In England, although he had been exhibited at the Royal Academy, it had again rejected his application for membership. His English and European landscapes, they seem to have felt, were not distinctive enough: his watercolours — and he was active in marketing the genre generally — were seen as potboilers. Glover hoped for some sort of rejuvenation. “The expectation of finding a new Beautiful World,” he wrote to a patron, “new landscapes new trees new flowers new Animals Birds &c &c is delightful to me.”

“I mean to take possession of 2,000 Acres,” Glover continued, and “to have a vineyard &c &c upon it.” Born the son of a tenant farmer, a gentleman-proprietor is what he wanted to be, and became. A responsible but strict father, he ran a tight ship: one (unmarried) son functioned as his personal assistant. Altogether, with the sons and their families, free labourers and convict servants, Glover was patriarch to some thirty or forty people. (We tend to forget that big colonial properties were in effect small villages.) Eventually he ran some 3000 sheep on the property, named Patterdale after a favourite spot in the Lake District. And there he died.

Ron Radford’s book, building on the scholarship of Ian McPhee, David Hansen and others, is particularly focused — as the subtitle indicates — on Glover’s Tasmanian period. But due attention is given to the English and Continental paintings, since Glover kept producing them even at Patterdale. The thing was, they sold — in England. In Tasmania, inferior paintings by English artists were preferred by homesick settlers. And they had no interest in local scenes. Apart from a few commissions, it was only at the end of his life that Glover sold one or two major Tasmanian paintings locally. He was, as Radford puts it, “the key, though isolated, figure in what can be called Tasmania’s ‘golden age’ of colonial prosperity, culture and art.”

Radford, as a sometime gallery director, is fully aware of the importance of the market, together with patronage and questions of framing. This practicality carries across to the placement of the sumptuous illustrations: they are always adjacent to the discussion of the paintings, even repeated if necessary.

Glover was a practical, prudent man — except when it came to his house. Perhaps in his enthusiasm he was led to over-estimate his own abilities, for Patterdale was built hurriedly and mistakenly on damp clay, near a soak, and of rubble sandstone. Floors and walls were inadequately joined: the façade fell away in the 1940s, to be replaced by one in concrete and weatherboard. Later there was risk of further collapse. An interesting chapter relates the post-Glover history of the house, culminating in its purchase, rebuilding and elegant restoration by Rodney and Carol Westmore.

Glover had already turned to oils in England, but at Patterdale he painted in them almost exclusively, responding to the new environment with his greatest burst of creativity. The result, writes Radford, is a succession of “realistic and light-filled celebrations of his recently adopted country.” He explains that Glover adapted a technique from his watercolouring, using a white ground which would glow through translucent glazes, helping to capture the intensity of Australian light. Indeed, the painter rose immediately to the challenge of a new country: in an early painting of a gully on Mt Wellington there is no idealisation, but characteristically Australian forest regrowth after fire, and dead stumps.

Even so, while alive to the “thrilling and graceful play in the landscape,” Glover found it more difficult to render than European ones. “There is a remarkable peculiarity in the trees,” he noted, “however numerous, they rarely prevent your tracing, through them, the whole distant Country.”

As was customary at the time, Glover did not perceive such vistas as the direct result of Aboriginal land management — burning the undergrowth to create pastures for kangaroos and wallabies, thereby making hunting easier. The assumption of white settlers was that all this was a God-given natural pasture, just waiting for the sheep and cattle to arrive. (A rare romantic strategy by Glover was to supplant sheep in his paintings with cattle, more picturesque.)

Radford is at pains to show that Glover was keenly sympathetic to the Palawa (Tasmanian Aborigines). The last tribals were being rounded up by George Augustus Robinson when Glover arrived in the colony. Robinson turned up at Patterdale with a small group of them, was well-received, and was shown massacre sites. Tellingly, Glover’s very first — and possibly last — paintings there would be of moonlight corroborees. At every opportunity he inserted the departed Aborigines into his landscapes. For Robinson he produced a painting of Aborigines Dancing at Brighton, Tasmania, explaining that “the figures are too small to give much likeness — my object was to give an idea of the gay happy life the Natives had before the White people came,” and also, he added, “an idea of the Scenery of the Country.” Interestingly, there are almost no whites and no cultivation in his landscapes. They are Edenic, essentially a record of what they were like before the invasion.

At one level Glover was, as the historian W.K. Hancock put it, “shedding an economical tear” about the displacement. For it was so recent, and in stark contrast to Glover’s sense of his own achievement on the same land, caught forever in the famous paintings of his house and garden and in the “My” of My Harvest Home. A contradiction: you might say that — surrealistically — his characteristic spaghetti gum trees had buckled under the strain. For there are few like that around Patterdale, yet Glover fixated on them; they became a trope. Significantly, Radford points to a yearning for synthesis: late works include an ambiguous Ben Lomond (Scotland — or Tasmania?) and the fanciful A Dream At 82.

Glover is still underestimated. Working in Tasmania alone and now perceived as a white man, he was described only a few weeks ago in the press as the “so-called father of Australian landscapes.” Yet, as Ron Radford tells us, he is still the Australian artist most widely represented in galleries abroad — extending to a good half dozen American ones, and the Louvre. Equally tellingly, Tom Roberts — having married into a northern Tasmanian family — painted the landscape Glover’s Country in homage around 1929. When he died a couple of years later, Roberts chose not to be buried where he lived, at Kallista in Victoria, but in a Tasmanian churchyard within view of Glover’s Ben Lomond. And twenty years ago, the locals of Evandale instituted the annual Glover Prize for Tasmanian landscapes, a prestigious and generous award.

In all, it is an impressive node of continuing influence, buttressed by the preservation order recently placed on the Patterdale landscape and the scrupulous restoration of the house. Ron Radford’s book will go a long way to making Glover even better known. •

John Glover: Patterdale Farm and the Australian Landscape
By Ron Radford | Ovata Press | $49.95 | 216 pages

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My Damascene conversion came only recently, and it occurred at Bega, a dairy town on the NSW south coast near where I now live. Far from the urban smog and traffic jams and celebrities, the south coast celebrates its own distinct cultural vibe. It has just reopened its art gallery — mid-town, gem-like — with an exhibition of the 2023 Archibald finalists.

Like any collective venture in regional Australia, the gallery needs volunteers. I put my hand up, and since the gallery opened I’ve spent several full days as a gallery volunteer prowling around in the silent presence of the fifty-seven portraits. It’s been a full-immersion experience, and now, like any new convert, I’ve become a zealous proselytiser.

What is it about the Archibalds? Since childhood, we’ve learned to appraise the people we meet by looking at their faces. We learn their age, their experience, their character; we understand whom we can trust. Show us fifty-seven faces on the walls of an art gallery and it’s the same: we’re all experts.

So people feel comfortable walking into the Archibalds — this is as true in Bega as it is in the city — and expressing strong opinions about what (that is, who) they see. Greeting them as familiars, paying them rapt attention, glancing at them sideways or dismissing them with a shrug.

Inevitably the popular portraits are of popular people. The winner of the People’s Choice award in Sydney was Noni Hazlehurst, who appears in Jaq Grantford’s portrait as a wise friendly spirit peering at us through a misty window — the epitome of trustworthiness, with fond memories of Play School thrown in for those of a certain vintage.

The challenge for the artists is to reveal the inner character of their subject by displaying their external appearance — their face, clothing, posture, location. And the challenge for the viewer is to decipher the inner life by inspecting that external paraphernalia. There’s a dual level operating, and we zoom backwards and forwards as we go.

Zoe Young’s portrait of NRL star Latrell Mitchell captures this best. It is actually two paintings, both larger than life. On the left we see the public footballing star, isolated mid-game under artificial lights, his Rabbitohs jumper covered with logos; he’s further objectified because we can only see him via the medium of a TV screen. On the right we see the private man, stripped to his waist, holding his child, under natural light in the natural landscape of his Country. Each Latrell is looking towards the other, across the frame of the paintings, but neither is connecting; one wonders how the man keeps both sides together.

It’s a profound moment, and when the school group came through the Bega gallery last week, they spent more time talking about Latrell than about Noni.

Being able to host an exhibition of this scale is a big deal for Bega. Sydney is a six-hour drive up the highway, so having the Archibald come here provides connection and stimulation. Tourists like having something different to do, school kids appreciate it, but the locals love it most of all. They feel respected, as they should, and treat the occasion seriously.

One of the little tricks portraitists can use is to give their sitter a prop — something distinctive to hold or wear or sit on — which helps us identify and understand them. This can be wonderfully subtle, as in the portrait of journalist Katharine Murphy. She looks just as we know her from Insiders — except here, as she serenely sits for Judith Sinnamon, she’s actually listening to a podcast through an ear bud. She’s busy, right?, and won’t waste a moment.

Without doubt the best prop in the show, not at all subtle, is an oversized crown made out of shiny colourful baubles and dolls’ heads and other tinselly things, worn with style by the late lamented comedian Cal Wilson. You can’t look at it without smiling. (Andrea Huelin’s portrait won the Packing Room prize in 2023.)

So, props are great. My pet peeve is text. I’m a text person, but to me, too much text defeats the purpose of a visual image and weakens the emphasis on the face. (And I note that none of the previous winners employs text.)

The question I get asked most frequently by visitors, as I stand around waiting to be asked questions, is: who won? Because ultimately the Archibald is a competition, and we need to rank what we see against everything else on display and come up with a favourite.

I point our visitors to the last portrait they’ll see before leaving the exhibition: Julia Gutman’s painting of singer-songwriter Montaigne. It’s a beautiful evocation, in oils and embroidered textiles, of a young musician’s dynamic creativity, with the excellent title Head in the Sky, Feet on the Ground. Some of the visitors grumble about textiles not being “appropriate” but most are delighted with the choice of the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales…

… except, in the Archibald sprit of everyone being entitled to their own opinion, I think it’s a shame they overlooked Natasha Bieniek’s Self-Portrait — tiny, exquisite, a microscopic universe of light and vegetation. And not a celebrity. •

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When the winning entry in a small Australian photo competition was revealed as “fake” earlier this year, there was much debate over whether technology was taking over from people. What purported to be a drone photo of a beach had been generated using AI. Not long after, followers of another photographer’s Instagram account were dismayed when he revealed he had used AI to create images.

Some react angrily to revelations like these, expressing outrage at a fake photo masquerading as real; others claim that its fakeness was always obvious. The waves are going in the wrong direction, as more than one person said of the beach photo. “If you know what to look for, you can spot these fakes at a single glance,” say the founders of the website Which Face Is Real? (“For the time being,” they add.)

Given that photographic experimentation and manipulation dates back to the very beginnings of the medium, it is hard to understand why this kind of stunt generates such dismay. The cry from doubters over the direction AI is taking us in overlooks the fact that judging the realness of an image has never been straightforward.

Ambiguity over authorship has been part of the world of photography since the beginning, with anonymity and attribution coexisting for the most part comfortably. That world contains works by professional photographers, some of them with stratospheric reputations, alongside “found images” made by amateurs and unknowns, quite possibly created by accident and involving the very minimum of human agency.

The success of a photographic image, its ability to strike a chord in the viewer, has never depended on its place on the spectrum of authorship. We might seek out further images by a photographer we admire because experience tells us that it will be likely to work its magic on us. But we can equally value images whose provenance we will never know.

Such has been the proliferation of photographic images in the digital, “pre-AI era” — that is, up until yesterday — that we are already well attuned to the difficulty of keeping up with the images themselves, not to say with who made what. Anonymous images blend with attributed ones, and if individual images stand out from the crowd we don’t always understand why.

A significant number of practitioners in these early days of AI photography are dealing with this complicated relationship by using handles rather than names. “What led you to choose anonymity,” a Vogue Italia interviewer asks Str4ngThing, an “AI artist of fashion,” to which the answer is “to leave room for interpretation.” This is a neat device for having it both ways — allowing the image to speak for itself while being credited at one remove with whatever success and approbation it may enjoy.

Approbation as a photographer was already running up against the fact that it has become increasingly difficult for an image to stand out not only because there are so many of them, but also because so many closely resemble one another. It has long been the case that certain themes have their moment, with photographers coalescing around those themes — portraiture with the face obscured in some way, photographic re-enactments of the old masters, moody shots of abandoned buildings.

The popular Instagram account, Insta Repeat, has great fun pointing out the unoriginal nature of so much photography, not only by displaying clusters of sunsets and waterfalls, but also by showing how specific subjects — the photographer’s feet dangling over a precipitous cliff, for example — are suddenly everywhere.

Yet all those sunsets also point, in an exaggerated way perhaps, to one of the more attractive aspects of photography as a creative art — its ability to foster collaboration and cross fertilisation, and to encourage emulation. Just as copying the old masters is a way of building painterly skills and confidence, so is making yet another image of a sunset or a girl with a pearl earring a means of mastering the capacities of the photographic medium.

AI is the beneficiary of this profusion. By mining the online datasets, image generation tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E and Stable Diffusion draw on untold numbers of extant, humanly created images, out of which new, AI-generated images are built.

According to Jaron Lanier, among the most illuminating chroniclers of the technological age, these tools “mash up work done by human minds… illuminating concordances between human creations.” Crucially, they are facilitators rather than independent creators. They are not in themselves new minds, Lanier says with confidence.

The philosopher and neuroscientist Raphaël Millière similarly emphasises the primacy of human artistic creativity in the face of this current whirlwind of technological advancement. The nature of artistic creation will change, he says, as it has often changed in the past, but the artist will remain in control.

The key to this artistic control lies in the text, the “prompts” used to instruct the program to produce an image. “This means that visual artists can now craft their art with words, much like poets,” says Millière, forming “a new bridge between linguistic and visual forms of artistic expression.”

