Letters
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... (read more)Ian Dickson reviews 'The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II', edited by Mark Eden Horowitz
In the history of the American musical, Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) presents us with what his Siamese king would have described as a puzzlement. Lacking the sophistication of Cole Porter, the verbal dexterity of Lorenz Hart, and the sly wit of Ira Gershwin, his lyrics, taken out of context, can seem hokey and sentimental. Will he ever be forgiven for The Sound of Music’s ‘lark who is learning to pray’? And yet it is his works, written in collaboration with Richard Rodgers, that are constantly revived rather than the flimsier concoctions of his more favoured contemporaries.
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... (read more)Read this issue's Letters to the Editor. Want to write a letter to ABR? Send one to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
... (read more)Michael Shmith reviews 'A Private Spy: The letters of John le Carré' edited by Tim Cornwell
Was he John or was he David? That’s the trouble with being a literary double agent: there’s always the significant other to consider. David Cornwell, alias John le Carré, devised his pseudonym in 1958, on the same day he also created his most famous character, George Smiley, on the opening page of his first novel, Call for the Dead. This was when le Carré – a fresh recruit to MI5 and on his daily two-hour train commute into central London – ‘just began writing in a little notebook’.
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... (read more)Letters to the Editor - July-August 2010
Thursday, 01 July 2010Busted
Dear Editor,
In his essay ‘Seeing Truganini’ (May 2010), David Hansen focused on the politics around the Benjamin Law busts of Truganini and Woureddy. As an aside, he mentioned that ‘Law’s only other known bust, of Robinson himself, has been lost’. It is ironical that, as Hansen’s essay was going to print, Gareth Knapman (Museum Victoria) and Olga Tsara (State Library of Victoria) located one of the George Augustus Robinson busts in the State Library of Victoria.
... (read more)Tragedy and loss
Dear Editor,
In his otherwise eloquent defence (‘Seeing Truganini’, May 2010) of Benjamin Law’s busts of Truganini and Woureddy as ‘irreducible historical objects’, secular works of art and therefore items that should be available for free discussion and exchange, and also in his sketching of the various shades of guilt accompanying this very complex issue, David Hansen, a professional curator, is, I feel, himself ‘guilty’ of looking around these works rather than at them – in fact, not ‘seeing’ them. Dr Hansen says: ‘It is not the sculpture that conveys the extinction myth, but the way the image is and has been used in another past, a later past.’ Focusing on Truganini, he details how, when her bust was made, there were still ‘two hundred full-blood Palawa living’, Darwin’s ‘Origin’ was twenty years off, Truganini was ‘smart and vivacious, young and attractive’, and she and her treaty group were ‘A-list colonial celebrities’.
... (read more)Patterned play
Dear Editor,
Reviewing my On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction in ABR, Lisa Gorton writes, ‘Boyd shows a troubling lack of interest in the female of the human species’ (October 2009).
... (read more)