Review
Wayne Reynolds reviews ‘Beyond belief: The British bomb tests: Australia’s veterans speak out’ by Roger Cross and Avon Hudson
Beyond Belief is yet another account of the atomic tests that were conducted in Australia between 1952 and 1962. It does not deal with nuclear strategy, the technical aspects of nuclear weapons or their delivery systems. It is weak on secondary sources, and there is no reference to archival records. The absence of footnoting makes it of limited use for detailed scholarship. It relies to a great extent on the 1984-85 McClelland Royal Commission for a discussion of the reasons behind the bomb tests, the so-called ‘Black Mist’ incident, the undeclared use of Cobalt in the trials and the poor oversight of the Australian Atomic Weapons Test Safety Commission. The section of the book, based on the writing of Alan Parkinson, dealing with the problems in cleaning up the test sites is useful, but hardly new.
... (read more)Sarah Russell Scott reviews ‘Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial women artists and the amateur tradition’ by Caroline Jordan
Picturesque Pursuits is a pioneering survey of a neglected area within Australian cultural history: the lives and works of colonial women artists. Caroline Jordan places her analysis of this subject within a broader social, political and historical frame. This approach allows her to reveal the multifaceted importance of an art tradition that was often interwoven with women’s daily domestic life. Evidently, colonial women’s art does not conform to traditional notions of a studio based ‘high art’, and its significance extends beyond the limited definitions of this category. As Jordan points out, most women artists produced works that were confined to the lower-value genres of miniatures, botanical studies, picturesque sketches and scrapbook collages. Their works were often small-scale mixed-media pieces of varying technical proficiency. The fact that the majority of colonial women’s art is found in libraries and archives rather than in the major galleries has further con- tributed to its virtual exclusion from the high-art canon.
... (read more)Sarah Kanowski reviews ‘Making ‘Black Harvest’: Warfare, filmmaking and living dangerously in the highlands of Papua New Guinea’ by Bob Connolly
Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson – partners in life and work – made three documentaries in the Papua New Guinea Highlands: First Contact (1983), Joe Leahy’s Neighbours (1989) and Black Harvest (1992). These films have won several awards which is fitting, given that each exemplifies what is possible in the medium of observational filmmaking, where the drama evolving from real situations outdoes anything that could be imagined in a Hollywood studio. Of course, they were shrewd in their choice of subject. With its mixture of cultures and traditions, PNG offers plenty of conflict, the essential salt in the documentary pie. Anderson and Connolly had a special taste for salt – who else would have recognised local mayoral elections as a site of grand drama as they did for Rats in the Ranks (1996)?
... (read more)Richard Johnstone reviews ‘The Cinema of Britain and Ireland’ edited by Brian McFarlane
Robert Murphy, in his contribution to this collection of essays on The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, focuses on a little-seen example of the ‘British noir tradition’, Robert Hamer’s The Long Memory (1952). Murphy makes a convincing case for The Long Memory, placing it in the frame with other, better-known contributions to the genre such as John Boulting’s Brighton Rock (1947), Hamer’s own, earlier It Never Rains on Sundays (1947) and, best known of all, Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). The Long Memory, Murphy concludes, is ‘a good example of the invisibility of British cinema’, and in that striking phrase he seems to imply that the fate of forgotten or neglected British films such as The Long Memory is to be doubly invisible, relegated to an also-ran position within a national cinema that has itself been unfairly relegated over the years.
... (read more)Peter Steele reviews ‘Dating Aphrodite: Modern adventures in the ancient world’ by Luke Slattery
Reading Luke Slattery’s Dating Aphrodite, I was reminded of dining once with the classical scholar Bernard Knox and the poet Anthony Hecht. Neither man was young: each had experienced remarkable and appalling things during World War II: and both had found ways of transposing those experiences into the register of art. They were at once unillusioned and instinctively creative.
... (read more)Mark McKenna reviews ‘Yarra: A diverting history of Melbourne’s murky river’ by Kristin Otto and ‘The Vision Splendid: A social and cultural history of rural Australia’ by Richard Waterhouse
I remember Richard Waterhouse as my lecturer in American colonial history at Sydney University in 1978. Then in his late twenties, he stood at the lectern as if itching to break free, arms flailing, feet shifting, constantly pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose; every lecture had its moment of vaudeville. After daily suffering the monotone perorations of those who stood entombed in their academic gowns, I enjoyed his lectures, which seemed driven by an infectious curiosity about the past. Perhaps it was also the material that captured the students’ imagination. American history, laced as it was with any number of grand and naïve utopias, could be read as epic and tragic drama, a constant fall from grace.
... (read more)Margaret Robson Kett reviews ‘Young Murphy: A Boy’s Adventure’ by Gary Crew, ‘101 Great Killer Creatures’ by Paul Holper and Simon Torok, and ‘Iron Soldiers’ by Dave Luckett
There is an almost overwhelming tide of historical texts for young people being published at the moment. Fictional accounts of actual events are enormously popular, and frequently the diary form is used, as this is felt to be more accessible to young people, and also gives the writer licence to use the historical present tense with impunity.
... (read more)Luke Morgan reviews ‘Disclosing Spaces: On painting’ by Andrew Benjamin
In a 2004 article for Art AsiaPacific, Simon Winchester reflected on a ‘sermon’ he had attended by Benjamin Buchloh, one of the ‘high priests’ of contemporary art theory and criticism. To his dismay, Winchester found Buchloh’s paper (on the German artist Gerhard Richter) completely baffling. ‘Save for a scattering of prepositions, I understood not a single word of what he said that day. He spoke in a language that I found entirely unfamiliar, about a subject I found impossible to determine.’ Undeterred, Winchester set himself the task of trying to understand Buchloh’s language. After two years of diligent study, however, he remained nonplussed. His conclusion is that Buchloh speaks as Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘sophistical rhetorician’ wrote: as a ‘man inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity’.
... (read more)Joy Hooton reviews ‘The Child Is Wise: Stories of childhood’ edited by Janet Blagg
The accounts of childhood in this anthology date from the 1920s to the 1960s. Most deal with experiences in Western Australia, although three are written by migrant women and are partly anchored in Europe. Two are extracted from the autobiographies of well-known writers, Dorothy Hewett and Victor Serventy, two are taken from self-published memoirs, and one, by Alice Bilari Smith is taken from her book Under a Bilari Tree I Born. This last is based on tapes of oral history collected by the West Pilbara Oral History Group and published in 2002.
... (read more)Written in hotel rooms while working as a professional actor in various indigenous film, television and theatre productions, Peter Docker’s Someone Else’s Country is a deeply sensitive and at times intensely visceral engagement with contemporary indigenous culture. A work of non-fiction (the names are fictionalised), it is also a powerful historical document, which has at its heart the struggle of a non-indigenous author trying to find an authentic position from which to discuss the indigenous culture with which he largely identifies.
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