The French filmmaker and artist Alain Astruc posts similarly stimulating reflections on the nature of AI image-making on his Substack. He is pleased to discover through his explorations of the new tools what he calls “a certain poetry of the prompt.” Astruc sees prompting as being both an art in itself and a new and exciting means of image creation. It is no surprise, given the power of the prompt, that instructional guides to effective prompting now abound on the internet, following on from the legions of tips on how to get the best out of your photo-editing software.

It is not only emerging young practitioners who are embracing AI. Hailing from an earlier, post-war generation, American photographer Laurie Simmons is well known for her innovative practice, and in particular for her staged scenes of domesticity involving carefully placed dolls and dummies. These images, borderline cute in a deeply unsettling way, have a distinctly proto-AI look to them.

Simmons has recently moved, by her own account quite seamlessly, into exploring the capabilities of AI. The tools can produce unexpected and even unwelcome results, but this only encourages greater deliberation and thought in her choice of prompts. “I feel like an AI whisperer,” she has said.

But perhaps a certain amount of wishful thinking is going on here. Judging by the prompt sequences AI explorers share online, few if any are raising the bar of poetic expression. Nevertheless, the sentiment expressed by Millière, Astruc and Simmons rings true: there is something essentially poetic about the art of prompting, of playing with words to produce the most satisfying result.

It is far too early to tell whether these various expressions of optimism are well founded. The question remains, do the various tools for AI image generation genuinely foster creativity, or do they stifle it? So much is being produced, so much experimentation and playing around is going on, that nobody quite knows.

A further, even more difficult question is whether these images are any good. Do they strike a chord? The critical vocabulary for assessing photography, never very robust, is at a loss when it comes to AI images. The standard online response to an individual AI image is along the lines of “impressive,” “wow” or “ground-breaking,” and from there the eye moves on in an instant.

The only meaningful form of validation so far comes from the collector, occasionally a museum but more often an individual, someone who is “comfortable in the space” and confident enough to pick an NFT image or two from the latest collection, transfer however many Ethereum in payment, and wait patiently to see if their investment pays off — in financial gain, growth of the artist’s reputation, or both.

In that sense, old-fashioned connoisseurship is back with a vengeance. The collector’s eye has become at least as important as the photographer’s in ensuring the continuing life of the image.

This leaves photography seemingly poised between the past and the future, but this is nothing new. Photography has always embodied the transitional state. Even the most “realistic” photograph captures an unrealistic stillness, an artificially stopped moment between the past and the future.

The New York activist photographer and filmmaker of the 1980s, David Wojnarowicz, in his memoir Close to the Knives (1991), suggests that this affinity with transitional states is what drives him as a photographer. “I hate arriving at a destination. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.”

In our current cultural climate, where we are especially fascinated by states of transition — with the spaces between fixed identities, between points of departure and points of arrival — it is not surprising that AI photography should be so heavily preoccupied with the “disconnected and unfamiliar.” Images produced with the aid of AI typically dodge questions of origins and destinations, mixing up the past and the future in a single frame, so that we have little sense of beginnings and endings.

When a human-like figure appears in the frame, they will often have a lost or bewildered expression, as if they don’t quite know what they are doing there or where they have come from. The Canberra-based artist Lilyillo, who describes herself as “collaborating” with AI, places her mock-human subjects in ways that parody conventional studio portraiture, covering them in bright harlequinesque patterns and giving them dreamy, spaced-out expressions, as though they have dressed themselves up and have nowhere to go.

Her images — and those of many other AI artists — suggest that whoever came up with the name of Midjourney for the popular image-generation tool was on to something. Either that, or it constitutes an outstanding instance of nominative determinism. For the great majority of AI images do indeed occupy a middle space, blending past and imagined future by means of a kind of retro-futurism, in which recognizable if distorted figures are placed within fantastical, quirky or off-kilter settings.

The result is unsettling, or “uncanny,” to use the most frequently deployed descriptor for this effect. Freudian notions of uncanniness have long been associated with photography and many past practitioners have deliberately sought to explore and highlight this effect. But the overwhelming emphasis of AI image making on this quality of strangeness is something new.

According to the online platform Fellowship, which displays curated examples of AI photography, “much of the ethos of AI work we have seen so far,” its visual language, can be summed up in the words “uncanny, surreal, fantasy and otherworldliness.” In other words, they’re not real.

Instead, AI helps the artist to create “complex, uncanny, neo-surreal images that can shift artistic styles seamlessly,” says Jess Mac, whose work (including this image) appears in Fellowship’s first group show of emerging AI artists, posted online in April. “This allows for a queering of the imagery,” they say, “undoing normative representations of gender, kinship, and embodiment with ease.” Alain Astruc’s forthcoming exhibition (which might well include these images), to be held in June in Cahors in southern France, has as its title “In the Valley of the Strange,” which is perfectly on point.

Taken as a whole, across the range of AI image production, this preoccupation with uncanniness can feel suffocating. It seems paradoxical that a technology that promises so much creativity and variety can produce so much sameness of approach, but that could fairly be said of the camera too — think of all those sunsets. The capacity for repetition and sameness has never precluded the emergence and the recognition of images that stand out and that strike a spark in the viewer, and something similar will increasingly happen with AI photography.

In contrast to the dispiriting idea that the exciting times, photographically speaking, are over, that all the good photographs have been taken — that the golden age of mid-century photography isn’t coming back — the advocates for AI as an image-making tool have launched a counter-narrative, in which the creation of “photographic” images is being reinvented and re-energised.

Like it or not, the term AI photography is doubtless here to say, even as some persuasively maintain that it’s not photography at all — that it would be more accurately if less sharply described as photography-like. Some favour the term “synthography” on impeccably logical grounds, but it has a bit of a robot-generated ring to it and is unlikely to catch on. AI photography could also be described as AI illustration, in that it is the rendering of text as image, but that hardly sounds cutting-edge.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of AI imaging, at least in the department of cultural change, is its dependence on words. We are even told that tools will soon become widely available that link directly to our thoughts. We will be able to think an image, which others will then view and perhaps admire.

But for the moment it is words, or prompts, that deliver the picture, by means of a technical miracle that most of us can barely comprehend. Just as we have long been familiar with the idea that every picture tells a story, so we will soon unquestioningly absorb this new iteration of the relationship between word and image, in which every story tells a picture. •

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The number of active and fluent speakers of these languages is low and declining. Among the Indigenous population aged under twenty-five — half the region’s Indigenous population — the lingua franca is primarily English and Kimberley Kriol, a relatively recent hybrid. The 2016 census listed 2315 Kriol speakers and just 158 Gija speakers.

Colonisation came late to the East Kimberley. The four decades of frontier violence after the pastoral invasion in the early 1880s caused untold — and largely unrecorded — loss of life as a result of disease, economic and social disruption, and overt violence. Today’s Aboriginal population of the East Kimberley are the descendants of the survivors of that forty-year war — survivors who made an accommodation with the owners of the cattle that had disrupted their waterholes and destroyed the basis of their subsistence livelihood.

The incentive for Aboriginal people to detach themselves from their subsistence lifestyle, attach themselves to missions and work on pastoral stations was reinforced by the imperative to avoid the pervasive violence of pastoralists and police, and possible exile to Rottnest Island and other prisons. Working for pastoralists at least gave traditional owners continued access to their Country, and time off for ceremonies during the wet season, and removed the risks of relying completely on subsistence.

Despite their concessions, Kimberley people have strenuously sought to maintain their cultures and languages. They have established cultural and language resource centres across the region, and many of the region’s schools support language maintenance. The Ngalangangpum School at the Warmun community and the Purnululu Community School at Frog Hollow, or Woorreralbam, both in the heart of Gija Country, offer instruction in English and Gija. But these cultural maintenance projects increasingly compete against the pressures of modernity and commercialism.

This is the context for Aboriginal Studies Press’s recent publication of Gija Dictionary. Its authors, Frances Kofod, Eileen Bray, Rusty Peters, Joe Blythe and Anna Crane, have produced an extraordinary linguistic resource for Gija people, derived from thirty-plus years of linguistic research, especially by Kofod, and the expert language skills of Gija co-authors Bray and Peters and the linguistic contributions of around sixty other Gija collaborators.

This is not simply an etymological project, translating vocabulary and explaining meaning; in many respects, it allows Gija speakers — and learners — to see themselves and their culture in a linguistic mirror. It reflects and documents the sophisticated worldview, developed over eons, that enabled Gija society to thrive in one of the most severe environments in Australia.

Gija Dictionary opens by introducing Gija language and Country, with an excellent map illustrating the extent of Gija Country’s approximately 30,000 square kilometres. Individual chapters deal with spelling and pronunciation, word classes, grammar and, importantly, Gija relationships. The core of the book, the Gija-to-English dictionary, defines in excess of 5000 words and phrases, and a separate and more succinct English-to-Gija word-finder identifies the Gija terms for more than 3500 English words.

But merely listing the contents doesn’t do justice to the effort and innovative thinking that have gone into producing a dictionary useful to Gija speakers, to future Gija learners, and to teachers, health workers and others interested in learning Gija.

Importantly, the introductory chapters explain the conceptual underpinnings of the Gija language: the fact, for example, that topographical directions (upstream/downstream; uphill/downhill) are just as important as cardinal directions. Interspersed through the text are more than ninety photos of current and past community members, local wildlife and significant locations, each labelled with a phrase in Gija, thus encouraging readers to look up the words to interpret the photo.

Not surprisingly, the dictionary is replete with vocabulary that reflects the social and cultural concerns of traditional Gija speakers, including their outdoor lives and focus on being on Country. Often, Gija terms have no equivalent word in English: for example, the English-to-Gija word-finder lists around twenty terms for different actions associated with the concept “walk.” Or, to pick terms almost at random, galayi means to shade your eyes with a hand while looking at something; galayyimarran refers to being in the brightness at sunrise or sunset; dooloo means to make smoke as a signal or as part of a smoking ceremony.

The word-finder also demonstrates the centrality of spears to traditional Gija life. It lists five different types of spear and six different types of spearhead, along with terms for using spears, such as hooking onto a woomera, straightening a spear, and throwing a spear at someone. My favourite is the word bililib: to drag a spear surreptitiously with your toes.

In Gija culture, the relationship between speakers is always significant. The Gija Dictionary’s definition of garij, calling someone’s name aloud, notes that this is considered an action with serious consequences depending on your relationship with the person named. It also includes a short explanation of the terms used in joking relationships between individuals denoted as ganggayi.

Were I to use any of the swear words listed, Gija speakers would respond with an interjection warri-warri if I was swearing at my parent or uncle or aunt, or yigelany if I was swearing at my brother or sister. If I swore at my brother- or sister-in-law, they would make a kissing noise and two tsk tsk clicks. They would then look away, use their hand to signal me to stop swearing, and then move their hands to block their ears.

Just as the dictionary reflects Gija culture for Gija speakers and learners, it provides a window that allows non-Indigenous readers to glimpse the Gija way of experiencing the world. Gija speakers’ grafting of new meanings onto old terms to incorporate non-Indigenous categories and technologies demonstrates their culture’s inherent dynamism.

Examples of Gija linguistic repurposing abound in the dictionary. For example, it identifies two words for police officer: mernmerdgaleny (literally, one who is good at tying up) and ngerlabany (having string or rope). In a similar vein, the word dimal, for boat, appears to be an appropriation of the English word “steamer.” A note explains that this is an old word used by Gija people, derived from the Aboriginal pronunciation of steamer and referring to the steam ships that transported Aboriginal prisoners to Rottnest Island.

Or take the word lendij, which means either to write or to read, but also to pressure flake a stone. The word came to mean writing because the old people saw it as a similar action to pressure flaking stone spearheads with a small hard stick called a mangadany. The transition from writing to reading followed naturally.

Other words have similarly been adapted. Ngoorr-ngoorrgalill means car (good at growling), with similar variants for car key and car engine. Wingini, which originally meant to spin around and around on the spot, now refers to being drunk. With a gender change, the term for wedge-tailed eagle (wirli-wirlingarnany) refers to an aeroplane (wirli-wirlingarnal). The word for photograph, ngaaloom, is repurposed from the word for shade and shadow.

What these words show is that Gija speakers, while anxious to maintain their language, have been prepared to incorporate non-Indigenous technological, cultural and institutional concepts within the Gija language. This engagement and accommodation has always been strategic, aimed at conceding what can’t successfully be defended, but also reflects a determination to find ways to protect what is important to Gija culture. The dictionary’s presentation of a unique Gija language, culture and worldview provides tangible proof that Australians inhabit a multiverse rather than a narrow social, economic and cultural universe.

While Australian English has similarly incorporated Indigenous vocabulary (boomerang, kangaroo), it is not obvious, at least to me, that this extends to the widespread adoption of such fundamental Indigenous notions as deep respect for Country and the power of reciprocity in cementing ongoing relationships. For all the talk of pursuing social justice and reconciliation with First Nations, mainstream Australia appears unable to acknowledge the extent of the loss suffered by Aboriginal people as a result of colonisation.

Most importantly, the nation appears unable to see — really see — that Indigenous people like the Gija have been prepared to make extraordinary compromises in order to bring the endemic violence of the frontier wars to an end and, later, to survive the upheaval of the equal-wages decision in the 1960s, which led to mass dismissals of Aboriginal pastoral workers and the forced removal of their families from stations.

It is an extraordinary paradox that while the few hundred Gija speakers are among the poorest and most disadvantaged Australians, at least a dozen Gija speakers are represented in international art galleries from Paris to New York, and in every capital city in Australia.

While other schools of Indigenous art have equivalent international reputations, Gija artists certainly hold their own. A reproduction of a work by Gija artist Lena Nyadbi is etched on the roof of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and can be seen from the Eiffel Tower. Internationally known artists such as Paddy Jaminji, Queenie McKenzie, Rusty Peters, Rover Thomas and Paddy Bedford (all of whom are now deceased but contributed to and inhabit the Gija Dictionary) are the subjects of published biographies or catalogues dedicated to their art.

