Melbourne Books

This attractive and fascinating volume is billed as ‘the first illustrated book on the 1948 Old Vic tour’, and, sure enough, it is jammed from stage-left to stage-right with scores of images – especially of the eternally photogenic two superstars who led the tour. Not among them is one particular photograph – more of a snapshot, really, just 6 x 4½ inches in 1948 measurements. It was taken on the night of 17 May 1948 at a post-performance party at a family home in Melbourne’s St Kilda. Four of the seven people in shot are unidentified; but two of the others, unmistakably, are Vivien Leigh and her husband, Laurence Olivier: she is in a fur coat, sitting in an armchair, a plate of food balanced on her lap; he is two along, perched on a piano stool. But who is that man in the middle in half profile? None other than Chico Marx, who was also in Melbourne, with his own show at the Tivoli.

Alfred William Howitt is a well-known yet enigmatic figure in Australian colonial history. Born in England in 1830 and raised by literary and politically active parents, Howitt grew up amid an erudite and socially progressive milieu. With his father and brother, he arrived in Australia in 1852, hoping to ‘make it big’ on the Victorian gold fields. Enthralled by the natural environment and the liberties afforded to a gentleman bushman in the colony, Howitt decided to stay on while his family returned to London.

Members of the general public are likely to recognise the names of some of the pioneering female aviators. There is of course Amelia Earhart, the American who became the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Here in Australia, many would recognise the name Nancy Bird Walton, who is known for gaining her pilot’s licence at the age of nineteen, as well as for helping to establish a flying medical service in regional New South Wales. But what of the Australian female aviator who is the subject of James Vicars’s début, Beyond the Sky: The passions of Millicent Bryant, aviator? Millicent Bryant (1878–1927) has largely passed into obscurity, but in her day she was a sensation. Vicars would like his great-grandmother to become once again a household name, celebrated for her achievement as the first woman in Australia – indeed, the first in the Commonwealth outside Britain – to gain a pilot’s licence.

So many art books! And too many of them remainder-table compendiums of famous images thinly draped with text. It is refreshing, then, to rediscover an artist who has fallen into the slough that often follows a lifetime flush of reputation, and an art historian tenacious enough to resurrect that artist’s work and milieu.

Deltroit (pronounced del-troy) is an exceptionally fine pastoral property and homestead in the Riverina – ‘pastoral’ in the Australian sense, with drovers, not shepherds, and the furies of fire, flood, and drought never far from mind, notwithstanding a privileged life in magnificent surroundings: