Non Fiction

One of the notable things about living in a small country is that you can enjoy many first-rate second-rate things. Given the post-Renaissance domination of the visual arts by painting, prints have for a long time been driven into a supplementary role by artists, historians, and the market, and, as a result, have tended to be treated as minor works, curios, or historical illustrations. Because, moreover, Australia was a far-flung colony of the British Empire for much of its modern history, treated by its masters as ancillary to ‘the main game’, this situation mitigated against the acquisition of many exceptional paintings. Australians bought prints instead. State galleries acquired staggering print collections, from Dürer through to Rembrandt, Piranesi, Blake and Goya to the present. As its subtitle suggests, A Beautiful Line: Italian Prints from Mantegna to Piranesi showcases one important local collection, in Adelaide. Running the gamut from Renaissance to Rococo, the exhibition presents 135 prints ranging from the iconic to the obscure, culminating with works by such luminaries as Canaletto and Giambattista Tiepolo.

In the relatively small field of Australian photographic publishing, Frank Hurley has attracted more than his share of attention. The reasons are clear: in the contemporary world, bound by prohibitions, Hurley is a photographer–adventurer of heroic proportions.

The most widely known story of Australian art is about the beginnings of Papunya Tula. It has, says Vivien Johnson, been ‘retold so often that it almost has the force of Dreaming’. Its force is not just due to the story’s frequent telling, but also to the crime with which it begins, which was the making of prohibited images.

An appropriately elegant publication, Khai Liew is the eleventh in the Wakefield Press series of monographs on South Australian artists, which was initiated by the South Australian Living Artists Festival (SALA) and is assisted by Arts SA.

The 2010 federal election fell on my wife’s birthday: 21 August. Being political tragics, we didn’t stop for birthday cake. Instead, we handed out roughly 1600 how-to-vote cards for the Australian Labor Party in suburban Melbourne. Our local polling booth is the Vista Valley Kindergarten, in Bulleen. This kindergarten cum polling booth, which sits in more of a gully than a valley and offers no vistas, is located in the north-eastern corner of the electorate of Menzies, held by ultraconservative Liberal frontbencher Kevin Andrews. The battle for Vista Valley mirrored the national poll. In the Vista Valley count, the ALP’s primary vote collapsed, the Greens’ soared, more people voted informal than backed Family First, yet, thanks to the preferences of Greens voters, Labor fell across the line by four votes.

When the book arrived for review, a paperback of 656 pages, my heart sank. Americans are the world’s greatest researchers. Reading it would be like drinking from a fire hose. But it began incisively, with a turning point in the 2008 presidential campaign that established Obama’s audacity as a ‘complex, cautious, intelligent, shrewd, young African-American man’ who would project his ambitions and hopes as the aspirations of the United States of America itself. Soon we were in Kenya, with Tom Mboya, Jomo Kenyatta, the Mau Mau uprising, and Barack Hussein Obama Sr, a promising young economist with a rich, musical voice and a confident manner on his way to the University of Hawaii. We also meet the most compelling character in the book, perhaps in Obama’s life: his mother, a seventeen-year-old from Kansas, intrepid and idealistic, who takes up with the dasher from Kenya, becomes pregnant and marries him.

Not for forty years have Australians had real arguments with their governments about international relations. Many marched in 2003 against the Iraq invasion, but were ignored. Now, if the national obesity rate is any guide, Australians spend more time eating, partying and sleeping than having the earnest pre-breakfast discussions about foreign relations that Fukuzawa recommended.

How complex a task it is to write the biography of a writer. For writers, whose daily business is making things up, the truest experience may be one they have imagined. All biographers need to be storytellers and private detectives, but the biographer of a writer must also be a literary critic, must account for how the work relates to the life and escapes the life; beyond this, how the experience of writing it might change how the author apprehends those other parts of experience, called facts.

Australian war historians usually find their theme in the army. Mike Carlton, a well-known journalist, thinks it is time to praise the Australian warship Perth and its men: ‘They were the flower of Australia’s greatest generation. No other has been so tested.’

Few who saw them will forget the grainy newspaper images of Australian drug traffickers Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers. Despite high-level diplomatic pleas from the Australian government, they were hanged at Pudu jail in Kuala Lumpur in July 1986 for possessing 180 grams of heroin. In the post-execution mêlée, their bodies were concealed by blankets, but one foot was casually left uncovered. The poignancy of those toes was heart-rending, their vulnerability encapsulating the brutal and ruthless efficiency of law in that region of South-East Asia.