In putting the East Kimberley on the international art map, these artists have also put Australia on the map. The core element in their success was their knowledge of Country and the intellectual capital inherent in Gija “ways of being,” both reflected in the Gija language.

Yet the demographics of the Kimberley are changing. Modern transport, communications technology, regional economic developments, educational opportunities and even sporting opportunities have expanded the horizons of young Gija speakers. The future of Kimberley languages is no longer guaranteed. If the Gija language does disappear, we will all lose not just a language but also an alternative worldview, a way of seeing and inhabiting the world that reflects and emerged from 60,000 years of living on this land.

At its most fundamental level, as an assertion of the legitimacy of Gija perspectives and worldview, the Gija Dictionary represents the next stage in the Gija’s 140-year quest to make their way into the future on their own terms. Its publication is an opportunity for the nation to acknowledge the inherent legitimacy of an alternative Gija worldview and to recognise the strategic compromises and accommodations imposed upon, and made by, Gija people.

Of course, the Gija are not alone in this respect. Hundreds of First Nations have experienced similar histories since 1788. Such an acknowledgement must involve — at the very least — taking effective action to repay younger First Nations generations with the skills that will assist them to continue living successfully in an increasingly multicultural Australia and world, along with substantive financial and policy commitment to language support and maintenance.

First Nations’ languages are a strategic cultural asset for the Australian nation and its people, yet they all confront existential risks. If reconciliation means anything, it means ensuring the survival of these intellectual and cultural assets. The value of the Gija Dictionary is that it is a modest but determined and tangible step in that direction.

Within two years, the nation may have a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice. By 2050, will the Indigenous Voice be limited to communicating in English, or might it youwoori (speak loudly), gooyoorrgboo (speak with power to change Country), wiyawoog (speak or sing to ward off danger) or even just jarrag Gija (speak in Gija)? •

Gija Dictionary
By Frances Kofod, Eileen Bray, Rusty Peters, Joe Blythe and Anna Crane | Aboriginal Studies Press | $34.95 | 430 pages

The post A dictionary for the future appeared first on Inside Story.

I’ve been back in Alice Springs since October 2018 to make repairs to my unit and live cheaply while I finish writing a book, Into the Loneliness, about two women who roamed outback Australia last century. I first moved here in 2003, and even after I shifted to Melbourne in 2010 I was never entirely absent, returning to Central Australia every few months to work on a research project.

January is typically when Alice people flee to the coast to avoid the heat, but this year it’s even hotter and more humid than I remember it during the noughts. In summers past, say long-term residents, the temperature usually fell to 15°C at night, but high maximums these days are accompanied by high minimums. One morning when I was making breakfast the temperature was already 39°C.

“Heat wave” — the term that’s used on the news — is surely a euphemism for what we’re experiencing. A 2015 CSIRO report says Alice Springs averaged seventeen days above 40°C each year during 1981–2010 and forecast the figure rising to thirty-one days by 2030. When fifty-five days exceeded 40°C between July 2018 and June 2019 I began to wonder when the desert capital will become uninhabitable.

By the year’s end, the town is awash. On Christmas Eve 2019 I wake to see brown water churning between the normally barren Todd River’s banks across the road from my townhouse.

During the year I’ve struck up an acquaintance in the library with a Luritja woman from Papunya, chatting with her whenever she brings in her grandkids to use the computers. When I admire how the rain overnight brought out the fresh bush scents, she disagrees. She didn’t like it at all; it was too hard to find anywhere dry to sleep. She’d been sleeping rough, of course, maybe in the saltbushes hemming the Todd or in the riverbed.

That’s where some of the library’s local Arrernte regulars sleep, along with the Warlpiri, Anangu, Alyawarr and Warramungu who come into Mparntwe from their communities, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, for cultural purposes, or to shop for supplies, use services or catch up with family and friends. Some stay with relatives in one of Alice Springs’s seventeen town camps or sleep overnight in or around the riverbed, then eat and shower at the Salvos before coming to the library.

Local Indigenous leaders fear that climate change will drive many from their traditional homelands to towns like Alice, escaping from flooded communities and overcrowded houses unsuited to extreme temperatures. “We are already suffering through hotter, drier and longer summers in our overcrowded hotbox houses,” says Central Land Council chair Sammy Wilson.

After the deluge, the usually bare slopes of the West MacDonnell ranges, flanking the town, are festooned in green. It would be tempting to see this as a La Niña bonus if not for the fact that much of the greenery is buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris), an insidious invasive species introduced by pastoralists to feed cattle. Buffel overwhelms native grasses, driving out bilbies and other small creatures and impeding local people’s collection of bush foods. Because of its intense flammability, traditional fire management practices no longer work. As Arrernte Anmatyerr poet Patricia Perrurle Ansell Dodds writes, “It’s too dry now. / The summer is too hot. / That buffel grass is everywhere.”

Back in January a boy had appeared in my peripheral vision as I drove out of the library car park one steamy evening. When he rolled across my bull bar in a loose, graceful motion I slammed on the brakes, fearful of hurting him, then bit back my irritation, waiting for him to move. How old was he? Eight; ten at the most. He was playing chicken, trying to provoke me, and when I failed to respond, he staggered away melodramatically.

I eased out of the car park, a little shaken and annoyed, although I’d soon be home sipping a G&T on my balcony with its view of the MacDonnells. I regained my equilibrium, distanced myself from what this scene ws a reminder of — the youth crime wave said to be plaguing the town.

When I first lived in Alice during the noughts, youth crime was expected to rise over the summer holidays. Since then, reports suggest it has reached epidemic proportions all year round. Aboriginal kids as young as eight are said to be roaming the streets in packs at night and “running amok.” Most of my friends have a story about a window being smashed, a house broken into, or a car being taken for a joyride, sometimes repeatedly.

This time round, the youth crime wave has become the main topic in what writer Robyn Davidson wryly calls The Conversation — the constant discussion about First Nations people among progressives in Alice Springs. Davidson, famous for walking with camels from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean, has been dipping in and out of the town since 1977 while many of the “white do-gooders” (as they are called by their detractors in town) associated with the land rights movement and Aboriginal-controlled organisations in the 1970s and 80s have retired or moved to the coast. Over the past decade, in their stead, my gen-X contemporaries have shifted into the senior ranks of the local chatterati while millennials have refreshed many creative and political spaces in town with their artistic and digital agility. An Indigenous middle class has also emerged, often holding key managerial roles in Aboriginal-controlled organisations.

To live in Alice Springs, regardless of whether you were born here or why you came here, is to be caught up in The Conversation. The reasons relate to Mparntwe’s role as what the late Arrernte artist W. Rubuntja called a “little Central Australian Rome — too much Tywerrenge [or Law].” It is a cultural, social and economic focal point for First Nations people from the cross-border region of the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.

Because colonisation occurred later here than in the southeast, First Nations people consequently make up a greater proportion of Alice Springs’s population of 25,000 (a shade over one in five, according to the 2021 census) than of densely populated coastal cities. With the fallout from the encounter between First Nations people and settlers more evident in daily life, The Conversation in Alice Springs is more direct and less notional than the talk on the east coast.

Within eighteen months of my return to Alice Springs in 2018, my van’s passenger window has been broken repeatedly — once in my carport and three times in the library car park. Around the complex where I live, shattered car windows often glint in the grass like dew-encrusted cobwebs. Friends advise me to leave the van unlocked with a window half down so people can break in without shattering the glass. The windows remain intact but I sometimes find signs — an open door or glove box, a cigarette butt — that someone has rummaged around overnight.

A local glazier says he replaced thirty car windows each day during the recent midyear school holidays. Most shop windows in Todd Mall, the main business drag, are shuttered to protect them overnight, dampening what was once a colourful tourist precinct. Windows in the town council chambers and the library were often smashed while I worked there; once the aquatic centre fell victim to a midnight vandalism spree, with eighteen windows shattered and computers thrown into the pool.

The town is “under siege,” one headline declares. On community social media forums people cite the continued break-ins, loss of property and vehicle damage as reasons why they’re leaving town, posting photos and footage from home security cameras of break-ins. The issue of race frequently surfaces:

Sorry but the way I see it now is that anybody with white skin is simply not welcome.

Time to leave.

Where are the parents? comes the cry, along with exhortations to get tough on crime and employ more police to ensure no kids are on the streets after a certain time.

A friend who works with children in care in Alice Springs tells me about how, when she encouraged a boy to reflect on the consequences of theft, he replied, “Whitefellas have lots of stuff. They can always get more stuff.” One possible interpretation is that the rise in crime is an up-yours to the coloniser — to those who’ve taken so much and have so much — by young people exiled to the shadow zones of intergenerational trauma and poverty.

Whatever its causes, statistics lend weight to the perceptions of rising crime and rising rates of recidivism among young people. In 2019–20, NT Police proceeded more than once against 54 per cent of offenders aged ten to fourteen and 37 per cent of offenders aged fifteen to nineteen (with the older cohort making up 82 per cent of all offenders), indicating high rates of reoffending. Young people detained by NT police are overwhelmingly Indigenous.

That youth crime should have burgeoned in Alice Springs over the past decade seems no coincidence. During the noughts, the main Conversation topics within local social justice organisations were violence against women and substance misuse. Central Australia was experiencing record rates of alcohol consumption and associated harms, including assaults, mainly against Aboriginal people. These declined over the next decade following the introduction of alcohol harm-reduction measures, including the NT government’s Banned Drinkers Register, a Labor policy implemented in 2011–12 and then resumed in 2017, when Labor resumed office.

Many young people were consequently born to parents who drank alcohol to harmful levels and mothers who experienced family violence. According to an NT government report, “at least one child is subjected to domestic and family violence every day of the year in the Northern Territory.” Other children live with the effects of having witnessed family violence; still others leave unsafe and overcrowded living situations and gain a sense of identity in street gangs.

Central Australian Youth Link Up Service report seeing a rise in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and other neurological conditions. While the current incidence of the disorder is unknown, a 2003 study calculated its prevalence in the Territory’s Aboriginal children to be between 1.87 and 4.7 per 1000 live births, compared with an estimated national rate of 0.02 per 1000 non-Indigenous children. Parents and educators find these young people, afflicted by limited attention spans, hyperactive behaviour and other learning difficulties, difficult to engage in educational, social, recreational and other activities.

Their parents are often young: in 2019, a fifth of Aboriginal mothers who gave birth in the Alice Springs region weren’t yet twenty. Often they haven’t completed school and face limited job opportunities, especially in remote areas. Around half remote-living Indigenous people don’t receive income from either wages or a Centrelink allowance, so they fall back on families for support, lifting poverty among the broader group. Census data indicates that between 2006 and 2016 Indigenous poverty rates increased to 50 per cent in very remote areas while falling to 22 per cent among Indigenous people in the major cities.

Food, fuel and other essentials were already more expensive in regional centres — and higher still in remote communities — but have hiked further in Alice Springs and its satellite communities since late 2021. Petty crime can be driven by something as basic as hunger.

The rise in crime and poverty also coincided with the implementation of the Howard government’s NT National Emergency Response and Labor’s Stronger Families policy. The BasicsCard, an income management tool introduced in town camps and prescribed communities in 2007, was extended to all welfare recipients in the Territory in June 2010. Fifty per cent of recipients’ Centrelink payments and 70 per cent of child protection payments could be spent only on food, clothing and rent. Financial penalties applied if, for example, children failed to attend school.

The BasicsCard was accompanied by the Community Development Program, a work-for-the-dole program that required remote participants to work for longer hours than their non-remote counterparts. Unlike its predecessor, the long-running Community Development Employment Projects scheme, the CDP was designed without any input from local communities.

Because allowances under these schemes were suspended if participants were unable to meet requirements, poverty rose. An ANU analysis found increased rates of infant mortality, child abuse and neglect, and a rise in low birth weights and child deaths from injury — a sad irony, given that the first round of reforms came in response to the Little Children Are Sacred report.

The rate of family violence in the Territory remains staggeringly high, and in 2021 recorded the greatest annual increase (12 per cent) in family and domestic violence-related assault victims across the country. NT police data indicate that nine out of ten victims were Aboriginal, and eight were Aboriginal women. “It is not an exaggeration to say that intimate partner violence committed upon Aboriginal women in the NT is pervasive,” NT coroner Greg Cavanagh said in 2016. “Almost three quarters” of NT Aboriginal women have been victims of intimate partner violence.

The Tangentyere Women’s Family Safety Group in Alice Springs has developed resources and initiatives to assist women and men in tackling family violence, but the lack of women’s refuges and other services, especially in very remote areas, and long waiting times for already overburdened clinics exacerbate the risks for those seeking to escape violence.

Although the fallout from this crisis is devastating, even the most distressing incidents scarcely rate a mention in national media. Which is why campaigners from the Tangentyere group held a vigil one Sunday in July this year to mourn the deaths of a mother and child, allegedly shot by the woman’s forty-one-year-old partner in a murder-suicide out of town. About one hundred of us gathered on the lawn outside Alice Springs Court and laid flowers on the grass and wrote messages of support to the family. Friends and relatives spoke about the impact of the loss of this thirty-year-old Aboriginal woman and her fourteen-week-old baby.

While the campaigners hoped the vigil would raise national awareness of the high incidence of family-violence-related deaths among First Nations women, the deaths received little attention outside Alice Springs. Indeed, more coverage was given to the shooting of three whitefellas in a property dispute in north Queensland the following month. And the small turnout for the vigil seems telling, too, in a town that focuses so much outrage on property crimes.

