Letters to the Editor

Patrick White in Adelaide Dear Editor, In his article on the theatre of Patrick White (May 2012), David Marr implies quite strongly that White had nothing to do with the theatre between John Tasker’s production of Night on Bald Mountain for the Adelaide University Theatre Guild during the 1964 Adelaide Festival and Neil Armfield’s production of Signal Driver, commissioned by Artistic Director Jim Sharman for the 1982 Festival. Marr goes so far as to say that the 1964 production ‘might have been it for White and theatre’, were it not for Sharman’s return to Australia, which, he says, ‘brought theatre back into White’s life’ in the early 1980s. In fact, the theatre was firmly in White’s life for the great part of this supposed break. His association with Sharman went back to at least 1968. According to his own account in Flaws in the Glass, White was sufficiently impressed by Sharman’s production of Terror Australis at Sydney’s Jane Street Theatre to write a letter defending it against dismissive reviews. The two men went on to develop a strong personal and professional relationship, which included Sharman’s production of A Season at Sarsaparilla for the Old Tote Theatre Company at the Opera House Drama Theatre, in 1976; the première season of White’s Big Toys for the Old Tote at the Parade Theatre in Kensington, and, subsequently, Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre, in 1977; the film, with White’s own script, of The Night the Prowler in 1978; and A Cheery Soul, again at the Drama Theatre in a co-production between the Opera House and the Paris Company, in 1979. This last was ‘rescued’ by Sharman from the ill-fated Paris Theatre enterprise in 1978. It had been due to follow Dorothy Hewett’s Pandora’s Cross and Louis Nowra’s Visions, but was pulled when the first two productions failed to break even. White was a major financial backer of the season and provided much-needed moral support to Hewett, Nowra, and others in the face of critical and financial disaster. These events were important to White and important for the history of Australian theatre in their own right. William Yang’s photographs of successive first nights and dinner parties show White as intimately involved in the Sydney theatrical scene. He loved actors: he wrote Big Toys specifically for Kate Fitzpatrick and Max Cullen. I was present at the opening night party for Big Toys in Melbourne, which coincided with Kate’s birthday, and I remember clearly the moving way in which White spoke about his regard for her and about the importance of the theatre, and this play in particular, in his writing life. In Flaws in the Glass, White remarked on how easily Big Toys came to him and how surprised critics would be to find that he could work on plays and novels simultaneously. Like Hewett, the tenth anniversary of whose death seems to have attracted far less attention than White’s centenary, the strength of his contribution across genres can be underestimated by those with a preference for one form or another. As Marr acknowledges, White was in his late sixties when he wrote Signal Driver, and increasingly frail, but I do think it is stretching it to blame Sharman, Adelaide, and, by implication, White’s inclination to write for the theatre at all, for depriving the world of a late novel. It is also premature to dismiss White’s plays as not being ‘what he did best’. Marr rightly reminds us about the importance of the Adelaide connection for the development of White’s writing for the theatre, but it is misleading to omit vital events, including at least one major work, from what is otherwise a well-researched survey, simply because they happened elsewhere. Alison Richards, South Yarra, Vic. Bernadette Brennan, in the previous issue, wrote at length about Dorothy Hewett in her review of the reissued autobiography, Wild Card. Ed. Sarah Scott replies to Simon Pierse Dear Editor, Simon Pierse, in his reply (September 2012) to my review of his book Australian Art and Artists in London, 1950–1965: An Antipodean Summer (July–August 2012), suggests that I am an ‘elusive figure’, but, despite what he thinks, I did not attend the 2004 conference in Cardiff that he alludes to, I have been contactable by email, and I would have happily answered any enquiries concerning my master’s degree or my PhD thesis, both of which he has tracked down and read. Pierse does not mention that, in the spirit of academic conversation, Professor Kate Darian-Smith and I are co-convening a conference on art and diplomacy that will take place in London this month and which he will attend. I am sorry that he feels that my PhD was a setback for him. I don’t feel the same way. Indeed, I was hoping that our differing points of view might lead to some interesting academic discussion. Pierse’s Bibliography reveals that my articles and theses were printed before his were even published; this is why he is not referenced in them. I thank Pierse for extending ‘the academic courtesy’ to include me in his Bibliography. None of his articles do so. I accepted this because we both used the same archival material. My critique pointed out that the London exhibitions of Australian art included works by Arthur and David Boyd, Russell Drysdale, and others that responded to the dire conditions experienced by Indigenous people during the 1950s. Why, then, does Pierse not acknowledge the writings of seminal scholars such as Nicholas Thomas, Ian McLean, Terry Smith, and Howard Morphy relating to this? His inclusion of a photograph of two Aboriginal children presenting the Queen with a gift – without any attempt to reference Indigenous experience in Australia at that time – does not acknowledge the significance of revisionist histories that do so. For the record, the photograph was taken at Townsville Oval, on 9 March 1954. The two children, like all other Queensland Aboriginal children under the age of twenty-one, were under the jurisdiction of the Aborigines Preservation and Protection Act (1939), which allowed authorities to remove children from their families without evidence of neglect. The Queen is walking on mats woven at Yarrabah Mission. In the background a dancer, flown in from Palm Island, stands alongside a display of crafts from the Mission stations. If the Queen had visited these stations, J.H. Connors suggests she ‘might have seen for herself the awful conditions which most were forced to endure’. I do understand that the scope of Pierse’s study is ‘the reception of Australian art in Britain from a United Kingdom/Commonwealth point of view during a fifteen-year period’. My review states that the author has a ‘comprehensive understanding of the British context’. But Pierse’s book is a part of a series entitled ‘British Art,Global Contexts’. As we move towards a broader history, is the scope of this study adequate? Sarah Scott, Canberra, ACT Antipodean summer Dear Editor, Sarah Scott has written a thoughtful review of Simon Pierse’s Australian Art and Artists in London, 1950–1965: An Antipodean Summer. A short letter would not do justice to the issues she raises, so I will only comment on a matter of common interest to Scott, Pierse, and myself. The years 1950–65 coincided with a period when Australian artists enjoyed unprecedented popularity in London. In her review, Scott says: ‘[Pierse] reveals that the success of these artists depended upon the support of a handful of art patrons, notably that of the art historian Kenneth Clark, the flamboyant young director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery Bryan Robertson, and the Australian expatriate art dealer Alannah Coleman.’ When Pierse places Alannah Coleman in the same frame as Kenneth Clark and Bryan Robertson, and notes the exhibition she organised and curated, Australian Painting and Sculpture in Europe Today (1963), alongside that of Robertson’s well-documented Recent Australian Painting (1961), it is pleasing indeed. The importance of Coleman’s role in promoting Australian art and artists through this exhibition (and others) is described with insight by Pierse. I became aware of Coleman’s exhibition while interviewing her about her life in London and her role promoting Australian artists. She was concerned that this exciting time, when Australian art and artists achieved so much so briefly, would be forgotten. With Pierse and Scott adding to, and expanding, the research I did all those years ago, it is gratifying to know that Alannah Coleman’s role in this internationally successful ‘Antipodean Summer’ of Australian art has finally been acknowledged. Wendy Donald, Bend of Islands, Vic.

Hidden Author

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Vincent Namatjira edited by Vincent Namatjira