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Culture

Turtles, Leah Lui-Chivizhe shows us in Masked Histories, are at the centre of Torres Strait Islander lives. They follow the Pacific currents and slipstreams, arriving in the Islands in the mating season of surlal, making available their eggs, their meat, their shells. For millennia, marine turtles have provided Islanders with material for subsistence and ceremony – allowing them to practise ceremony with turtle shell masks so evocative of Islander cultures and histories. 

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The title of Gillian Bottomley’s lively study addresses both the major theme of migration and her own position as an academic anthropologist. Bottomley targets specialist studies with hard and fast disciplinary categories and attitudes and rejects the tone of impersonal scholarship which such works frequently adopt.

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In his début collection of essays, This Young Monster, Charlie Fox pays homage to a range of artistic icons (or ‘monsters’) who revel in freakish and reckless play. His creatures of choice include filmmakers Buster Keaton and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, photographers Diane Arbus and Larry Clark ...

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‘Boy he Cry’ or ‘Gwama’idou’ is the name of a boat owned by one of the inhabitants on Nuakata, the Melanesian Island that is the setting for Roger Averill’s odyssey. The boat is a canoe, hand-carved and painted yellow, with a bright plastic sail, so there is something incongruous about its poignant caption, which, as Averill learns, refers to a local expression: when a boy is hungry and cries for fish, his father must go out and catch it, so demonstrating his love for the child. In this case, there is an additional melancholic twist because Guli, the owner of the canoe, is separated from his son and unable to hear him cry. Averill’s story is permeated by a doubleness of mood that takes a while to reveal itself.

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‘I never thought Australia needed culture of any kind,’ drawls Barry Humphries in Not Quite Hollywood, Mark Hartley’s recent documentary on Australian ‘trash’ cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. Perverse aesthete that he is, Humphries cannot resist the idea that lack of refinement might be a sign of vitality: ‘Culture is yoghurt, isn’t it, or mould? It grows on decaying things.’

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Richard Holmes’s aim in this remarkable book is to set aside the notion that ‘Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity’, replacing it with the notion of wonder, uniting once mutually exclusive terms, so that ‘there is Romantic science in the same sense that there is Romantic poetry, and often for the same enduring reasons’. ... (read more)

Modern Times: The untold story of modernism in Australia edited by Ann Stephen, Philip Goad and Andrew McNamara (eds)

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December 2008–January 2009, no. 307

'MODERN TIMES constantly challenges the reader to consider the nature of modernity and of modernism and its structure.’ Virginia Spate’s lucid preface to the volume articulates why this handsomely illustrated and well-researched book is such a ground-breaking history of Australian modernism. It acts as a companion volume to Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art Design and Architecture 1917–1967 (2007), which was an anthology of primary source documents including diaries, letters, talks and manifestos. These revealed Australia’s engagement with international modernist trends and the role of interior and fashion design in developing modernist principles. These developments occurred despite the Australian conservative government’s opposition to them, particularly when it came to the area of fine arts practice. Modern Times is aimed at a broader readership than its predecessor and is connected with a touring exhibition on show at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum until 15 February 2009. The book includes twenty-five articles written by academics, artists and curators from a range of different disciplines, including visual art, design, architecture, animation, fashion, popular culture, film and photography. These articles are divided into five themes that cover abstraction, the body, the city, space age, and electric signs and spectacles.

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Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge by Jean-Noël Jeanneney (trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan)

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March 2007, no. 289

France’s hypersensitivity about its culture is not infrequently derided, but it produces a salutary vigilance for which we can all be grateful. Such has been the case with the French-led defence of cultural specificities in the various ‘free trade’ meetings (GATT and WTO) of the past two decades. And such is this book by Jean-Noël Jeanneney. Deceptively slight in size – Jeanneney himself refers to it modestly as his ‘little book’ – it is a work that not only addresses a critical issue but articulates practical proposals that can, and should, command the attention of cultural policy-makers and decision-makers everywhere. It is also essential reading for the wider public. The issue is about which principles, in the already strongly globalised world of the Internet, should guide the processes of digitising the world’s literary heritage. Keenly critical of the plan launched by Google in late 2004 to create a universal online library, Jeanneney proposes a pluralist alternative posited on a quite different philosophy from that of the profit-based ideology underpinning the Google initiative.

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New Under the Sun: Jewish Australians on religion, politics and culture edited by Michael Fagenblat, Melanie Landau and Nathan Wolski

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August 2006, no. 283

This significant anthology consists of thirty-three articles by Jewish Australian scholars, lawyers, writers, educators, rabbis, journalists and other high achievers, prefaced by a thoughtful and wide-ranging introduction by the editors. Many of the contributors are distinguished in their fields and prominent in public life. The editors have cast the volume from a ‘perspective of commitment and belonging’, with the conviction that ‘challenge and critique when offered by committed members rather than hostile outsiders is often the most useful form of reckoning with ourselves’. The disjunction is troubling (I think I may be a hostile insider), but its effect does not diminish the interest of the collection. The book’s focus is narrower than its subtitle suggests: these are not just passing reflections by some Jewish Australians: each contribution is centrally about some aspect of the religion, politics and culture of Jewish Australians. As such, it provides a useful and authoritative synopsis of the progress, state and thoughts of many Australian Jews today. No single essay sparkles brilliantly, and a few are alarmingly deficient in serious thought; nevertheless, this is a big, rich, diverse collection deserving of wide public attention.

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This book consists of sixteen essays based on papers delivered at the symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities held in Hobart in 2004. The title of the book was the theme of the symposium. A conference must have a theme, of course, or no one would ever fund the participants, but individual speakers do not always address it, or they do so tangentially. We have all been at conferences where the relationship of the speaker’s paper to the theme is the same as that between the ugly sisters’ feet and Cinderella’s dancing slipper – a great deal of stretching and contorting to make the text fit the theme, and vice versa. This is why conference proceedings rarely make good books.

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