Strange things happened in Central Australia during the pandemic. After the first lockdown was announced on 23 March 2020, the streets of Alice Springs became abnormally quiet. Heeding the strong messages carried by remote Indigenous and national media about Covid-19’s risks, people stayed inside their houses or returned to their communities.

Behind closed doors in the library, we continued to provide borrowing and printing services, and moved storytelling and other educational programs online. But we wondered what had happened to our regulars. What were the tjilpis (Pitjantjatjara for older men) who watched westerns in the library doing every day, and the cheeky kids who enjoyed using computer apps to make videos and create emojis?

That was the town’s longest lockdown. By mid May we were dining al fresco in cafes; by early June we were allowed to go camping again (the ban had been a great privation for locals). On the last day of May, about one hundred people gathered at the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens for the launch of local author Dani Powell’s book, Return to Dust — the first sign for me of a return to a fragile normality.

For almost two years, as we resumed life in our own Truman Show in the middle of the desert, the virus seemed hypothetical. We went through the motions of sanitising and physical distancing (mask wearing never became widespread, except where mandated). Because of the Territory’s relative isolation, sparse population and, most of all, strict border controls, the virus’s spread was curtailed until quarantine restrictions were lifted for vaccinated travellers just before Christmas 2021. For me, the pandemic’s most difficult aspect was not being able to visit family in Sydney because of the prohibitive cost of fourteen days’ quarantine when I returned.

Alice Springs didn’t experience its first Covid-related death — an Aboriginal woman from Mutitjulu, who was the third fatality in the Territory — until 31 January this year. By the time five-day Covid isolation ended nationally, the Territory had recorded seventy-three Covid-related deaths and a fatality rate of 0.07 per cent. While any loss of life is tragic, these figures are remarkably low given that the region’s indices of disadvantage are among the worst in the country.

The effectiveness of the Territory’s Covid response stems from advocacy early in the pandemic by the Combined Aboriginal Organisations and peak Aboriginal health bodies, and especially by Donna Ah Chee, the chief executive of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, who initially lobbied for strict border controls.

The pandemic’s first year was also an unwitting social experiment. Property crime rates plummeted from April to August 2020, which some local commentators attributed to the existence of a curfew of sorts. A more compelling hypothesis is that crime fell after the coronavirus supplement lifted the JobSeeker and Youth Allowance by $550 fortnightly in March 2020, temporarily raising welfare recipients’ income above the poverty line.

“For the first time some households have been able to afford basic needs like accommodation, food, winter clothes, whitegoods or repairs to motor vehicles,” reported the Northern Territory Council of Social Service in October 2020. As the supplement was phased out from late September through to December that year, property break-ins resumed their previous high levels.

When people ponder the distance, the climate and the crime they often ask me and my friends how we can live here.

Despite the town’s extremes, it’s possible to experience many things here that have been lost in other urban areas. You can usually commute to work in ten minutes from any direction. You can escape to the bush for a walk or a swim in a waterhole, or to camp overnight, often without much preparation. You can immerse yourself quickly in the dramatic landscape — giant orange rocks cast by ancestral beings, wild dogs (Akngwelye) and caterpillars (Yeperenye, Ntyarlke and Utnerrngatye) churning across the land — and its moodiness, all bold primary colours in bright sun one day, brooding pastels in overcast weather the next. You can enjoy a sense of social ease, bumping into anyone at any time, and you can slot quickly into the town’s social, cultural and sporting lives.

To me, Alice Springs’s greatest strength has always been its community-driven activities, of which it boasts an extraordinary number. The town wheels through a calendar of iconic and idiosyncratic creative and sports events, including Parrtjima, the country’s only Aboriginal light festival, the Anaconda mountain-bike race, the Finke Desert Race, the Beanie Festival, Word Storm (the NT Writers Festival, every second year in Alice), the Bush Bands Bash, the Desert Mob exhibition, Desert Song and the Desert Festival.

In early October, composer Anne Boyd’s Olive Pink Opera was performed with the support of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir in the botanic gardens, on the site where the eponymous anthropologist camped in a tent during the 1950s.

While Alice Springs is best known for its visual arts — Albert Namatjira’s landscapes, the central and western desert art movements, the annual Papunya Tula Art Exhibition — it is also an incubator for experimental work by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. A recent exhibition, Footy Show, at Watch This Space, showcased First Nations artists exploring their relationship to football. Indigemoji, Australia’s first set of Indigenous emojis, was produced by young people guided by senior Arrernte cultural advisers, and Awemele Itelaretyeke is an app with two audio walking tours made by traditional owners to help users learn about Mparntwe’s history, culture and language.

Some of Centralia’s most hard-hitting creative achievements over the past decade have been in film and television: Warwick Thornton’s prize-winning Sweet Country (2017), which premiered at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, is a Western based on the local story of Willaberta Jack, and Penelope McDonald’s Audrey Napanangka (2021) explores the life and work of the Warlpiri artist. Dylan River (Thornton and McDonald’s son) directed Finke: There and Back (2019) for Brindle Films, which follows several Finke Desert Race participants, including local filmmaker Isaac Elliott, who competes on a modified motorbike after an accident left him confined to a wheelchair.

Alice-based production company Brindle Films, founded in 2011 by Rachel Clements and Trisha Morton-Thomas, produced the ABC TV comedy series 8MMM Aboriginal Radio (2015), and The Song Keepers (2018), the NITV/SBS documentary about the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir on tour. Isaac Elliott also worked with Brindle Films on the Netflix TV series MaveriX (2022), about dirt bike riders in the red centre.

Locally made documentary In My Blood It Runs (2019), which screened on ABC iView and Netflix, introduced viewers to the challenges encountered by ten-year-old Arrernte/Garawa boy Dujuan Hoosan in navigating cultural life and Western educational systems in Alice Springs. SBS crime series True Colours (2022), created by Erica Glynn (Thornton’s sister), portrays First Nations people’s social and cultural realities in Central Australia in a way rarely seen on TV. With white characters appearing as marginal figures, it features strong performances by untrained locals including singer Warren H. Williams, Arrernte elders Sabella Kngwarraye Ross Turner and Rosalie Kumalie Riley, and lead actor Rarriwuy Hick.

Books and publishing also have a high profile in Alice Springs. Although Dymocks closed its local store in 2013, local bookseller Red Kangaroo Books, run by the Capper–Druce family in Todd Mall since 2007, battled on, featuring on one list of “21 of the Best Bookshops in Australia to Visit in 2021.” As “the only bricks-and-mortar independent bookshop still standing in Australia between Port Augusta, Darwin, Broome, and Broken Hill,” the shop attributes its success to its “fiercely local” focus, stocking (often hard-to-come-by) books on Central Australian subjects and by Centralian authors.

Community-publishing outfits have long flourished in Alice Springs, especially those dedicated to producing books by First Nations people. The Institute for Aboriginal Development Press, which has published First Nations dictionaries and resources since 1969, has recently been joined by Running Water Community Press, which has produced anthologies of local women’s poetry including Campfire Satellites: An Inland Anthology (2019) and Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women’s Talk: Poems of Lyapirtneme from Arrernte Women in Central Australia (2020). The first book in its new truth-telling series is local stolen generations survivor Frank Byrne’s Living in Hope (2022), an earlier version of which won the Small Press Network’s Most Underrated Book Award in 2018.

Other notable First Nations publications include Central Land Council’s collective memoir, Every Hill Got a Story (2015), and ninety-year-old Kanakiya Myra Ah Chee’s memoir, Nomad Girl (2021).

Among the most inspiring local ventures are the First Nations children’s books published by intergenerational Arrernte learning initiative Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe Children’s Ground. Led by local Arrernte elders, Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe began providing education to First Nations children on Country and in people’s communities, combining Arrernte and Western educational priorities. Since 2019, its Arrernte educators have produced nine educational resources featuring seven local languages, the latest of which include Tyerrtye Atyinhe (My Body), Althateme (McGrath’s Dam) and Intelhiletyeke, a First Nations colouring book.

“We’ve been following government nearly all our lives — this is a new beginning,” says Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe director M.K. Turner. “We are following a new path, our own path as First Nations people for the future of our children. At Children’s Ground, the community is taking the lead. We are very proud of that. We are the government of ourselves.”

When the Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitsh arrived by train in Alice Springs in 1933 he experienced “an uncontrollable joy and fear.” “One feels,” he wrote, “that one is in the middle of the hot, wild heart of the most remote of all continents — Australia.”

I can relate to the intensity of Ravitsh’s response. Unsettling feelings take hold of you on being confronted by Mparntwe Alice Springs, destabilising your perception of Australia. The town continues to draw people like me — rootless wanderers above the ground, as a Māori elder once described the Pākehā — back to the Centre. With its sharp light throwing so much into relief, there is rawness about living in the place.

Here you live on the precipice of the prosperity so many Australians take for granted, where the marginalisation, the poverty, the trauma and the damage to Country that resulted from dispossession of First Nations people are all too apparent. At the same time, it is a privilege to see this other, remote Australia, to live and work alongside First Nations people, to catch a glimpse of what Country means to them, even if the depth and complexity of this relationship is hard to grasp.

“The town grew up dancing,” the late W. Rubuntja wrote. “And still the dancing is there under the town… We still have the culture, still sing the song… It’s the same story we have from the old people, from the beginning here in the Centre.”

May the dance never end. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Hot, wild heart appeared first on Inside Story.

Just last month, the nuclear subs deal was presented by one commentator as a crossing of the Rubicon, a reference to Caesar’s point of no return in his invasion of Rome. During the bushfires, Scott Morrison’s Hawaiian holiday irresistibly summoned the image of Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Kevin Rudd gleefully destabilised Julia Gillard on the Ides of March, recalling the day of Caesar’s assassination.

Gough Whitlam, of course, was the supreme master of this game. He likened prime minister Billy McMahon, scheming on the Isle of Capri, to “Tiberius with a telephone” and a well-lubricated governor-general Sir John Kerr, “weaving his way from the Imperial box” at the 1977 Melbourne Cup, to Caligula: “The fascinated crowd and a million viewers may have thought the horse would have made a better proconsul.”

Mary Beard has the answer. In Twelve Caesars, the professor of classics at Cambridge University explores in fascinating and entertaining detail how the long-dead Roman emperors have lived on in the Western imagination, providing a rich store of moral and political exemplars to instruct, warn and mock their successors.

Her title pays homage to Suetonius, the Roman historian whose Lives of the Twelve Caesars recorded the virtues and vices of the first emperors in salacious and sometimes horrifying detail. In doing so he turned those dozen autocrats into an enduring canon: the dictator Julius Caesar, appointed after the demise of the republic in 48 BCE; the Julio-Claudian emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, who came after Caesar’s assassination and a civil war; the three short-lived emperors Galba, Otho and Vitellius, who ruled during another civil war in 69 CE; and the Flavian dynasty of Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, who was assassinated in 96 CE.

In this book, as her subtitle suggests, Beard is interested in the “images of power” — that is, the visual representations of the emperors. As she did in SPQR, her 2015 bestselling history of Rome, she reveals her great talent for transforming the arcane and ancient into the relevant and contemporary, and for bringing the highest levels of scholarship into a popular and entertaining narrative.

The medium in which the most numerous of these images are preserved are the coins bearing the emperors’ portrait and name, which helped the regime enforce its authority throughout its huge empire. With a slogan or a symbol on the reverse side, they made for effective propaganda. Production of individual images on this scale had never been required during the republic, with its regular rotation and sharing of power (in theory, at least) among numerous office-holders.

Statues and busts of the emperors were also widely disseminated, with more than 200 inscribed pedestals of Augustus alone having survived. Judging by the fragmentary remains of pastry moulds found amid the ruins of Roman kitchens, imperial portraits even appeared on cakes and biscuits.

But identifying who is depicted on any particular sculpture is frustratingly difficult. Most have been separated from their named plinths, and few display the physical characteristics Suetonius so vividly describes. Indeed many of them, found thousands of kilometres apart, look broadly similar; it’s difficult to distinguish an Augustus from a Tiberius, a Caligula, a Claudius or a Nero.

Beard suggests that individual likeness might not have been the point — that they shouldn’t be taken at face value, as it were. Image-making may have instead been designed to achieve “carefully constructed similarity (as well as the occasional difference).” Whatever the physical characteristics of individual emperors, their statues and busts seem designed to assert a shared imperial authority, which became even more apparent as the emperors began to be regarded as divinities.

Idealisation and anonymising are even more apparent in the images of the emperors’ female relatives. At the imperial court, wives and mothers were political players, especially in questions of succession; they were accused of adultery, incest and poisoning. Yet their statues and busts blandly represent dynastic stability and fecundity. Again, likeness is not the point.

Beard, best known as a historian of Rome, takes her analysis well past the imperial age, exploring the “images of power” produced by medieval, Renaissance and baroque artists, by the Victorians and into the modern era. Twelve Caesars ranges widely across paintings, drawings and books; marble and bronze; metalwork and tapestry; from Titian and van Dyck to Alma-Tadema and Anselm Kiefer. For two millennia, images of the Twelve Caesars have been lost and rediscovered by archaeologists; imitated, copied and reinterpreted by artists — and by forgers; bought and sold by dealers and collectors; displayed by kings, wealthy elites and museums; looted by armies; burnt in fires.

It’s here that Beard tells a wonderful story about the Aldobrandini Tazze, a set of twelve “grand and exquisitely decorated silver-gilt dishes” dating from the late 1500s. Incorporating thirty-seven kilograms of silver, the set is a showy product of extreme wealth and elite taste. For Beard, it constitutes the earliest surviving attempt to illustrate Suetonius’s Lives in material form: each bowl is decorated with scenes from Suetonius’s account of the life of one of the Caesars, and at the centre of each bowl stands a miniature statue of the appropriate emperor.

