Letters to the Editor - April 2009

DIAMETRIC OPPOSITES Dear Editor, I concur with Daniel Thomas’s high opinion of the collection of Eva and Marc Besen and of their TarraWarra Museum, and share his admiration of the essays by Christopher Heathcote and Sarah Thomas in his review of Encounters with Australian Modern Art (February 2009). I am sorry he found my contribution ‘laboured’. It seemed an interesting idea to compare artists of the period ‘1960–85’ who appear to be diametric opposites yet who were direct contemporaries, such as Fred Williams and Brett Whiteley, John Brack and Roger Kemp, and so on. From such seeming contradictions springs much of the interest and imaginative energy of the period. But then, ideas were never Daniel Thomas’s strong suit, although, by way of compensation, I will say there has been no trend in modern Australian art he has not been a devotee or advocate for, no matter how briefly. Patrick McCaughey, New Haven, CT DANIEL THOMAS REPLIES: The title of Encounters with Australian Modern Art, understandably for marketing the French edition of the book, avoided the fact that it was based on a single collection given to the TarraWarra Museum of Art. Patrick McCaughey’s letter does not respond to my amused speculation that the internationalised structure and vocabulary of his contribution was intended to ingratiate French readers, for whom the Australian specificities in the other contributions might have been obscure. I had no objection to his ideas. Even silly or culturally cemented-in ideas help us understand the specifi cities of period-piece works of art. However, a young art-museum director recently confessed that a remark of mine at a professional conference, years ago, stuck in his mind and turned out to be true: ‘Art museum visitors are more interested in art information than art history or theory.’ I was originally a collection curator, and I confess the habits persist; I still prefer to discover new ideas within particular works of art after scrutiny and research, not to impose general ideas upon them from outside. And of course, collection curators always have to take an open-minded interest in all new movements but be prepared in due course to pass unfavourable judgement on particular works of art. My word ‘laboured’ described Patrick’s structure: if he took it to apply to his style, I apologise. He and David Hansen are our most beautiful writers on Australian art. I remembered to say the recent McCaughey monograph on Jan Senbergs was written with grace and ease’ when I praised it in the TLS. BLACKSTONE AND THE 1770s Dear Editor, Michael Kirby’s generous review of my recent biography of William Blackstone suggests that what makes Blackstone really important today is not his life, but the ongoing influence of his Commentaries (March 2009). Maybe so; yet our view of the author’s life is likely to affect our reading of his book (which Blackstone revised through all nine editions published during and immediately after his lifetime). This makes an error in Kirby’s fi nal paragraph particularlyunfortunate. For Blackstone died not in 1770 but ten years later. So he was well aware of the American Revolution and Captain Cook’s discoveries. Indeed, as I mention on pp. 267–68, Blackstone helped adjudicate a copyright caseover an abridgment of Hawkesworth’s Voyages. Happily, however, Kirby’s call for a sequel to my biography will be soon be answered. Blackstone and his Commentaries: Biography, Law, History (forthcoming from Hart Publishing) includes chapters by Australian and international scholars discussing key aspects of Blackstone’s jurisprudence in the Commentaries, and its influence in the United States, Australia and elsewhere. Wilfrid Prest, Adelaide, SA Dear Editor, It is with some trepidation that I point out an apparent error by a former justice of the High Court, but Michael Kirby, in his review of William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century, said that Blackstone died in February 1770, placing that event in the context of James Cook’s discovery of the east coast of Australia later that year and the beginnings of the American colonists’ objections to ‘taxation without representation’. However, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Blackstone died on 14 February 1780, by which time Cook was already dead, having been killed in the Hawaiian islands exactly one year before, and the revolting colonists were less than two years away from Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, Washington’s final victory being achieved with the assistance of three French noblemen, Admiral de Grasse and the generals Rochambeau and Lafayette, who were unconcerned about taxation, with or without representation, as they didn’t pay any. From