Commentary
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.
... (read more)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.
... (read more)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.
... (read more)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?
... (read more)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.
... (read more)'The Oily Ratbag and the Recycled Waratah: Early Years of ABR' by Kerryn Goldsworthy
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.
... (read more)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’:
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‘Dear God. Save us from those who would believe in you.’ Not long after the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11 last year, those words were sprayed on a wall in New York. Knowing what provoked them, I sense fear of religion in them. Their wit does not dilute the fear, nor does it render its expression less unsettling. To the contrary, it makes the fear more poignant and its justification more evident.
Enough people have been murdered and tortured over the centuries in the name of religion for anyone to have good reason to fear it. Is it, therefore, yet another example of the hyperbole that overwhelmed common sense and sober judgment after September 11 to sense something new in the fear expressed in that graffiti? In part, I think it is. But the thought that makes the fear seem relatively (rather than absolutely) novel is this: perhaps the horrors of religion are not corruptions of religion, but inseparable from it. To put it less strongly, but strongly enough: though there is much in religion that condemns evils committed in its name, none of it has the authority to show that fanatics who murder and torture and dispossess people of their lands necessarily practise false religion or that they believe in false gods. At best (this thought continues), religion is a mixed bag of treasures and horrors.
... (read more)When Arthur Phillips conjured up the cultural cringe fifty-two years ago – he was Arthur then, only later becoming the more formal A.A. Phillips – he had little idea how that phrase would come to haunt us. When interviewed by Jim Davidson in 1977, Phillips was rather dismissive about his original 1950 Meanjin article, although he noted that it was ‘twice nearly strangled in infancy’, first by editor Clem Christesen who hadn’t liked it, and then by a member of the Commonwealth Literary Fund Board who urged him not to include it in his collection The Australian Tradition (1958). But he attributed the popularity of the phrase to its being ‘catchily alliterative – and alliteration is the most facile stylistic trick there is’.
... (read more)September 8. Feeling like I have been away too long, I visit Warsaw to meet up with Zygmunt Bauman’s people; Budapest to catch up with Agnes Heller and her son, Yuri; Prague, just before the deluge; Leeds, to work further with Bauman; Chicago, for the American Sociological Association convention; New Haven; and Boston, where my sanity is restored, my daughter having arrived to stay with me in Cambridge. Today we are upstate New York, on the Hudson; yesterday we were in downtown Manhattan, where the aura of September 11 is strong, and more than a bit spooky. We walked down Broadway, stayed in Greenwich Village, and decided to visit the site of Ground Zero another time, if ever. The whole of America is flagged – a weird show of strength, defiance, patriotism and anxiety. The shops, in particular, all seem to bear compulsory flags on the windows and doors. You get the sense that there is not much room to move here.
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