Criticism
On Spring Theatre
The chauffeur was reading Proust—something that since the creation of the world has never been known to happen outside plays or Melbourne novels. In this complacent and show-off script the characters talked about food, property, holiday destinations, foreign travel, restaurants, education, movies, books and writers, painters. Murray-Smith had turned the Saturday Age into a play.
On David Williamson
Behind me the ladies ate Maltesers, in a satirical manner, while talking of crumbling bones and ABC reruns of As Time Goes By. Seats ahead a Lily Brett novel was being waved about and animatedly discussed. We were waiting for the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of David Williamson’s new play Scarlett O’Hara at the Crimson Parrot to begin.
Mr Felton's Bequests by John Poynter
Buying for the Gallery
by Patricia Anderson
Mr Felton’s Bequests,
by John Poynter;
Miegunyah Press, 2008, $89.95.
When the National Gallery of Victoria acquired—courtesy of Mr Alfred Felton—Giambattista Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra for the sum of £31,375 in 1933, there was a commotion in Russia as well as Melbourne. Many Russian émigrés—some of whom had had valuable collections confiscated to enrich the imperial Hermitage Collection in St Petersburg—saw the sale as emblematic of its dissolution and perhaps an end to their hopes of ever recovering their own treasures. One such émigré, Mr A. Goukassow, wrote from Paris to the Times in London in despair: “We consider it our duty to our country and its history to record a most emphatic protest.”
On Burchett by Tibor Meray
This book by the well-known Hungarian author Tibor Meray has an unusual genesis. Meray and Wilfred Burchett worked together as propaganda journalists behind the communist lines during the Korean War. Meray was spreading germ warfare allegations, and Burchett interrogating allied prisoners of war.
The Problem of Aboriginal Art
What discussion there is of Aboriginal art rarely mentions the root problem. That is the disjunction that exists between Aboriginal tradition, as it is applied to visual expression, which proscribes—and even punishes—innovation and individual expression, and the fact that these are the very characteristics of art in the modern Western world.
The Return of the Old-Fashioned Thriller
Body of Lies seems like a throwback to all those morally ambiguous Cold War thrillers of the 1970s where American or British agents confronted the more or less monolithic Russian or East German intelligence services.
The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis, by Rabbi David G. Dalin
Rabbi David Dalin, a professor of history and political science, and the splendid Regnery publishing house, have done a great service in producing this book. Meticulously detailed, it completely destroys the myth that Pope Pius XII was pro-Nazi or did less than his utmost to save Jews from the Nazis, and pays tribute to what he actually did.
Magnificent Obsession: The Story of the Mitchell Library, Sydney, by Brian H. Fletcher
James McAuley is probably the only poet to celebrate a Mitchell Librarian in his verse, but almost every Australian historian, professional or amateur, for the past 100 years has applauded the Mitchell Library and its now 600,000 books, records and pictures documenting Australian history.
The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, by Marilynne Robinson
I know that some readers will share with me an ill-defined unease about modernity. Unfortunately, as we grow older, it becomes more difficult to decide whether our general mood of dissatisfaction with the zeitgeist is simply a nostalgic longing for a fondly remembered past - laudator temporis acti - or whether, indeed, things really have deteriorated.
The Fine Art of Benefaction
The mention of a signal art work, and the precipitous price paid for it in the same breath, inevitably diminishes our intuitive response to it. As the writer Jeanette Winterson once briskly put it: “The viewer does not see the colours on the canvas, he sees the colour of the money.”
Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy, by Peter Cochrane
As I read Peter Cochrane’s fine book on the beginnings of Australian democracy, William Charles Wentworth seemed less and less like Edmund Burke or Thomas Jefferson and more like John McEwen.
Australia's Birthstain: The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era, by Babette Smith
There are three cruel libels perpetrated against the Australian people. One is that we are a nation of racists; the second is that we have conducted a “genocide” against the Aboriginal people; and the third is that we are “stained” by our convict heritage.
Bernard Smith and the Formalesque
When the art historian Ernst Gombrich reviewed a book called On Quality in Art: Criteria of Excellence Past and Present in 1968, he began by saying: “A good race horse, one supposes, is one that wins races, a good chess player one who can beat his opponents … a good linguist by his testable mastery of foreign languages. But how can we tell what is a good work of art or who is a great artist?”
Melbourne Macbeths
There’s a yellowing clipping in my scrapbook showing a scene that could be straight out of a film: a gleaming black coffin, covered in red roses, carried by men in sharp suits and sunglasses, coming out of a Catholic church in Kew; a blonde crime clan matriarch in black, old men with craggy, wary faces, and muscled, moustachioed henchmen in ponytails, mingling in the mourning crowd with the elite of Melbourne society.
Haddon Chambers and the Long Arm of Neglect
Who would be your nomination as Australia’s most successful playwright? Ray Lawler? Patrick White? David Williamson? Alex Buzo? How about an Australian who had some thirty plays produced over three decades with the finest actors and directors of the day?
Shots Fired by Sam Francis
The context of a book can matter as much as its content, and this is such a case. It’s a work that invites conservatives to search their souls, and it suggests a good place to start is with the legacy of Edmund Burke.
God, Man & Hollywood: Politically Incorrect Cinema from The Birth of a Nation to The Passion of the Christ, by Mark Royden Winchell
The Hollywood film has been dominated by two eras of political correctness. The first kind of correctness, its proscriptions codified in the Production Code (also known as the Hays Code), extended from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s. It aimed to preserve and strengthen the institutions of American life. The second kind, never codified, and going strong, has had the opposite aim.
Hatred in the Balkans
It began early in 1993 with Brill, always a compulsive news watcher, becoming increasingly aware that most of the coverage of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia between the Croats and Muslims, on the one hand, and the Serbs on the other, was coming from the Croatian-Muslim point of view. Like any good newsman David wanted to know if there was another side to the story.
Nude or Naked
As the Australian art world is a little chafing dish in a world of bubbling cauldrons, it seemed improbable that an artist’s work could become fodder for broadsheets and tabloids, radio and television—for weeks on end. Those who knew of the photographer Bill Henson’s dark-toned and occasionally disquieting works were more or less confined to that chafing dish.
Children on Demand
In his thoughtful examination of parenting, Children on Demand, Tom Frame discusses all methods of achieving parenthood in our times and questions the modern demand to be a parent.
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