Archive

I have commented before in ABR that literary criticism is a rara avis in Australia’s publishing world, so perhaps it is not surprising that Ann Vickery has had to find an overseas publisher for this important contribution to Australia’s literary and cultural history. Whatever its provenance, I have a particular reason for welcoming this contextualising study of the work and times of six women poets of the early twentieth century: Mary Gilmore, Marie Pitt, Mary Fullerton, Anna Wickham, Zora Cross, Lesbia Harford and Nettie Palmer.

Sarah Hay’s new novel is set in north-western Australia against a background of intense heat and bone-hard country, a continent away from the grim southern island setting of her previous novel, Skins (2001). Although this second novel by the Vogel-winning author explores a very different place and time, the two novels share some common terrain. Both unfold in remote locations where conditions of survival are harsh; both explore themes of loneliness, will, desire and the impact of colonisation.

We begin by peering through a window, watching a carpenter hard at work, engaged, precise, among tools and apprentices. Suddenly, we are glimpsing a lab technician working on rabbit cadavers; next, we are in a concert hall, our eyes keenly directed toward the conductor. We encounter these three craftsmen many times throughout Richard Sennett’s enthralling inquiry into the nature of craftsmanship. Their ranks are joined by ancient weavers, medieval goldsmiths, Linux programmers, brick-builders, luthiers, architects, glassblowers and those who constructed the first atomic bomb.

Laura Riding, sometime poet and citrus-grower has risen from the grave to deliver this series of attacks on poetry and its untruthfulness. She comes back to us now in a posthumous gathering of essays and shorter notes, The Failure of Poetry: The Promise of Language. It will certainly get people’s backs up.

In his final, unfinished opus, the German writer Max Weber presented his exemplar of irrational, arbitrary law-making by describing an image of a Muslim qadi, or judge, sitting beneath a palm tree, dispensing justice as he saw fit. Later, as scholars began to examine Western portraits of the east – particularly in the wake of Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism – Weber’s description was itself held up as an example of unthinking and condescending Western judgement. More recently, as the Western and Islamic worlds have meshed and clashed – over oil, land, beliefs and geopolitics – the stereotypical image of the Muslim religious leader has been assigned a whole new set of connotations, involving fanaticism, violence and doom: the qadi remains charmingly austere, but no longer benign.

Bernard Smith’s new book, The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and Its History is aimed directly at those school and university students who, he writes, ‘may need an introductory primer to the art history of the 20th century’. Although it offers a lucid and accessible survey of familiar territory, The Formalesque is by no means a straightforward textbook. Smith’s persuasive, even pugnacious style has remained remarkably undiminished by time (the author is now in his nineties and this, as he himself has said, will probably be his last book).

This is a novel about a mother, daughter, and granddaughter. Two of these women are artists, and the third is a medical practitioner. Wendy James explores creativity and the price it exacts, especially if the artist is a woman. James is also interested in biography, its limitations and potentially destructive effects. The title, The Steele Diaries, refers to the journals of a celebrated book-illustrator, Zelda Steele. In the 1960s, Zelda is a young mother of two, temporarily living separately from her husband when, mysteriously, she dies by drowning in the local river. This occurs just as she is fulfilling her potential as an artist. The main narrative is a first-person account by Zelda’s (now adult) daughter, Ruth, a doctor who has spent her life resenting her famous mother and modelling herself on her beloved father, Richard, the respected GP of an outback country town. Ruth’s inner journey towards an adult understanding of her mother and, thence, herself provides the central narrative. The trajectory begins immediately after her father’s death in the late 1990s, when Ruth is contacted by Douglas Grant, an international art critic and biographer of her long dead grandmother, modernist landscape painter Annie Steele. Annie was the first wife of painter Ed Steele, Australia’s most famous modernist artist. Douglas Grant, a lover of Zelda’s when they were young, is aware that she kept a journal and now wants to base a biography upon it. Grant is convinced that it must have been in Richard’s possession during the years since Zelda’s death.

In the 1990s the Smithsonian Institution conducted a comprehensive survey of visitors to exhibitions in the United States and concluded that the majority of viewers, while retaining impressions of individual objects, are unlikely to take much note of an exhibition’s theme. That came as a surprise to art gallery and museum professionals, who had recently put much effort into didactic displays, with a proliferation of wall texts and increasingly sophisticated methods of thematic presentation. It should have come as no surprise. The objects we see assembled in exhibitions were produced separately. The co-opting of works of art in an exhibition is in a critical sense different from the organisation of parts within a book or film, for example.

A Family History of Smoking, the most recent of Andrew Riemer’s memoirs, focuses on the world of his great-grandparents, his grandparents, and his parents. In so doing, it traces Hungary from the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its collapse at the end of the Great War, on through the brief springtime of the 1930s and the chaos of displacement and destruction of World War II. It is a rich and rewarding memoir.

The title of this rich and varied collection of poetry by Philip Neilsen comes from a poem entitled ‘First Creative Writing Class’:

I have only just begun to know
what a cloud is and could be.
Poetry comes without an alibi,
in lightning flashes of sanity.