Helen Ennis

Wolfgang Sievers was a complex person with a clear vision. The major dimensions of his life included photography and an abiding sense of the dignity of man. Helen Ennis, one of the foremost authorities on Sievers, has produced a book that is at once satisfying and teasing.

This is a wonderfully ambitious book. There has been no other publication on Australian art photography that so richly illustrates a period: 400 illustrations from 1980 to the present, by 190 individual photographers. And their work looks impressive – diverse, energetic, sophisticated. The selection is satisfyingly broad, covering an eclectic range of approaches, styles, and concerns.

In the relatively small field of Australian photographic publishing, Frank Hurley has attracted more than his share of attention. The reasons are clear: in the contemporary world, bound by prohibitions, Hurley is a photographer–adventurer of heroic proportions.

Helen Ennis’s book Reveries: Photography and mortality, published by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra to accompany her recent exhibition, is a fascinating choice of subject for an institution that deals with portraiture. As the author notes, ‘In the face of mortality the touchstones of portraiture are gently nudged aside … to encompass the possibility of dissolution or dispersal of self.’ This expanded definition of portraiture is apparent from the cover of this sensitively designed book, which features a photograph by Ruth Maddison. Titled The beginning of absence, the photograph shows a domestic interior dissolving into light and suggests Maddison’s feelings when confronting the imminent death of her father. It is a ‘portrait’ composed not of physical detail but emotion, and is no less descriptive of a person and a relationship for that.

There is a recuperative basis to Jane Lydon’s project that the measured tones of academic writing cannot disguise and that gives this book its energy. Lydon’s subject is the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station near Healesville, which was established in the 1860s in what Lydon describes as ‘consensual circumstances’. In the first decade of operation, the Aboriginal residents at Coranderrk achieved an un-characteristic and impressive degree of autonomy. Under the sympathetic management of John Green, there was, Lydon argues, ‘space for Aboriginal objectives and traditions to co-exist with newer practices’. As an early, initially successful expression of Aboriginal self-determination, Coranderrk has already attracted much scholarly attention, but Lydon takes a new tack, examining the extensive photographic archive created during the Station’s first forty years (it closed in 1924).

Margaret, Margarethe, Grete, Gretl, Gretele are all the same person: the biographer Helen Ennis prefaces her book and arouses our curiosity with the note that she has used the names depending on the context. Margaret Michaelis was born Margarethe Gross in 1902, in Dzieditz (Austria, later Poland); when she died in 1985, in Melbourne, she was known as Margaret Sachs. She studied photography at the Institute of Graphic Arts and Research in Vienna. In the late 1920s she worked in studios in Prague, and then Berlin. There she met and married Rudolf Michaelis, an archaeological restorer and an anarchist. After the Nazi takeover, the couple fled to Spain in 1933; they separated soon after their arrival. In Barcelona, and after 1939 in Sydney, Michaelis managed her own photographic studios. In 1960 she married Albert Sachs, a Viennese-born émigré and moved to Melbourne.

I came away from this book with an unexpected insight – not into George Rose as a photographer, but as a man. His de-facto biographer, Ron Blum, has revealed that Rose was an adventurer who travelled hugely, photographing in at least thirty-eight countries in Europe, North Africa, and Asia. He was also an expert mountaineer who, with his cumbersome photographic equipment, scaled the peaks of New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland during a long and healthy life (he was vegetarian, never smoked and apparently drank only milk and water).

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

Behold how low

Dear Editor,

Robert Manne’s review of my book Washout: On the Academic Response to the Fabrication of Aboriginal History (ABR, May 2005) avoids most of my criticisms of Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, and misrepresents the rest.

Photography was introduced to Australia in the 1840s, with the first photograph being taken in May 1841, in Sydney. Since then, photographic images, in all their permutations (including the more recent digital images), have become ubiquitous and indispensable parts of our daily lives. Family snapshots, holiday mementoes, news and sporting images, advertisements, book illustrations and passport photographs contribute to the phenomenal quantity of photographs in existence.

The other day, in a stairwell within the National Library of Australia, I opened a door, expecting it to lead to a corridor and a suite of offices. Instead, I found myself inside a dimly lit room filled with rows of book-laden shelves. As I looked for the exit, I saw a man removing a book from the bottom shelf. Another man walked past me carrying books and said hello. It was like a scene from Being John Malkovich, surreal and delightful, and it characterises my last few months at the National Library, where I have been curating a two-part exhibition, In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s–2000 (the first part, which deals with the processes of colonisation, opened on 9 October 2003 and will close on 26 January 2004, and the second, focusing on modern life, will open next August).