Vane Lindesay
Vane Lindesay’s works include, Noel Counihan: Caricatures (1985), Aussie-osities (1988) and Stop Laughing, this is Serious! (2001).
Old fashioned dinki di Australians will view this book with mixed reactions indeed. For those of us conditioned in the popular culture of May Gibbs whose Mr and Mrs Koala featured in her ‘Bib and Bub’ drawings, Dorothy Wall’s koala ‘Blinky Bill’, and of course Norman Lindsay’s delightfully comic bear ‘Bill Bluegum’, will be decidedly startled by this latest anthropomorphic koala. F ... (read more)
From the beginnings of white settlement, Australia has had, an economy based almost entirely on rural production. The effects of a rural economy and population influencing broad social attitudes, not surprisingly, has resulted in a culture wherein the ‘up-country bushman’ and the legendary ‘outback’ are the very essence of this nation’s lore. And comedy has been a significant element of ... (read more)
Following the enterprising publication of Michael Leunig’s drawings and of Arthur Horner’s ‘Colonel Pewter’ and ‘Uriel’ cartoons Penguin’s latest offering in illustrated publishing in a wonderful book of evocations – a selection of many hundred Australia ‘trademark’ symbols created to identify local products ranging across the one hundred years from 1860.
Symbols of Australia ... (read more)
When nobody is blown any good, it is indeed an ill wind. Much that was good blew my way as a soldier during the stormy years of World War II – but I was one of the lucky ones, although I did not think so during the Japanese bombing of the Darwin area in 1942. I say lucky because I not only survived the many bombings in a place where others did not, but was later posted to join the staff of Salt, ... (read more)
More than in any other way, Australian humour has evolved and found its greatest expression not through the nation’s writers, entertainers, or film makers, but by the means of cartoonists drawing for the Australian press. This humour had two significant periods of development - the first beginning with the founding of the Bulletin a little over a century ago when the editors of this illustrated ... (read more)
The perennial and increasingly tiresome question of Australian ‘national identity’ will probably diminish rapidly after the point where the design of a new and truly Australian flag is determined.
That it is a question at all, after just on two hundred years of settlement here, is curious. Part of the condition was diagnosed by the late Arthur Phillips in his studies of our colonial culture, ... (read more)
The thing that has distinguished the ‘inspired genius’ from the run of the mill ‘practitioner’ in all creativity is quality of mind. Michael Leunig, few Australians have to be told, has this. But astonishingly, quality of mind has not been a gradual, developing part of Leunig’s work, for it was evident as an integral part of his art, first widely seen in the pages of the fondly remembere ... (read more)