So far so good. The Caesar statues are even inscribed with their names, making identification certain. But there’s a problem: the statues were made to be screwed in and out of the dishes — presumably so they could be cleaned and polished — and somewhere along the line, several of them were screwed back into the wrong ones. (It’s so hard to get good help!)

Over the centuries, the dishes were auctioned off in ones and twos to collectors and dealers and museums. The statues became irretrievably separated from their correct locations.

Enter Professor Beard, scholar and sleuth. In 2010 she popped into London’s Victoria and Albert Museum to inspect its single dish, which the museum believed to depict Domitian. Beard confirmed the statue was indeed inscribed as Domitian. But — and you can imagine the V&A curatorial staff experiencing a tremor at this point — “it was soon clear that there was something very wrong indeed with the scenes on the bowl.” In particular, Beard noticed that the supposed scene of Domitian’s triumphal procession after defeating the Germans “had nothing to do with” Suetonius’s description of the event. Instead, it looked more like the triumph of Tiberius.

“For me,” she writes, “it was a clear hint that the bowl had been wrongly identified and was attached to the wrong emperor. So it turned out… It took only a careful look, and a text of Suetonius, to see that the wrong emperor was on the wrong bowl.” The real Domitian bowl has turned up in Minneapolis, accompanied by the statue of Augustus, and the Augustus bowl is in Los Angeles with Nero.

Beard reports another clever piece of research, this time involving a series of twelve Flemish tapestries depicting the life of Julius Caesar that were bought by Henry VIII in the 1540s and hung in Hampton Court. The tapestries disappeared, probably simply worn out, in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Thanks to the work of art historians using documentary archives and studying copies, the scenes have been largely reconstructed, but several curious misidentifications persist.

Why, for example, does the scene supposedly showing the (male) soothsayer Spurinna predicting the death of Caesar actually show a woman? And why does that woman have a cauldron, bats and snakes? Because, Beard triumphantly points out, the scene is taken from Pharsalia, an epic by the first-century poet Lucan. In Lucan’s narrative, the witch Erichtho predicts, in gruesome detail, the death not of Caesar but of his civil war rival Pompey.

Twelve Caesars is a rich but loosely arranged miscellany. At one level it reads like an upmarket version of Fake or Fortune?, the BBC program that tests the authenticity and provenance of unrecognised art works. I am sure the TV rights for Beard’s book will be snapped up. Fiona Bruce had better watch out.

But Beard provides instruction as well as entertainment, and the fun of chasing down the provenance of arcane objets is not intended to conceal the more important puzzle that lies beneath. Why have these emperors exercised such a continuing and profound fascination? Why have their images been so frequently and carefully studied, emulated and multiplied?

They were, after all, an unattractive bunch, less known for civic virtue than for personal vice — “death, destruction, imperial sadism and excess,” as Beard puts it. Only one of the twelve, Vespasian, died in his own bed; or two, if you count Tiberius, who died there only because that is where he was when (probably) suffocated by a loving relative.

The rest were assassinated, poisoned, forced to “fall on their own sword” or, in the case of Vitellius, dragged through Rome by a lynch mob, “tortured, beaten to death, impaled on a hook and thrown into the Tiber.” Though they are arranged into “dynasties,” many sons were executed and only one (Titus) succeeded his father as emperor. After the relative tidiness of republican rule, the Roman imperial system never worked out an orderly transfer of power from one autocrat to the next

And here of course is one answer to the puzzle. The emperors provided important lessons to subsequent rulers. For wannabe autocrats, absolute power is, of course, its own attraction. When Julius Caesar terminated the Roman republic he took the title “dictator.” Literally, his word was law. Mussolini took the same title, set up a fascist regime, and sought to recreate a Roman Empire in Africa.

But even more orthodox rulers — such as those kings and emperors who continued to carry the name of Caesar (as Kaiser and Czar) right through to the early twentieth century — might have found useful lessons about the hazards of succession, the perils of civil war, and the interplay of court politics and national welfare. Beard suggests that the Renaissance and later artists, who were commissioned by princes and dukes to portray the lives of imperial Caesars, not infrequently combined flattery with coded nuance, hidden meanings, and “unsettling version[s] of one-man rule.”

Today, this enduring artistic project, the visual reinterpretation of the Twelve Caesars, appears to be in decline. Briefly traversing the TV drama I, Claudius, the Carry On franchise and Gladiator, Beard bemoans the “visual descent of a once challenging iconography into the realm of a visual cliché.”

The same can be said of our political language. Whitlam’s elaborate put-downs were informed by his education in the classics; it is hard to identify anyone today who could follow his lead. A cartoon of Nero fiddling is indeed nothing more than a visual cliché. Then again, we are democrats and — unless Trump returns — have no need for tales of imperial excess.

This is a beautifully produced hardback. The text, with fifty pages of notes and bibliography, is brilliantly illustrated with 242 colour plates and just enough family trees to help the reader distinguish the Julio-Claudians from the Flavians, and Agrippina the Elder from Agrippina the Younger. Princeton University Press is to be congratulated. •

The post What the Romans have done for us appeared first on Inside Story.

One of Australia’s finest landscape painters, she was an extraordinarily gifted artist: versatile, productive, bold, subtle and profound. Our appreciation of her artistic achievement will only grow with the years. The intensity and beauty of her work is breathtaking, whether it be a panorama of central Australian desert ranges, an Antarctic iceberg, a dark industrial landscape or an exploding oil platform.

She was renowned as the artist of the largest commissioned work in the Australian parliament, the twelve metres by three metres Red Ochre Cove (1987) which hangs in the main committee room. Beneath its luminous presence, which features a shaft of light that references Tom Roberts’s Opening of the First Parliament of Australia (1903), our politicians and bureaucrats are routinely forced to reveal their failings. During the televised reports of Senate hearings on the nightly news, you can lift your eyes from their humiliations and gaze instead into the exhilarating otherworld of Mandy Martin’s art.

Mandy Martin, Red Ochre Cove, 1987, oil on canvas, Parliament House, Canberra. Click to enlarge

Mandy’s early works were on paper and often in the form of political poster art; later she took to oil painting and produced sensitively observed landscapes, often on very large canvases. Her mother, Beryl Martin, was a watercolourist and her father, Peter Martin, a professor of botany at the University of Adelaide. Years of accompanying her father on scientific field trips honed Mandy’s eye for ecological detail. From the 1990s she brought together her political and ecological sensibilities in a powerful series of “environmental projects,” as she called them.

Guy Fitzhardinge, whom she married in 1996, who brought to their partnership a deep knowledge of the land and its management, became an essential and enabling collaborator. As well as being a beef farmer, Guy was a director of Bush Heritage Australia, a member of the Commonwealth Threatened Species Scientific Committee and a director of Meat and Livestock Australia, among many other public roles.

Martin produced such a rich and varied oeuvre that it is impossible to encompass it here. But her environmental projects are worthy of special notice, and it was my good fortune — along with many other writers, scholars and scientists — to be invited to contribute to them. Mandy and Guy’s home in Wiradjuri Country near Mandurama, with its sweeping views across white box woodlands towards Mt Canobolas and Orange, became a salon, a place of art, nature, productivity and good conversation.

There was a fine beef herd in the paddocks, sugar gliders putting on a nightly show in the gums, superb parrots flitting past like darts, Mandy’s art on the walls, the latest literature on Guy’s shelves, a white box log in the fireplace, a great leg of hogget in the oven, a cherry pavlova on the table and gatherings of people passionate about the land and its future.

Mandy, always zinging with electric energy and fun, had a flair for creating this chemistry on tour as well: her artist’s caravan would unfold itself — alongside her famous ironing-board easel — in some of Australia’s most remote landscapes. Multidisciplinary conversations enabled by the art would then break out around the campfire and under the stars, leading ultimately to new, rich insights and significant literary, artistic and political outcomes.

Shadows lengthen as Mandy Martin finishes her day’s work back in camp at the Mulligan River, Cravens Peak Reserve, 2009. Tom Griffiths

Mandy’s imagination was already turning inland in the late 1980s, but from the mid 1990s she launched a triptych of projects that ventured beyond the Darling River in northern New South Wales to the edge of the Simpson Desert. Each of them — Tracts: Back o’Bourke (1997), Watersheds: the Paroo to the Warrego (1999) and Inflows: the Channel Country (2001) — involved a fieldtrip, a travelling gallery exhibition and a published booklet and were supported by Peter Haynes as director of the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery. I was invited to join the last two as a writer and was thus given a rigorous education in the aesthetics, history and politics of the Australian inland.

Guy Fitzhardinge seems to know everyone across outback Australia and so we travelled from homestead to homestead, walked the paddocks, engaged with the ecology and listened to the locals — under their verandahs, in their kitchens and by their firesides. He shares Mandy’s conviction that conservation is an urgent national priority, believing that productivity, ecology and aesthetics have a beautiful relationship and that you need people on country to look after it. As well as being an innovative farmer, he has a doctorate in environmental sociology and the ability to talk to people from all walks of life.

Mandy’s art grew out of her passionate engagement with both landscape and people; thus her painting was intensely social and self-consciously historical. People rarely featured in her landscapes but human feelings and beliefs framed them. She saw herself in a lineage of explorer-artists (especially Ludwig Becker, who travelled with Burke and Wills), and so planned “expeditions” and painted a series, numbering the canvases in the sequence of a journey.

Country and conversations energised her creativity, and the public character and momentum of an expedition placed her under daily pressure to produce. She relished having to sculpt her art out of the circumstances of the travelling day; it had to be swift, opportunistic and impressionistic, alert to mood and moment, light and sky, lunch and dinner.

Her creativity was visible and public and social, the dogs and children played around her feet and an impromptu painting lesson for a nine-year-old was conducted on the side. Mandy painted as we ate, as the billy boiled or under threat of dusk. And she also painted under command. For it was her deliberate strategy on this trip to ask landholders to choose her sites and scenes. She encouraged local people to take her to their special places and allow her to paint them.

Thus her art often depicted beloved scenes, places of significance to inhabitants. This generated further pressure, of course. Her hosts had expectations, especially about the portrayal of favourite spots. They would review the progress of a painting over her shoulder or with a grave sense of ceremony at the end of the day.

I remember how one gravelly voiced grazier of the Channel Country, Sandy Kidd, paced like a restless beast around the finished canvas of his favourite waterhole as it lay on the concrete floor outside his home in the fluorescent light after dark. He had even graded the track to the spot that day to ease the artist’s way. By the waterhole that morning, sitting on the newly graded earth where a deadly snake had just slithered, he looked around with pride. “I wouldn’t call the king me uncle in this place,” he announced. “I couldn’t catch a cold here.” Later, as we awaited dinner at his home, he handed us beer cans spattered with blood from the meat chiller.

Finally, the moment had come to see what the artist had done. With drink in hand, Sandy circled the finished canvas, approaching it from every angle and looking at it from the corner of his eye as if trying to take it by surprise. In a Shakespearean stage whisper, he muttered, “This intrigues me, this does!” Then, nervously gesturing towards the painting as if it were alive, he declared, “This puts emotion into me. I come over all emotional looking at that. The Channels, eh? I didn’t know I loved them so much till they tried to bugger them up.”

In 1996, Mandy and Guy both spoke at a scientific workshop held nearby in Windorah, where local landholders, Aboriginal people and scientific visitors offered “an ecological perspective on Cooper’s Creek.” The workshop was coordinated by locals and responded to the environmental threat posed by plans from Currareva station to develop irrigation for cotton farming. The community came together impressively in defence of their wild rivers — they surprised themselves just as Mandy’s painting surprised Sandy Kidd.

Mandy Martin, Coopers Creek on Currareva Station, 2001, oil, ochre, pigment/linen, 90 x 330 cm.

Crusty pastoralists admitted to emotions. The mayor of the Barcoo Shire, Bruce Scott, used words like “braided” and “anastomosing” and “ephemeral,” adapting the words of urban professionals to advocate the special attributes of their water system. One Cooper pastoralist, full of genuine wonder, called the channels “anastomazing.” And they are! The Cooper, Diamantina and Georgina are the three great rivers of the Channel Country, flaring out into myriad braided channels, revealing an intricate web of arteries across a vast landscape. Aerial photos of the terrain look like microscope slides of organic tissue.

This is a boom-and-bust ecosystem, an arid land animated by waterflows from elsewhere, a place where monsoonal rain falling hundreds of kilometres away to the northeast periodically floods down dry channels, bringing a spectacular pulse of life to the plains and a precious, intense productivity. The flush of water occasionally reaches all the way to the saltpan of Lake Eyre, a continental rain gauge. Constituting almost a fifth of the Australian landmass, the Lake Eyre basin is the largest inland draining system in the world. Aboriginal people hold up the open palm of their hand to represent the basin, their fingers signifying the rivers that drain into it.

You need science, art and imagination to understand an ecosystem of such scale. In winning the battle of the Cooper at the turn of the millennium, Mandy Martin’s art was as important as Richard Kingsford’s surveys of river birdlife or Chris Dickman’s long-term studies of desert marsupials or Bruce Scott’s regional political advocacy or the Gorringe family’s testimony of deep Aboriginal attachment. They all successfully argued for the importance of “going with the flow” in arid Australia, and they did so by bringing together science and art, ecology and emotion, economy and history. Channel Country pastoralists found themselves beginning sentences with the words: “I’m not a radical greenie, but…”

In 2010, further field trips to the Channel Country and new interdisciplinary work with fifty local and visiting experts culminated in the publication of a large and beautiful book, Desert Channels: The Impulse to Conserve (edited by Libby Robin, Chris Dickman and Mandy Martin). Martin’s canvases — designed in four sets of four and presented as gorgeous interludes between essays — were all painted on location at Ethabuka and Cravens Peak on the eastern edge of the Simpson Desert, and this time she deliberately chose “ordinary or unsensational places to paint, places encountered by chance rather than design.” She wanted to capture the accidents of nature and the intricacies of ecology, to help people feel “the sensuousness of texture.”