the Encyclopaedia we learn that, in 1770, Blackstone was appointed judge of the Common Pleas and knighted; he spent the last ten years of his life in the village of Wallingford. Towards the end of his life, Blackstone had urged that convicts should be put to work in penitentiaries instead of being transported. If the British government had taken up this suggestion, the European settlement of this continent may not have begun in 1788 and, when settlement did take place, it could have been effected by a different European power: France, for instance, which was very active in the Pacific towards the end of the eighteenth century. Doug Batten, Weetangera, ACT NATURAL CAUSES Dear Editor, I have no quibble with Judith Brett’s fair, thoughtful and elegant review of my book on John Howard and conservatism. (March 2009). But I can’t let her uncharacteristic lapse into social quietism go without comment, echoing as she does, Margaret Thatcher’s sentiment of TINA (there is no alternative) to contemporary capitalism. It is important to dispel the notion that socialism simply died. It did not; it was murdered. The socialist experiment that began with the Russian Revolution was sabotaged from the outset by the capitalist powers, lest their own workingclasses be inspired by success in Russia and elsewhere. In the promising post-Stalin era, the prospect of reforms in the socialist nations was met with unconcealed dread in the West; fervid, non-stop propaganda was directed at the communist nations (not to mention at home as well), coupled with a permanent war footing that sapped the socialist economies and eventually led to their collapse. The object of the exercise, thinly disguised as concern for ‘captive’ peoples, was for the capitalist ruling class to discredit andrid itself of a potential alternative. It is a real dilemma for those nominally on the left whether to acquiesce in the murder by accepting the ‘natural causes’ verdict. Sartre once wrote that there were no good colonists or bad colonists, only colonists; it was a system and would always behave in the same way. So with capitalists and capitalism. We are all colonised by it, all subjected to the tyranny of the market in an ever-decreasing sphere of public influence. Political democracy counts for little in a privatised economy and an undemocratic workplace. As to my own unfashionable faith in popular democracy, I plead guilty (though it is in no way unexamined). Brett’s review raises significant questions, among them what it means to be on the political left today. She is quite right to raise post-materialist concerns in regard to contemporary anti-conservative progressivism, but a question remains: can you accommodate capitalism and still be consistently on the left? I would argue that you can’t. Norman Abjorensen, Queanbeyan, NSW TELL THAT TO THE EAST TIMORESE Dear Editor, So, Gareth Evans is ‘the person who has done more to develop the responsibility to protect [a new international norm] than any other’, according to Allan Gyngell’s review of Evans’s The Responsibility to Protect (March 2009). Tell that to the East Timorese, whose desperate plight Saint-Gareth loftily dismissed in his and Bruce Grant’s earlier Australia’s Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s as no more than ‘a recurring irritant’, while Indonesia’s brutal takeover of East Timor was characterised as ‘an embarrassment to the Whitlam government’. According to Gyngell, Evans was always wringing his hands over atrocities and proposing wizard conceptualisations of notions of intervention, but no mention is made of his unimpressive record over the atrocity on his back door. Evans’s attitude was summed up in a Portuguese newspaper not long after the massacre in the Santa Cruz cemetery, when Evans couldn’t avoid his six-monthly meeting with the rotating presidency of the European Community (at the time in Portugal), and was said to have behaved to the Portuguese minister for foreign affairs ‘with all the cynicism and rudeness to which we have become accustomed ... behaving like someone who, invited to dinner, finishes up by spitting in the plate’ (Público, 19 March 1992). I don’t think I’ll be wearing the Evans T-shirt anytime soon. David Callahan, Aveiro, Portugal

From the New Issue

The Cancer Finishing School: Lessons in laughter, love and resilience by Peter Goldsworthy

Expanding Mindscapes: A global history of psychedelics by Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock

The Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on effective altruism, engaged Buddhism, and how to build a better world by Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei

Fat Chance: Journalism poems by Kent MacCarter

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