Commentary

In 1890, at the age of forty-four, William Henry Corkhill of Tilba Tilba – accountant, cheesemaker and farm manager – decided to become a photographer. There is no record of his ever receiving any training in photography, but he had, it seems, read a few books on the subject. Over the next twenty years, he would take thousands of pictures of his family, friends and neighbours, seldom venturing beyond the confines of his local community with his camera.

In 1975 Corkhill’s daughter offered the National Library his collection of glass plate negatives, which had dwindled over the intervening decades to about 1000 in number. Suffering the decays of time and damp, only 840 of the plates still retained printable images, but the record they contain of life in a small but thriving rural community at the turn of the twentieth century is fascinating. As we see Tilba Tilba through Corkhill’s eyes, he, too, as the creator of this singularly focused, longitudinal record, becomes fascinating.

Is anti-Americanism one of the last respectable prejudices in Australia, or are cries of anti-Americanism a way of silencing reasonable criticism? At the risk of being injured while straddling the fence, I will argue that, although the Bush administration has often behaved like an imperial bully-boy, the US has become the whipping boy for the anxieties of many nations and people. A broad anti-Americanism seems on the rise among Australians, possibly due to the resentment many feel about US power and the policies of this administration. Although I sympathise with many of its critics, the associated slide of many Australians into anti-Americanism is unfortunate. Presidents come and go, but America’s importance in our world and imaginations is much greater. Besides, the US is far too diverse to hate.

There cannot be many literate people left in the world today who have not heard of the appalling looting of the Iraq National Museum earlier this year. This followed the evacuation of the building on April 8 by museum personnel who had been safeguarding the site (in some cases sleeping there) up until that point. What ensued was a nightmare of cultural carnage involving an unknown number of looters who, according to Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos (head of the Joint Inter-Agency Coordination Group investigating the looting of the museum), made off with approximately 13,500 objects.

The Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Awards are the most significant awards for books aimed at young people in Australia. They guarantee short-listed books increased sales. The judges’s report is always an important document, since the eight judges read every book (give or take a few that publishers neglect to submit) published in Australia for young readers during the preceding twelve months. This gives them a unique perspective on how contemporary experience is being represented to the next generations of readers, writers, reviewers, festival-goers and book-buyers.

Art is a strange posing of discoveries, a display of what was no more possible. For it is the task of the creative artist to come up with ideas which are ours, but which we haven’t thought yet. In some cases, it is also the artist’s role to slice Australia open and show it bizarrely different, quite new in its antiquity.

Half a century ago, Sidney Nolan did just this with his desert paintings and those of drought animal carcasses. I recall seeing some of these at the Peter Bray Gallery in 1953 and being bewildered by their aridity: a cruel dryness which made the familiar Ned Kelly paintings seem quite pastoral. Nor could I get a grip on his Durack Range, which the NGV had bought three years earlier. Its lack of human signs affronted my responses.

The furthest our littoral imaginations had gone toward what used to be called the Dead Heart was then to be found in Russell Drysdale’s inland New South Wales, Hans Heysen’s Flinders Ranges, and Albert Namatjira’s delicately picturesque MacDonnells. Nolan’s own vision was vastly different: different and vast. It offered new meanings and posed big new questions.

At the outset, I acknowledge the traditional custodians on whose ancestral land Queensland’s first university stands.

It is now approaching eight years since I retired from the Bench. In the time since then, I have effectively ceased to be a lawyer. Consequently, I do not feel qualified to offer any really worthwhile professional advice to those of you who are setting out on legal careers.

The most I can do is to urge you to be true to your own personal principles and to the ethical standards which are essential to the proper practice and administration of law in this country. That having been said, I venture to share a few thoughts with you about the nation, which will be increasingly reliant on the leadership of people like yourselves as it passes through its third half-century.

It is fascinating how a single photographic image can generate a whole range of thoughts and interpretations. Take Derek Biermann’s photograph of dancer Kathryn Dunn in Gideon Obarzanek’s Fast Idol. I love the sense of movement seen in the swing of the hair, and the shimmer and subtle motion of the costume. I like to imagine I can hear a jangle coming from the metallic strips of the costume. Yet others are struck by the sense of stillness in the image. The dancer’s eyes are cast down and her head is lowered, contained, as it were, in the cradle of her arms. Some find it highly unusual as a representation of the work of Obarzanek, whose choreography now looks quite different from the way it did in 1995, when Fast Idol was made. ‘Is that really from an Obarzanek work?’ they say. Fans of Dunn admire it for the way it encapsulates her dancerly qualities. Others just like it because it’s a sexy image. What will history make of it?

The year 1937 was the centenary of the death of modern Russia’s first great poet, Alexander Pushkin. Celebration was mandatory in the USSR, and it wasn’t a good year to ignore the dictates of Stalin’s bureaucrats. So the Soviet satirist Mikhail Zoschenko takes us into a grim but determined apartment block in Moscow, past a slap-dash artistic rendering of the great poet wreathed in pine branches, into a room where the tenants are gathered and a slightly flustered youngish man is preparing to speak. There is a general doziness and smell of old onions.

This is issue no. 250, and the twenty-fifth consecutive year, of Australian Book Review. Issue No. 1 appeared in 1978, edited by John McLaren and published by the National Book Council. Since then the journal has survived and thrived, through changes of editor (though not very often) and of editorial policy (though not very much); through changes of appearance, ownership, sponsorship and affiliation.

The Underside of the fish is just as tasty as its upper flanks. Life is also like that. And leadership is not just a matter of will, power and grandeur not just like A.D Hope’s image of such power when he writes in ‘Pyramis’: