Commentary

Just before she entered the world of Wonderland, Alice asked: what is the use of a book without pictures? A book in which an imaginative narrative is symbiotically supported and augmented by illustrations can play an important part in the development of a child’s verbal and visual literacy skills. However, a picture book is more than just a story with pictures: it is also a cultural artefact that both reflects and transmits the mores of the country in which it is produced. And a good picture book can do more than simply replicate the visual stereotypes often found in popular culture: it can stretch the imagination, excite curiosity, structure meaning and shape cultural identity.

The Sabi sands reserve borders South Africa’s famed Kruger National Park. I spent a memorable few days in one of Sabi Sands’s private game reserves in January 2002, tracking the ‘big five’ at dawn and dusk, eating fine food, and curling up under my bed’s mosquito net to read J.M. Coetzee. While I was rather discomfited by the obsequiousness of some of the black employees, I knew that tourism was the lifeblood of the community. The events of September 11 had impacted even on Africa, and the lodge was eerily quiet.

For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own selves.

These words appear towards the end of Erich Auerbach’s study of representation in Western literature, Mimesis. First published in 1946, the book has become a classic of twentieth-century literary criticism, but is almost as famous for the circumstances under which it was composed as for its content. It was written between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul, where Auerbach, a German Jew, was living in exile.

The combatants in the so-called ‘History Wars’ have been denouncing each other for about a decade. The main issue is the handling of black–white relations in histories of Australia. There are tangential disputes about the policies of the National Museum and the worth of the historian Manning Clark and his writings, but these are not germane to this article. On the left, television historians, journalists and politicians are concerned to levy blame for terrible acts of European greed and brutality and to bestow praise for acts of Aboriginal resistance; while rightists emphasise the white settlers’ and authorities’ normally good intentions and the small amount of blood shed by comparison with the histories of North and South America, and of Africa. The leading protagonists in both camps have generally been formed by Marxism and retain that absolutist faith that nothing happens by accident, thereby permitting simple assignments of good and evil.

‘I can’t believe that you look back and say “I was unkind to people” … you’re not an envious person, you’re not a hateful person, you’ve got – one assumes – plenty of money. So why do you sit there and beat yourself up thinking that you’ve hurt people?’

Poor John Mangos. There he was on Sky News Australia presenting the interview programme Viewpoint last November. His interviewee was the great John Laws, who had a new book to promote and yet another spectacular controversy (this one involving his comments about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s Carson Kressley) to defend.

How do dance and music fit together in a choreographic work? Even the briefest look at Australian collaborations across the arts suggests that endeavours vary widely. The National Library of Australia’s collections, which are particularly strong in the areas of music and dance, provide some interesting examples of the synergies that exist between these two art forms and that make cross-art form collaboration a richly rewarding area of study.

At certain moments in Australia’s cultural history, dance has been the prime artistic force of the day. At those times, dance and its makers have inspired and enthused a whole generation of people. Dance has changed lives, has allowed careers to blossom in unexpected ways, and has created fanatical audiences. Dance had this power over Australians between 1936 and 1940, when three Russian ballet companies – Ballets Russes companies – toured Australia.

This year for the third year in a row, Black Inc. is reprinting writing from HEAT in one of its ‘Best Australian’ anthologies, without seeking my permission as the magazine’s editor and publisher. They can do this because there is a legal loophole in Australia’s literary culture – literary magazines in this country do not normally have contracts with their authors. It is conventional to ask magazine editors for their permission before reprinting work that has appeared in their pages; but the fact is, if the author’s permission can be won it is entirely irrelevant, from a legal point of view what the magazine editor thinks.

Manning Clark married Dymphna Lodewycks in 1939. In the following years they lived in Oxford, Tiverton, Geelong and Melbourne, before moving to Canberra in 1949. On 29 October 1953 they took up residence in a new house, designed by their friend Robin Boyd, in Tasmania Circle, Forrest. It was to be their home for the rest of their lives. It was not a particularly large house, and the Clarks and their six children must have found it cramped at times. The only upstairs room was Manning’s study, reached by a ladder from the entrance hall. It was in this room, with its view of Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain, that he wrote the six volumes of A History of Australia, several other books, and countless articles, reviews, lectures and speeches.