we humans inhabit, and dream about, is the central theme around which Mark Wakely has spun his wide-ranging observations, anecdotes and personal stories. The topic lends itself to as many possibilities as you wish to make it. In order to narrow the focus, the author could have gone several ways. One approach would have been to write for a specific audience, perhaps for people interested in building a home. Or the book could have become a memoir of observations and people around their favoured homes. The author has instead decided to present stories, facts and observations that seemed relevant to specific periods of life, from childhood to old age, even death (what kind of mausoleum would you like as your final resting place, baroque or minimalist?). Although a valid approach, the book’s form presents particular problems.

In Paradise Mislaid, Anne Whitehead captivated readers with a nicely judged blend of elements. Here was a documentary that interwove two travellers’ tales, each with the resonance of quest narratives. Those ‘peculiar people’ who went off to Paraguay as part of William Lane’s experimental Utopian settlement were seeking a just community where the labourer would not only be worthy of his hire, but actually receive it; while Whitehead was pursuing the historian’s endless quest to bring back into present memory the always receding reality of the past. But Whitehead’s journey was not made only in the mind or in the archives: it had a literal dimension, involving following physically ‘in the steps of’ her subject. This led to an interesting relationship between past and present in her work, a layered intercutting, sometimes positing connection, sometimes disjunction. The effect was analogous to the intercutting techniques of documentaries, and it’s not surprising to find that Whitehead has worked extensively as television producer, film director and scriptwriter. It also offered, in a way, a gentle rebuff to any undeconstructed readerly yearning for the complete and logically sequential narrative that we might once have thought history could give us.

This is a welcome addition to the historical literature about Indonesia. Aimed at new readers with limited or no knowledge of Indonesia, and written in an informal and accessible style, it makes an interesting contrast with the other well-known history in this field, Merle Ricklefs’s History of Modern Indonesia. When Ricklefs produced his second edition about ten years ago (he published a third expanded edition in 2001), the very existence of the Indonesian state was not as problematic as it now seems. Scholars could still talk without hesitation of a ‘history of Indonesia’. These days, the future of the country as a single state is more contested than at any time since the 1950s. Hence Brown’s subtitle, ‘The Unlikely Nation?’ He explains in the foreword that, since the idea of a united archipelago is so recent, ‘in a sense the book has been written backwards, using the Indonesian state and nation at the end of the twentieth century as its starting or defining point’.

Readers who share Helen Nickas’s view that Antigone Kefala’s fiction forms ‘a continuous narrative which depicts and explores the various stages of an exilic journey’ may be pleased to find more instalments in her fourth book of fiction, Summer Visit. The first of the three novellas is an account of an unsatisfying marriage, told with a controlled detachment that makes its title, ‘Intimacy’, seem ironic. In contrast, the third, ‘Conversations with Mother’, contains a series of elegiac apostrophes of the deceased; the connections with Braila and other congruities with a figure familiar from previous writings again encourage an assumption of autobiography.

At a recent Australian Broadcasting Authority conference, federal communications minister Senator Richard Alston conceded that the early adoption of digital television in Australia had been ‘modest’. More impartial observers of the transition to digital broadcasting in Australia have been less restrained. ‘A digital dead-end’ and ‘dismal failure’ are representative of recent media commentary on the subject.

Owen Dixon joined the Melbourne bar in 1911. By 1918 he was among its leaders, with the young R.G. Menzies as his pupil (and future lifelong friend). In 1926, five months as an acting Supreme Court judge convinced him ‘that I would never be a judge’; but in January 1929 he accepted an appointment to the High Court. There he would stay for thirty-five years – almost from the beginning as the Court’s undoubted intellectual leader, and from 1952 to 1964 as Chief Justice. He is commonly regarded as the twentieth century’s greatest Australian judge, and often as its greatest judge in the English-speaking world. His biography is long overdue.

Australian judicial biographies are rare. Mostly they deal with men whose judicial work was only one phase in a controversial political career. Biographers without legal training have sometimes uncomfortably skirted the edges of the judicial material; but, for Dixon, no such skirting is possible. In this splendid biography, Philip Ayres has risen to the challenge.

On September 11, 2001, Australian journalist Irris Makler was working as a freelance correspondent in Moscow. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington focused attention on Afghanistan, and Makler was among the first journalists to make their way into the strife-torn country via its northern neighbour, Tajikistan.

Our Woman in Kabul documents the US invasion of Afghanistan, the routing of the Taliban and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Makler’s story covers the circumstances of daily life as a female correspondent in a country where women are virtually invisible, the discomforts and challenges of being part of a media feeding frenzy in a place without the infrastructure to support it, and the larger drama of a civil war suddenly escalating into an international conflict. During two decades of fighting, Afghanistan had lost an estimated ten per cent of its population to war, starvation and lack of medical resources. For those of us to whom the name bin Laden seemed to rise like a demonic projection from the underside of the US imagination, Makler’s book provides the background to an event that was formulating its inevitable trajectory in the barren mountains of Afghanistan.

Art is divided into three parts – at least for amateur painters who ask, when they begin acquaintance, ‘Do you do abstract, impressionist or surrealist art?’ Of these, surrealism has the strongest interest for a mass audience, and the deepest penetration into popular culture. When it was new, surrealism was quickly appropriated into commercial and advertising art. Today, commercial cinema is awash with some of surrealism’s youthful political idealism, but more with its fantasies of shock-horror and sex.

Surrealist literature never came to much. The artists took over. If Picasso was the greatest twentieth-century artist, his surrealist paintings from the 1920s onwards might be his own best work. Remember how the best exhibition ever produced in Australia, Surrealism: Revolution by Night (National Gallery of Australia 1993, by Michael Lloyd, Ted Gott and Christopher Chapman), showcased Picasso ahead of Miró, Dalí, Magritte and Ernst. And the star of the Australian component of the exhibition was James Gleeson.