Mandy Martin, S-Bend on the Mulligan River, Toko Range, Cravens Peak Reserve 2, 2009, pigments/ochres/acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm.

Mandy was striving to generate a new vocabulary and palette suited to the arid zone. Aesthetic evaluation, she argued, should be valued alongside scientific assessment, and both rely upon processes of sampling and re-sampling, consistent methodology and the patient accumulation of data. Mandy painted four canvases in sequence in each location, tramping back and forth between the different viewpoints, labouring for up to ten hours a day in the searing sun.

Martin was a researcher and a theorist, an artist-scholar, an esteemed speaker at international environmental history conferences and an adjunct professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. South African environmental historian Jane Carruthers, who contributed to Mandy’s environmental projects, wrote of how the artist can partner the historian by fostering “interdisciplinary collaborations between the written and visual,” empowering others to think visually “and even to produce art.” Martin drew out the artistic potential of all her collaborators.

Great art breaks down barriers and opens minds, liberates people to see and feel in new ways. It is an effective political tool because it transcends politics. Mandy’s opening trio of environmental projects focused on settler lore and aesthetics, on the wisdom as well as failings of imported environmental visions in Australia. Her painting practice mobilised and elaborated traditions within the history of art: plein air painting, artists’ camps and documentary and scientific expeditionary art. Her work connected in this way not only with the likes of Ludwig Becker, Sir Thomas Mitchell, Conrad Martens and Eugene von Guérard, but also with the camps of the Heidelberg School, the multi-disciplinary expeditions of Russell Drysdale and John Olsen, and the immersive materiality of John Wolseley.

Did she relish the gendered intervention of her ironing board? Surely this early practitioner of feminist art did. Her ironing board was her stage, a place of theatre erected in the middle of the camp from which she could survey the scene and interact socially with her team, always with an eye for the comfort and interests of others. She directly addressed the landscape, like a conductor with her score. The horizontal board was perfect for the splash and wash of colour, the deft sketch of detail, and the urgent and fluent capturing of raw material and impressions which she later refined in her studio. She would use the sand at her feet, grind ochres, work blown dust and pollen into the paint and build layers from the substance of the place in which she stood.

Keenly conscious of how the land she painted was already layered with representation, Mandy often inscribed and painted words on her canvases that conjured connections to these cultural histories. Perhaps they were Becker’s words or Mitchell’s evocations of the seventeenth-century Italian painter Salvator Rosa (his favoured lens for the new land), or the latitude and longitude of the place, or some topographical annotations, or descriptions of its geology and vegetation from contemporary scientists and scholars. In this way she brought her painting into direct dialogue with science and literature, a conversation also enacted by her fieldtrips.

Mandy Martin, Westerton Ram Paddock 2, 2001, oil, ochre, pigment/linen, 90 x 165 cm.

David Malouf wrote in 2002 of her conscious cultural layering and Mandy, in turn, wrote in 2013 of how she and fellow artist David Leece were influenced in their choice of prospect by their shared reading of Malouf. Malouf perceived that the ambition of the literate European explorers of Australia was “to gather these new lands into a world of feeling that would be continuous with the culture they had brought with them.” Martin honoured that quest and built upon it, but she also took it in radical new directions.

Increasingly, she sought the guidance and collaboration of Indigenous artists on Country. In 2004, environmental historian Libby Robin, archaeologist Mike Smith and ecologist Jake Gillen travelled with Mandy and Guy to Puritjarra, an ancient rock shelter in the red sandstone Cleland Hills, 350 kilometres west of Alice Springs. Puritjarra is an extraordinarily significant place that, from the mid 1980s, deepened the chronology of human history in the centre of the continent from 10,000 to 35,000 years and provided evidence that people managed to sustain civilisation in the central deserts during the last ice age.

This expedition to such a remote site was a cross-cultural experiment, not just in bringing together art and science, but also in collaborating with the Indigenous owners, Ikuntji artists from Haasts Bluff. Their traditional knowledge, interpreted in acrylics on canvas especially for the project, was brought alongside Martin’s “European” vision where it generated a respectful dialogue about aesthetics, economy and history in a place of national significance. The paintings by Narputta Nangala Jugadai, Daisy Napaltjarri Jugadai, Molly Napaltjarri Jugudai, Anmanari Napanangka Nolan, Eunice Napanangka Jack, Colleen Napanangka Kantawarra, Alice Nampitjinpa and Linda Ngitjanka Naparulla are visually stunning and environmentally precise about their home.

Mandy, the visiting artist, painted her own breathtaking panoramas of the range and also collaborated with each of her visiting team members to produce multi-panelled canvases inflected with their distinct visions: archaeological, historical, pastoral, botanical. The boldness of this collaborative intervention in our national cultural life, captured in an exhibition at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs and the book Strata (2005), was remarkable.

Further ambitious, cross-cultural ventures followed. In 2007, renowned Kimberley artist Janangoo Butcher Cherel invited Mandy to paint alongside him in Fitzroy River Valley Country: “It led to one of the most extraordinary working relationships I have ever been lucky enough to experience,” remembered Mandy. On the Puritjarra project, the Ikuntji artists had done their painting at Haasts Bluff, but here Mandy was shoulder to shoulder with Mangkaja artists painting the same landscapes at the same time of day. The following year, three generations of Cherels came out to Painters Rock on Jalnganjoowa (Fossil Downs) to continue this journey into memory, country and the alchemy of art.

Southwest of Fitzroy Crossing is a big desert lake named Paruku (Lake Gregory), a World Heritage wetland in northwest Australia and “a human home of great antiquity,” a setting that geomorphologist Jim Bowler had long seen as a northern echo of his investigations into ancient human history at Lake Mungo. During 2011 and 2012, a project team of fifty artists, scientists and Walmajarri people from the Mulan community worked together on the Paruku Indigenous Protected Area beside the lake.

Alongside Mandy Martin, the curators and editors of the project were artist and writer Kim Mahood (who had a long association from childhood with Paruku and the Tanami), desert ecologist Steve Morton (who researched fire ecology in the Tanami and worked with Anangu people on the Uluru Fauna Study), and anthropologist John Carty who has lived and worked with Mulan people since 2002. Other visiting contributors included Guy Fitzhardinge, Jim Bowler, archaeologist Mike Smith, American writer and curator Bill Fox, ethno-ecologist Tanya Vernes, conservationist David Rickards, and creative artists Laura Boynes, Alexander Boynes, Faye Alexander, David Leece and David Taylor.

To draw together such a team was extraordinary in itself, but to do so on Country in a productive relationship with the Indigenous owners shows the sheer power of art, and of great artists, in energising genuine collaboration. Morton, Martin, Mahood and Carty wrote in their introduction to Desert Lake: Art, Science and Stories from Paruku (2013) that Paruku resonated with the most important questions of contemporary Australian life: “How are we to live with our shared history, our shared environments, our shared homes, in difference and respect? And how do we tell these stories together?” The Walmajarri people and artists welcomed and worked with the visitors, not only guiding the project, but redirecting it in several crucial ways. They had faith that multiple perspectives would generate “a kind of truth, a type of honesty about how things are in Australia now.”

These three innovative cross-cultural art projects focused in turn on deep archaeological perspectives, contrasting aesthetic visions, and social and ecological belonging. The next such project — known as Arnhembrand — brought art to bear on contemporary environmental challenges in caring for Country. Guy Fitzhardinge was chair of the Karrkad-Kanjdji Trust, which supports traditional owners in land management and cultural conservation in the Djelk and Wardekken Indigenous Protected Areas in western Arnhem Land. He knew that community members ranked “empty country” as the most severe threat to the maintenance of healthy country. His own research had for years critiqued the separation of social systems from ecosystems that underpins much Eurocentric thinking. In 2013 Mandy Martin was approached to work with Bininj people in western Arnhem Land as she had with Walmajarri people at Paruku, and in 2015 she held a drawing workshop supported by Djelk Rangers who saw the opportunity to tell stories about the cultural and land management work they were doing.

By 2017, nearly eighty Bininj people had become involved as performers and artists working with Martin and fellow Balanda artists Alexander Boynes, Laura Boynes and David Leece. Paintings, video works and a commissioned woven mat were created, and a mixture of Bininj and Balanda techniques were used. Mandy described the joy of watching the Bininj artists prepare their traditional bush brushes from speargrass slashed from the seafront and then deploy them with fluid precision. The team also used “the latest fluorescent Anthropocene pigments” mixed with traditional ochres to tell novel, confronting stories about invasive species, new fire regimes and changing climates.

As the project historian Billy Griffiths put it, “buffaloes, pigs, feral cats and cane toads have trampled, chewed, rubbed and wallowed their way across a delicate ecosystem… In the absence of traditional burning, fire, too, had become feral. The cultural landscape had transformed into a modern wilderness.” The project work, which was exhibited at Australian Galleries and published as Light — Stone — Fire (2017), has been archived by the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art where the director Bill Fox (a brilliant interpreter of Martin’s work) saw parallels in challenges faced by traditional Indigenous communities around the world, “whether it is the Inuit of Nunavut in the Canadian Far North, the islands of Vanuatu, or the scattered settlements of Arnhem Land.” Fox sees his museum as preserving information about how to achieve resilience in the face of change “and passing it down from generation to generation, and from place to place in order that we might all survive.”

After each of these exhilarating trips away, Mandy and Guy would return to their home amid the undulating white box woodlands, perched with its view northeast towards Orange. Winking at night on their horizon, bordering their property and expanding every year, was the Cadia Hill gold mine, the largest in the southern hemisphere. Mandy’s lifelong critical engagement with industry was now taking place in her own backyard.

True to form, her relationship with the mine owners was honest, forthright and constructive — and mediated through art. She completed a series of one hundred small canvases of the Cadia region, fifty of them depicting the local Belubula River in a golden palette using river sand and natural pigments, and the other half portraying the mine in a copper palette, using tailings from the dam and sulphide concentrate from the mine’s sag mill. She worked with Wiradjuri artists, and collaborated on canvases with neighbouring Indigenous artist Trisha Carroll. She launched further interdisciplinary projects combining art, science and storytelling that focused on the local mining landscape: The Lachlan: Blue-Gold (2003), Land$cape: Gold & Water (2003) and in 2016 a broader retrospective entitled Homeground, in which Mandy reflected on twenty years living in the Central West and selected twenty of her paintings of the region (out of more than 200) for exhibition.

As a boy, Guy would explore the rocky twists and turns of the Belubula River, whose name captures the sound of a gurgling, flowing stream, and he grew up knowing and romancing the traces of past mining in the landscape. But Cadia Hill was different in its sheer scale of mining and earth-moving and also in its amorphous international corporate elusiveness. In a beautiful essay for the Land$cape catalogue, Guy reflected that he now had “a neighbour who I do not know and probably will never know” and whose process of wealth creation lay far outside the local ecosystem or community. Nevertheless, he was determined “to explore and enlarge what we do have in common.”

Mandy, with fierce commitment, used her art to humanise the corporate face of the mine so that she could engage with it. And the argument she and Guy made through their work was that “the actual value of the Cadia region landscape is aesthetic, not material, and that the natural values of the river and native habitat if preserved, would in the long-term, outweigh the value of gold extracted from the mine.” It is a simple statement that is incontrovertibly true — if one can see long-term, can value the more-than-human, and can understand that Country needs people.

While plumbing the depths of her local region, Mandy was also prosecuting global environmental issues. Human survival in the face of massive anthropogenic climate change was a vital and urgent concern of hers for decades. In Australia, business and the arts have moved into the vacuum left by federal government denial of climate change, as Libby Robin has analysed, and are creating new partnerships such as a series of biennial Climarte Festivals, the first of which was held in 2015.

Mandy, working with Alexander Boynes and composer-musician Tristen Parr, created a series of stunning, panoramic performance pieces that combined traditional oil painting with video projection and a music composition. In Luminous Relic, a factory belching smoke gradually gave way to a collapsing Antarctic ice shelf, and in Rewriting the Score a Gondwanan fern forest morphed into an open-cut coalmine that became ravaged by fire. This piece ended with Parr, wearing a mine worker’s hard hat, poignantly playing his cello in a landscape of fern, coal and fire. These performances are visual enactments of chaos theory: time and landscapes collapse before your eyes and the globe becomes whole, elementally. Standing in that gallery in Morwell in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley in 2019, shoulder to shoulder with locals, I listened to workers moved by art who were feeling their way towards a new politics.

Martin had first painted the Yallourn Power Station in the Latrobe Valley in 1991 and here she was, a quarter of a century later, returning to the land of brown coal to deepen her critique. It is testimony to the coherence of her career. Her art began as a radical commentary on industrial and corporate power, drawing on the responses of European Romantic poets and artists to the industrial revolution to portray contemporary industrial incursions upon the Great South Land. She explored the links between the dark, satanic mills that emerged in the late eighteenth century and the vulnerable, beautiful landscapes of Australia today. As Mandy made these explorations from the 1980s, the grim implications of anthropogenic climate change burst upon us and made those links manifest in the very air we breathe.

We might reasonably say, therefore, that Mandy’s art foresaw the full horror of climate change. Her canvases from the early and mid 1980s pictured chimneys, mining residue and industrial plants in sublimely beautiful settings and they prompted us to ask: are they abandoned? is this the past or the future? is that smoke or cloud in the sky? are those mountains natural or terraformed by industry? Martin was already investigating the blurred line between nature and culture; she was preparing herself for the Anthropocene. Science eventually caught up with her and she was ready. The Sublime is both beautiful and terrible, grand and grotesque; it has a violence at its heart that threatens everything. When Mandy painted an exploding oil platform, it was both a magnificent form of terrorism and an objective commentary on fossil-fuelled cupidity.

