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Christopher Menz

The cookery sections of bookshops are crammed with bright new titles, but how necessary are they? Inevitably, they are repetitive – how many ways are there to boil an egg, make stock, prepare a vinaigrette? – and presentation is often privileged over content. In such a crowded market, awash with flashy covers, glossy photography, and populist titles acclaiming the latest celebrity chef, or niche cuisine, how can we sort out the cream from the whey? How can we be confident that books will edify or endure? Gratifyingly, some publishers are reprinting older works, providing a balance between the new and inventive, the tried and trusted.

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How differently would we view Australia’s postwar architecture and urban design without Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness? Such is the significance of this classic 1960 text that it has shaped debates about our cities – their planning, development and buildings – for half a century. Whether the book has helped to improve them is questionable – they probably would not be much different today, Boyd or no Boyd – but what a context and framework he gives us for analysing and discussing them. With the dramatic changes in society and tastes in fifty years, what does Boyd offer the contemporary reader?

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The art gallery of South Australia has assembled a cast of expert contributors for the catalogue that accompanied its recent exhibition of European decorative arts. Empires & Splendour: The David Roche Collection, is the most expensive publication to date from AGSA and was published with assistance from David Roche.

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If Australian art has sometimes been perceived as wanting in style and opulence, recent art museum exhibitions and monographs examining the art and artists of the Edwardian era tell another story and reveal that there is abundant glamour in Australian art. The Edwardians (2004) and George W. Lambert Retrospective (2007) – both from the National Gallery of Australia – and Bertram Mackennal (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007) have succeeded in presenting Australian art in the grand manner from this most extravagant period.

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Julie Blyfield by Stephanie Radok and Dick Richards

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November 2007, no. 296

Julie Blyfield is the most recent subject in a series of monographs on South Australian living artists. They are commissioned by the SALA Inc. Board and produced in association with the annual South Australian Living Artists Festival, now in its tenth year. Handsomely produced and elegantly designed, these abundantly illustrated volumes do much to promote the art and artists of South Australia. Not all the artists in the series, which began with Annette Bezor: A Passionate Gaze (2000), are well known in other states. Notable absentees are Fiona Hall and Hossein Valamanesh, both of whom have received major state and national institutional recognition, through solo exhibitions and publications.

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‘All machinery may be beautiful, when it is undecorated even. Do not seek to decorate it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the line of the strength and the line of the beauty being one.’

Although ridiculed in his own day as a fashion victim in dress and manners, Oscar Wilde, the exemplar of the excesses of the Aesthetic Movement, is not normally quoted in design histories. Being Wilde, what he wrote above is probably not in praise of the machine, but its inclusion in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (first published in 1936) shows the breadth of reference in this excellent and now classic introduction to modern design and twentieth-century modernism.

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India, China, Austraila: Trade and society 1788 - 1850 by James Broadbent, Suzanne Rickard and Margaret Steven

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March 2004, no. 259

Studies of nineteenth-century decorative arts in Australia have largely focused on objects – furniture, silver, ceramics – produced in Australia for the home market, rather than on a systematic study of imports. The design sources for Australian-made furnishings during the nineteenth century were mostly British; this is also reflected in Britain’s being the principal source of exports to Australia. Given the vast amount of imports from Asia available today – from tableware to mobile telephones, and much of it demonstrating the latest in technology – one could be excused for thinking that our reliance on Asian trade is a twentieth- century phenomenon. Not so. As India, China, Australia: Trade and society 1788–1850 amply demonstrates, our trade with Asia began in the eighteenth century even ensured the survival of the fledgling port of Sydney – and we have never looked back.

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