Non Fiction

Charles Osborne, who was born in Brisbane in 1927 and moved to London in 1953, is a prolific writer, broadcaster and opera critic. His latest offering, The Opera Lover’s Companion, sets out to guide its reader through 175 of the world’s most popular operas. Osborne correctly states that ‘the staples of the operatic diet today are the major works of five great composers – Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Strauss’ – and certain works by other luminaries. The operas of sixty-seven composers are included, but that core quintet gives us almost a third of the operas in this volume. Interestingly, in opera’s four hundred-year history, the vast majority of the most frequently performed works fall within the period between Mozart’s first featured opera, Mitridate, rè di Ponto (1770) and Strauss’s last, Capriccio (1942).

As with The New Kobbé’s Opera Book (1997), the list reveals a re-evaluation of many previously neglected operas, in particular some lesser-known works of Handel, Rossini, Donizetti, Massenet, and Strauss, which have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Doubtless this also reflects the dearth of modern operas and the scarcity of contemporary composers who know what their audiences want. Any opera company ignoring box office appeal does so at its peril, and a book such as this should be mandatory reading.

Pity the professional historian. It is hard to know where to turn these days to avoid being abused, even from the most unlikely sources. According to Andrew Riemer, writing lately in the Sydney Morning Herald, the main reason professional historians castigated Robert Hughes in 1988, when he published The Fatal Shore, was because he had ‘occupied their territory’. Is there any other professional group in Australia so childish, irresponsible, parasitical and useless as the professional historian? Judging from remarks like this, appearing weekly in the press over the last few years, apparently not. And why is it, at a time when the number of living professional historians probably outnumbers the total of their deceased predecessors since time began, we supposedly manage to work as a tiny clique? Someday an historian, maybe even a professional one, will explain this unlikely phenomenon. Allegations such as these are linked somehow with the overwhelming anti-intellectualism of early twenty-first-century Australia, but exactly why historians, among all the others, are hit so hard and so often is a puzzle.

Here is an entry in one of A.D. Hope’s notebooks: it is from 1961: ‘Ingenious devices for letting in the light without allowing you to see out, such as modern techniques provide – e.g., glass brick walls, crinkle-glass, sanded glass and so on – remind me very much of most present-day forms of education.’ This is a representative passage from the notebooks. Lucid itself, it bears on elements of frustration or nullification in experience. As such, it testifies to Hope’s recurrent sense that human beings can easily mislocate their ingenuity, with results that are both memorable and regrettable. In a later notebook, in 1978, speaking of the labyrinth as a model of human life, he writes: ‘Looking back one sees that comparatively trivial blind choices have often determined one’s course and that the majority of people do end up in blind alleys.’ One might contest the generalisation, but will not easily forget the analogy.

Brisbane’s unruly rioters and Melbourne’s enemies within continue the Vulgar Press’s excellent series of city guides. By interpreting familiar places in Melbourne and Brisbane from within a tradition of left-wing activism, the guides emphasise a different environmental heritage. Where city planning seems bent on transforming daily life into those sanitised displays that can garner tourist dollars, these collections speak to far more challenging and imaginative traditions. Sadly, and this seems especially the case in Brisbane, the buildings around which radicals fought and dreamed have, for the most part, disappeared. Photographs in Radical Brisbane present the reader with bland offices, mundane glass and concrete façades and the occasional freeway flyover. Modern city planning has efficiently purged the landscape of any radical intrusion.

The Age of Sail might be presumed to cover several centuries, beginning, say, as far back as the great age of European exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and continuing until wind-powered sea travel was gradually replaced, in the late nineteenth century, by steamships.

The euphonious title of Robin Haines’s book is therefore a little misleading. She deals only with British assisted emigrants to Australia in the nineteenth century, putting their personal accounts into historical and statistical context, or rather, fleshing out the statistics with the human stories from which they are extrapolated. These emigrants are working-class people for the most part, ambitious and, of course, self-selected by their literacy, with social networks strong enough to encourage them to write their shipboard letters or diaries to keep in touch with those they had left behind in Britain. They are also, as Haines points out, self-selected for success in the new colonies, since the successful were the most likely to have descendants who would preserve the diaries and letters of their fortunate ancestors.

The Cambridge Guide to English Usage is written by the Australian academic Pam Peters, and is an interesting extension of the work she published in The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide (1995). This time Peters examines more than 4000 issues of word meaning, spelling, grammar, punctuation and style as exemplified in the Englishes of the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The book will appeal to both a specialist and a general readership.

The major players here are the UK and the US, and the evidence of usage for these domains is drawn largely from corpora (or should it be corpuses?), especially the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) and a subset of 140 million words of American English from the Cambridge International Corpus (CCAE). The evidence for usage in the other Englishes is not corpus-based, and relies largely on dictionaries, style guides and questionnaires.

Peter Timms is ‘dismayed’ by the state of contemporary art and by the hype that surrounds it and the reality of the experience. He has written a book mired in exasperation and frustration. It is not hard to share Timms’s sentiments. Visit any sizeable biennale-type exhibition and you are engulfed in flickering videos in shrouded rooms, installations of more or less hermetic appeal, large-scale photographs – these often prove to be the most interesting – scratchy ‘anti-drawings’ and a handful of desultory paintings. Noise is ‘in’, too. ‘Biennale art’ is the term frequently used to describe the phenomenon.

Quite who is to blame for this occupies much of the first half of Timms’s book. Artists hell-bent on having careers rather than seeking vocations are part of the problem, and so are curators of contemporary art who nourish the artist’s every need. Art schools are next, where cultural theory has replaced the teaching of art history. The superficialities and the susceptibility to trendiness in the Australia Council are further contributors.

When is a suburb not a suburb? When it is an inner-urban locale with a distinctive café culture, its own postcode and football team, but no town all. And here’s another: how did an Old English word meaning ‘churl’s farm’ come to be assigned to a swanky inner suburb of a major city in the southern hemisphere? These and numerous other questions are answered in Carlton: A History. This encyclopedic book tells a fascinating story that resonates way beyond its notional suburban boundaries.

As Melbourne grew, its suburbs became too vast for one local government body to administer, and areas were carved off to form separate municipalities: Richmond, Collingwood, Fitzroy, South Melbourne, North Melbourne. Carlton, however, despite periodic agitation from its residents, has remained within the boundaries of the Melbourne City Council.

Writing of cinematographer Damien Parer’s untimely death in 1944, war correspondent Chester Wilmot paid tribute to him as ‘a fine man as well as a brilliant photographer. He made the camera speak as no other man I’ve ever known.’ Neil McDonald’s book, Damien Parer’s War, does eloquent justice to this legendary figure in Australian history and Australian film. Many may know that Parer was the first Australian to win an Oscar, but, unless they have read the 1994 edition of this admirable book, they may not know much else.