Mandy Martin, Oblivion, 2019, pigments, acrylic and oil on linen, 200 x 200 cm. RLDI

And it is also wonderful art. When Dorothea Mackellar wrote of her love of the wide brown land in her poem My Country (1908), she evoked “her beauty and her terror.” Living on the land Mandy knew those Australian extremes, the supreme skies at sunset and the aching earth in endless drought. As an artist in thrall to the Romantic Sublime, she explored the edge between awe and fear and her paint dripped with passion. As an environmental scholar she was sensitive to delicacy and complexity, urgency and deep time, and the fragility of the planet’s predicament, the beauty and the terror. As a human being, she was warm, funny, intelligent, loving. Mandy Martin was a remarkably original, courageous and generous Australian artist whose vision of our land, and of its past and future, is inspirational. •

The post The beauty and the terror appeared first on Inside Story.

This rulebreaker was Constance Stokes. Although she won the coveted two-year National Gallery travelling scholarship in 1929, she never received the same recognition in Australia as her male competitors. Exhibiting in London, she won high praise from Kenneth Clark and other British critics, but at home she was largely ignored. Forgotten for many years, Stokes is only now being rediscovered.

She wasn’t the first woman to show her work in public, of course. Women had been exhibiting their paintings in Melbourne and elsewhere for decades. But they didn’t have the assurance of male artists; and when they exhibited in the company of men, their work was often ignored. Many careers paused because of the demands of marriage and children, as did that of Constance Stokes. Some never developed.

Women’s individual achievements were belittled. When Nora Heysen won the Archibald Prize for portraiture in 1938, she was photographed in her kitchen. The report was headed: “Girl Painter Who Won Art Prize Is Also Good Cook.” Heysen was twenty-eight years old. An unsuccessful entrant, Max Meldrum went public with the thought that it was “sheer lunacy” for women to think they could paint as well as men. Being “differently constituted,” they should concentrate on raising a healthy family.

Meldrum was echoing the long-established view of the proper role of female artists. Samuel Johnson gave his ruling in the mid eighteenth century when he declared that “public practice of any art [was] very indelicate in a female.” When portrait painting involved “staring in men’s faces,” it was a serious breach of decorum.

Such comments were not about a woman’s skill as an artist; they were about her place in the world. If she insisted on devoting her time to painting, she would do best to stick to flowers or small children, and not to offer her work for sale. In some ways, it was easier for female writers. They could make themselves invisible, as Jane Austen did when she published as “A Lady,” or, like the Brontës and George Eliot, they could use a male pseudonym.

Nora Heysen’s Archibald win might have been less offensive to traditionalists because her subject was a woman, the elegant wife of the consul for the Netherlands. In 1960, when Judy Cassab won the award with a portrait of the swaggeringly assertive Stanislav Rapotec, the press wanted to be sure that Cassab could cook and was a devoted mother. By winning the prize for a portrait with a male subject, she made a double breakthrough. Cassab won again in 1967, this time with a female sitter. Other female artists had to wait. Over the hundred years of Archibald contests, only eleven women have taken out the prize.

Questions about a woman’s place in the public world of art are central to Jennifer Higgie’s new book, The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits, a captivating study of how female artists have created their images of self. Although the invention of the mirror benefited male as well as female painters, it had special meaning for women. Excluded from the life class, they could become their own models.

In earlier times, the female self-portrait had often come from those whose artist fathers trained them to be studio assistants. The remarkable seventeenth-century artist Artemisia Gentileschi was taught by her painter father, who in turn was a disciple of Caravaggio.

Until the nineteenth century, mirrors were scarce and expensive. But the female self-portrait flourished as soon as any female artist could study her own likeness. She saved money by not employing a model, and she could be alone with her art. It wasn’t just a matter of making up for the life class in a private anatomy lesson; for many, it was a chance for reflection.

Alice Neel in front of her 1980 self-portrait in New York. Sonia Moskowitz/IMAGES/Getty Images

Higgie adroitly places her artists in the context of their times and personal circumstances. Rather than take them in chronological order, she uses a thematic structure that groups them under such headings as “Smile,” “Allegory,” “Hallucination” and “Naked.” The “Smile” chapter is really about not smiling; the Mona Lisa look is as open as it gets. Some of the women depicted are lively and responsive to being seen, but they seldom show more than a glimpse of teeth. This restraint, as the author suggests, may have been partly due to poor or non-existent dentistry, but even in modern times the lips of most sitters remain closed.

The naked self-portraits were created in deliberate defiance of the rules that for centuries excluded women from the life class. In 1980, American portraitist Alice Neel painted herself at eighty, with no soft lighting on her ageing body. Unfazed by showing her sagging breasts, she faces the world with assurance, her expression jaunty. No regrets, no apologies; this is who I am.

In “Allegory,” the author suggests, we find coded messages from the painter. The empathy for the terrified woman in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) must reflect the artist’s own experience as a victim of rape. In 1794, a middle-aged Angelica Kauffmann looked back on her choice of career to paint herself in a moment of hesitation between the competing arts of music and painting. Angelica, an innocent in white, rejects the advances of blowzy Music and begins the uphill climb marked out for her by the stern figure of Painting.

“Hallucination” includes the wayward art of Leonora Carrington and the nightmare visions of Frida Kahlo. Carrington’s self-portrait shows the artist seated on a red cushion in an empty room. Behind her is a white rocking horse; outside the window another white horse gallops freely. Close to the artist’s chair, a hyena turns a malevolent gaze on the viewer. This expression of Carrington’s inner world stretches most notions of self-portraiture. What, after all, is the self and where does it begin and end?

Swedish artist Helene Schjerfbeck painted herself in a series of nightmares. In her eighties, anxious, lonely, dying of cancer, she produced twenty self-portraits. In most of them she is an apparition, “an other-worldly being in swirls of brown and beige.” In the last paintings she stares ahead, barely alive, barely human.

The story of Gwen John, sister of the more famous Augustus John, is a painful example of a life overwhelmed by force of circumstance. Illness, poverty and misplaced love might suggest a victim, but her superb self-portrait, painted in her mid-twenties, shows her as strong and self-contained, demure yet amused.

“I am not a flower”: Margaret Preston’s only self-portrait (1930). Art Gallery of New South Wales

Australia’s Margaret Preston had few doubts; hers is a history of triumphs and blunders. As Higgie says, Preston’s fascination with Indigenous art coexisted with a staggering ignorance and insensitivity to cultural trespass. She appears to have painted herself only once, on request. She wasn’t enthusiastic about the task. “I am not a flower,” she said. “I am a flower painter.” By contrast, Nora Heysen did many self-portraits. Whenever she changed her place of living, she would start by painting the person she knew best, herself.

Heysen’s self-portraits show subtle shifts in mood. Often she is seen at her easel, absorbed. In one painting, she turns away from her work, displeased by an interruption. There is no clutter in her studio. Her clothes are in clear, bright colours, plain and smooth as her neatly braided hair. The mood is one of composure, a quiet certainty without assertiveness. As the daughter of the famous Hans Heysen, she needed to be reassured about her independent self: her self-portraits affirmed her separateness. Heysen’s private space may seem limited, but it was her own.

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian art historian and screenwriter who now lives in London. Because her wide-ranging, generous and perceptive book can give no more than a selection from 500 years of women’s self-portraiture, it seems ungrateful to complain of omissions. Yet, in a study that includes self-portraits by artists from many cultures, some space could have been found for Indigenous Australian women. One example: Julie Dowling’s Self-Portrait: In Our Country (2002) carries the burden of her family history.

Higgie skates rapidly over colonial Australia, where she finds nothing of interest. Georgiana McCrae is an obvious omission. Trained in London, with professional experience in 1830s Edinburgh, McCrae was forbidden by her husband from painting for money. Her career ended after her marriage and settlement in Port Phillip. She did, however, paint portraits of family and friends. The most relevant to Higgie’s study would be McCrae’s early self-portrait, coupled with her much later portrait of “Eliza” of the Bunurong tribe. Eliza’s pose, with one hand at her breast, matches that chosen by McCrae for her own image. The young Georgiana looks confident, even coquettish, while Eliza’s gaze is patient, expecting nothing. Painted at a time when McCrae’s hopes had dwindled, Eliza’s portrait may express the artist’s empathy.

In an art world that didn’t accept women as equals, the self-portrait was an assertion of individuality. “This is who I am,” these artists say. It’s their response to those who questioned their right to a career in art with the putdown of “Who does she think she is?” Jennifer Higgie’s spirited and engaging book shows that there are as many answers to that question as there are individuals. Their versions of self, in many moods and modes, encompass worlds of experience and achievement. •

The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits
By Jennifer Higgie | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | $39.99 | 336 pages

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In its dramatic setting in The Messiah, the aria is a commentary on the loss of leadership, though in this case the message is that the people are to blame. “We have turned every one to his own way,” runs the next line of the text, drawn from Isaiah. If we the people are in trouble, we may have no one but ourselves to blame, but who are we?

“It’s time to find out,” Annabel Crabb announced later in the evening, introducing Australia Talks, a ninety-minute feature on the results of a survey in which 60,000 people across the country were invited to respond to 600-plus questions about their attitudes, habits and opinions. Co-host Nazeem Hussain declared himself “so pumped to be part of this special event” as cheers went up from the studio audience and a graphic of bouncing coloured balls set the party mood. There would be none of Tingle’s astringency here.

Some of the survey’s findings suggest the mood of the nation is upbeat: 80 per cent of us think it’s the best country in the world, a rise of 10 per cent over the past decade; 80 per cent of us are optimistic about our own futures; 79 per cent of us think we should keep the borders closed until Covid is over. How good is Australia?

And yet, as emerged from a series of live crosses to regional centres, many of the responses were far from happy. Forty per cent of residents in Rockhampton, for example, say they have difficulty making ends meet, and the young are especially hard-pressed. One young woman fights back tears as she says she can’t afford to rent somewhere to live and fears she may never be able to move out of her parents’ place. The trickle-down effect doesn’t work, says a train driver.

Fifty per cent of respondents say that capitalism has failed. Seventy-nine per cent think the gap between rich and poor is too big. Sixty-five per cent think that JobSeeker should be raised. Eighty-one per cent don’t trust corporate executives. As if to reassure viewers that no one was going to get too serious about such matters, live-cross host Nina Oyama did a brief stand-up on the theme of capitalism at a Rockhampton club; then it was back to the studio for some fun facts about our sex lives and personal habits.

No doubt the bubbly atmosphere was a careful programming decision: halfway through a second year of intermittent lockdown and social distancing, perhaps it was fair enough to use the survey as pretext for a show that accentuates togetherness and fun. And it should be acknowledged that its findings are being featured elsewhere, including in snapshots of the data from Casey Briggs on ABC News.

Yet the program came across as over-hyped and confused. Contradictory findings — majority concern about economic inequality versus an overall satisfaction with the state of the nation, for example — were ignored. Glib studio banter risked making light of the obvious distress of some interview subjects.

The announcement of the number one issue on which we all agree (“Da-ra!”… “Are we all pumped?”) led to tougher perspectives. Ninety-eight per cent of us think politicians should resign if they are found to have taken a bribe. Ninety-four per cent think they should resign if they lie to the public. Crabb made an awkward attempt to shift to a more urgent register. “In many ways Australia Talks is a cry for help and for more accountability from politicians,” she said.

Fifty-six per cent of respondents think politicians are often corrupt; 72 per cent think they get away with it. Eighty-eight per cent support a federal corruption watchdog. Barrie Cassidy, appearing in a video segment on the theme of trust in politics, said the public should be pushing for the watchdog. “Make them nervous and that might just change behaviour,” he urged, striking a note of moral seriousness that the program as a whole signally failed to sound.

The appearance of John Howard for the concluding section did nothing to help in this regard. If the responses in the survey are to be taken seriously, it was bizarre to call for a warm welcome to the prime minister who so consequentially traded on fake news about weapons of mass destruction and refugees throwing their children overboard.

Like any such attempt to gauge public opinion, the survey behind the program is open to criticism for its methodology. And we should always be wary of attempts to translate pollsters’ respondents into “us,” or Australians in general. For a more circumspect consideration of who “we” are, viewers can turn to Rachel Griffiths’s three-part ABC series Finding the Archibald, which delves into the hundred-year history of the national portrait prize.

Using the medium of portraiture to focus on how we see ourselves needn’t entail any attempt to come up with firm answers. In fact, Griffiths’s explorations serve to deepen the enigma of identity rather than resolve it. Perhaps there is an analogy with the way a good actor works: Griffiths has no need to indulge in flamboyant vitality in order to draw us into the genuine curiosity she so evidently feels for the work of the painter.

As a motif for the series, she takes on the challenge of finding the one painting that, above all others that have been in contention for the prize, represents the face of the nation. It’s a chimera, of course, but she redeems her quest by making it all about the uncertainties and shifting criteria of judgement.

Here she is helped by curator Natalie Wilson, who has the task of selecting one hundred portraits from some 6000 Archibald finalists for a centenary retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. As we look at some of the paintings Wilson has already identified as key works, social and aesthetic transitions are starkly visible.

W.B. McInnes’s inaugural winning portrait of architect Harold Desbrowe Annear, an image of posed dignity in greys and browns reflecting a deeply conservative white Australia, is set against John Brack’s 1969 pop art rendition of Dame Edna Everage. With its gaudy colour palette and satirical attitude, Griffiths suggests, Brack’s is the first portrait that was really about celebrity.

The search for the one painting involves moving through a forest of exploding criteria. As a form of social enquiry, it’s a scoping exercise with requirements that echo those of a good demographic survey. Painters and their subjects must be considered across ethnicity, gender, age, location and employment.

And then there is the range of styles and approaches taken by the painters, many of whom have sought to flout the conventions of portraiture and test the adjudicators. Ultimately, the work must itself be the determinant. “You have to look and look and look and look,” advises Ben Quilty, who has recent experience on the judging panel. “A good portrait is way, way more than a likeness.”

If we, like sheep, have gone astray, it may indeed be time to take a good look at ourselves. One hundred years of the Archibald, with all its controversies, could test our preconceptions about what we will see. •

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Many of the families of the roughly 2050 Dunera men have in their keeping wartime keepsakes passed to them by fathers and grandfathers. Over the past three years many of them have contacted me, wanting to donate their treasures to public institutions so that others may also enjoy them. I help where I can, providing introductions to the museums and libraries I know will care for and celebrate the collections. My spare room has become a halfway house for artefacts on their way from private homes to the public sphere.

Curators may shudder at that thought, but I think it’s wonderful. Each day I have privileged glimpses of rare artefacts — paintings, sketches, letters, perhaps an artist’s beret or a travel trunk — that tell vivid stories of people’s lives, of hope and loss in a world at war. Just last month the son of a “Dunera boy” entrusted to my keeping the scores of letters his mother and father sent each other during the war years. In that treasure trove is a tale of love; but other collections can devastate. I have read letters exchanged by Dunera internees, safe in Australia, with mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers trapped in Nazi Europe.

The most intimate of these collections reveal details about Dunera internees of whom we knew nothing when writing the books. Of the great majority of the “Dunera boys” we know only a little, and sometimes nothing other than the biographical bones — name, age and homeland — offered on wartime forms. Many, and probably most, didn’t speak publicly about their lives, and especially about their wartime lives as unfortunate souls arrested and imprisoned without fair reason. For some, this history evoked pain; others preferred to look ahead, never dwelling in the past. Some didn’t want the Dunera experience to colour how their lives and careers were interpreted.

Paul Mezulianik was one of these silent men, his Dunera history not for sharing. I first heard his name in January 2019 when Æone Shrimpton, his stepdaughter, wrote from England about the possibility of donating his art collection to an Australian home. A little over two years later, an exhibition of his work is showing at Tatura Museum, near Shepparton in northern Victoria. In presenting a selection of those artworks for the first time, the staff at Tatura Museum and I have taken the liberty of delving into his past. We do so to honour an individual and tell something of his unique story. About 2000 Dunera stories still remain to be told.

Paul Mezulianik was born to Rudolf Mezulianik, a sales representative, and his wife Gisela (nee Wien) in Vienna on 12 November 1921. Rudolf, who had been raised as a Catholic, had left the church on 11 July 1917 to marry Gisela, or Gitel, who was Jewish. Until the late 1930s the couple were part of Vienna’s Jewish community. On 21 March 1938, just days after Hitler came to Vienna’s famed Heldenplatz to proclaim Germany’s incorporation of Austria, Rudolf left the community. Gisela followed his lead on 19 June 1939.

Paul, raised in the Jewish faith, was baptised on 28 November 1938, shortly after the anti-Semitic violence of Kristallnacht. He was seventeen. Later he would tell Australian officials that he was Catholic, but he wasn’t. His creed was atheism.

An only child, Paul studied at a primary school in Vienna’s fourth district, then for three years from 1931–32 at the Akademische Gymnasium, a high school of excellent reputation. But his marks were so poor that he couldn’t continue to fourth year. Whether he abandoned his studies or continued them elsewhere isn’t known.

Paul remembered Hitler declaring the Anschluss. In the months that followed, the anti-Semitism inherent in Nazi rule and law began to close in on him and the Mezulianik family. On at least one occasion, when Nazi officials came calling, brave neighbours protected Gisela. As the Nazi threat pressed ever harder, queues at foreign embassies lengthened. Jews and others in desperate need of safe haven applied for refuge in friendly countries, with the United States the most popular of potential destinations.

“Certain pieces appear to depict scenes and characters from the years of his internment”: Undated sketch by Paul Mezulianik.

Paul applied for a visa at the American embassy in Vienna in December 1938, but he was denied passage to the United States. It was a common story: the Western liberal democracies were slow — immorally so — to respond to the humanitarian crisis in Europe. The Society of Friends, known as Quakers, eventually arranged his passage to Britain in May 1939, with his residency guaranteed by a British man married to one of Paul’s Austrian friends. While his parents remained in their flat in Vienna — where they would survive the war — he began work on a farm in Yorkshire.

On 16 May of the following year, months into the war, Paul was one of the thousands of Germans and Austrians to be stung by the illiberalism that swept Britain following German military advances. Worried about the possibility of Nazi agents hiding among Germans and Austrians who had sought sanctuary in Britain, Churchill and his government authorised mass arrests. With this one bureaucratic act, thousands of refugees from Nazism were rendered “enemy aliens,” Britain their sanctuary no more.

Churchill’s government wanted enemy aliens as far away as possible from Britain and the war. Paul would tell his family of being deported on the SS Arandora Star, which was sunk by enemy action in July 1940, on its way to Canada, with about 800 lives lost. He remembered being pushed from the foundering vessel into the sea, then dragged from the waters of the Atlantic onto a lifeboat. With more men in the water than space in lifeboats, many of those who survived the sinking soon drowned.

Paul’s account echoes that of another Dunera internee, athletics coach Franz Stampfl. Although no evidence exists to put him aboard the Arandora Star, Stampfl told of surviving its sinking. Paul’s name doesn’t appear on passenger manifests either, or in official documents as a survivor of the sinking, and there is no particular reason why he should have been on the ship. The Arandora Star carried internees about whom the British authorities had political doubts, of which Paul was unlikely to be one. He was probably a category C “enemy alien,” meaning that authorities felt he posed no threat to Britain’s security. Moreover, he arrived in Australia with an intact suitcase and contents, a circumstance extremely rare among Arandora Star survivors. This is not to say that Paul, and Stampfl, weren’t on the Arandora Star, but simply to note that history doesn’t show it.

Undated sketch by Paul Mezulianik.

A week after the Arandora Star’s survivors were returned to land, the HMT Dunera departed Liverpool for Australia, carrying more than 2000 of Churchill’s “enemy aliens.” In Dunera terms, Paul was not destined to spend long in Australia. He was held at Hay, in New South Wales, from September 1940 until May 1941, where he lived in Camp 8, Hut 20. One of his hut mates was Heinz Schloesser, whose remarkable life inspired Belinda Castles’s novel Hannah and Emil. Then he was part of the mass movement of Dunera internees to Tatura, in Victoria, where he remained until July of the next year. His return to Britain having been approved, he boarded the TSS Themistocles in Melbourne on 18 July 1942.

Paul’s closest Dunera friend may have been Rudolf Stern, from Cologne, whose birth date, 3 May 1924, made him one of the youngest internees. The two men kept in touch after Paul returned to London. In one letter, Rudi asked Paul to help find him a job in London. Though probably written in Tatura, the letter was sent from the Liverpool transit camp in Sydney, where Dunera men intending to return to Britain were housed while awaiting passage. Rudi died on 29 October 1942 when the MV Abosso, the transport on which he was returning to Britain, was sunk by a German submarine northwest of the Azores. Paul carried the sadness of Rudi’s death for the rest of his life.

Like so many former Dunera internees facing hostility from people who assumed they were German, Paul gave thought to changing his name. His entry in the London Gazette’s list of newly naturalised Britons in January 1950 reads:

Mezulianik, Paul (known as Paul Julian); Austria; Artist; 12, College Road, Isleworth, Middlesex. 22 December, 1949.

Did he want a British name to accompany his British identity? If he did, the thought was fleeting. He appears not to have used the surname Julian, or at least he didn’t formally register the change. His family — he married Patricia, mother to his son Stephen, in 1944, and Esilda, Æone’s mother, in 1963 — knew him only by the name Mezulianik.

After he returned to Britain, Paul took a factory job making aircraft instruments. Once the war was over he turned to film, working initially in animation for Gaumont-British Animation, then for other companies. His animation credits include the 1954 version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. His work won acclaim, leading eventually to a position as director of the Special Animations Unit for Rank Screen Services. Later he made prize-winning television advertisements for Dorland Advertising, which in time became part of the Saatchi & Saatchi empire.

Success allowed for early retirement, at age sixty, and time to indulge his passions. He gardened, listened to music and played the piano, and travelled widely with Esilda — to Europe, the United States, Africa, and islands of the Indian Ocean. Each year he visited his parents in Vienna, maintaining this annual pilgrimage after Gisela died in 1969 until Rudolf’s death in 1978. Paul died on 21 January 2019, aged ninety-seven.

Undated sketch by Paul Mezulianik.

A month before Paul’s death, Æone Shrimpton, his stepdaughter from his second marriage, uncovered a trunk in the attic of the Berkshire house he had shared with Esilda. For decades Paul had hidden his artworks, about 250 in number, from his family. They are almost exclusively figure drawings, studies of human emotions and form, and together they show a fine hand, charting his development as his technique and use of colour became more refined. Certain pieces appear to depict scenes and characters from the years of his internment, and the poor quality of much of the paper suggests that at least part of the collection dates to wartime.

The many nudes prompt the thought that Paul might have joined a life-drawing class, but some of these images, too, may have been sketched during his internment. Artists who could draw the female form found their work highly sought after among the all-male Dunera population, who gave money, cigarettes or other rewards in exchange. The African men and women Paul depicted may have been sketched aboard the TSS Themistocles, which called at Durban and Freetown on his return voyage to Britain in 1942.

By the time of Æone’s discovery, Paul was blind, suffering dementia, and unable to answer questions about the works and his motivations as an artist. He may not have answered them anyway.

Paul was not an easy person, says Æone, with love. Confined to a nursing home late in life, he continued to play piano while complaining bitterly, in Æone’s words, that it wasn’t a grand. He loved gardening and found enjoyment in growing fruit, vegetables, dahlias and zinnias, though that pleasure also showed his pernickety ways: dahlias and zinnias were the only flowers he liked, and the only species he grew. He was given to doubts about his abilities. He was an outstanding pianist, but never considered himself as such. Did he hold similar reservations about his art?

And there was the matter of the war, about which Paul was reluctant to speak. What Æone does know of Paul’s experiences came from her mother, who was also hesitant. In 2014, when Æone asked Esilda in her last days about Paul and the sinking of the Arandora Star, “she became very distressed and it seemed to haunt her.” Æone decided not to tell Paul she had found his art collection.

The Austrian historian Elisabeth Lebensaft was another who learned that Paul preferred to leave the past undisturbed. He resisted her request for information, replying politely but firmly that he remembered almost nothing of the Dunera and his internment. At some point he did tell his friend Fritz Sternhell (1924–2020), of Oxford, something of his experiences: perhaps discussing the past was easier with those who also had lived the Dunera story. Fritz returned to Britain on the same ship as Paul, the TSS Themistocles.

Dunera wasn’t the only source of pain in Paul’s past. In the years after the war, he conducted a long affair with the fiancée and, later, wife of his best friend. This was Esilda, Æone’s mother, whom he later wed. As always, such circumstances had costs. Paul became estranged from Stephen, his only child, who later changed his name, further distancing himself from his father. When Paul died, Æone and her husband Christopher engaged an agency to locate Stephen so he could have the opportunity to come to the funeral. He was found, and attended, but hasn’t been in touch since. The Mezulianik lineage is lost.

“Werde, was Du bist!” Robert Hofmann’s portrait of Paul Mezulianik, c. 1941–42.

For only one piece in Paul’s collection, and in this exhibition, is the exact provenance known: a portrait of Paul by the acclaimed Austrian artist Robert Hofmann, a fellow Dunera internee. Hofmann, who was fifty-one when he arrived in Australia, was an artist of considerable reputation, winner of the 1922 Prix de Rome and one of Europe’s finest exponents of portraiture. Were the two men friends? Did Hofmann help Paul refine his touch and method?

The portrait, completed at Tatura in 1941 or 1942, shows a strikingly handsome young man, pensive and reticent. Hofmann captured a sense that the subject holds on to something not to be shared. His inscription on the portrait, though hard to decipher, appears to read: “Werde, was Du bist!” (“Become what you are!”) The portrait hung in Paul’s house throughout his postwar life. This artwork was for sharing, his own works were not. He kept his history close. •

Become What You Are: The Art of Dunera Boy Paul Mezulianik is showing at Tatura Museum until July. This article is an expanded and edited version of an essay in the exhibition catalogue. After the exhibition ends, the Mezulianik collection will be donated to the State Library of New South Wales.

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Beckett took up painting seriously only in her mid twenties, and died at forty-eight. She painted mostly the streets and beaches of her suburb, Melbourne’s Beaumaris, and never travelled outside Victoria. She had her supporters, certainly, even among the art critics; but after she died, she was largely forgotten. If not for the persistence of one young woman a generation later, she could have disappeared from memory altogether.

A blockbuster exhibition of 150 works by this unique artist, Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment, now in its final month at the Art Gallery of South Australia, shows what a loss that would have been. (For those who can’t get to Adelaide before the exhibition closes, Marcus Bunyan provides a very good guide on his website, Art Blart.)

Fifty years after Rosalind Hollinrake resurrected her work, critical opinion sees her, in the words of exhibition curator Tracey Lock, as “one of Australia’s most important painters of the interwar period, critically acknowledged for her own individual form of modernism.”

October Morning, painted in Melbourne circa 1927. Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter/Art Gallery of South Australia

Some go further. John McDonald of the Sydney Morning Herald says that he was so overwhelmed by the scale and diversity of the exhibition that he returned to see it three days in a row. “I’m wary of hyperbole and reluctant to play the game of declaring any artist to be ‘the best,’” he concludes, “but for me this retrospective of what remains of Clarice Beckett’s work has propelled her way ahead of more celebrated painters such as Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith.” Beckett has been dismissed as another “Meldrumite,” he adds, “but neither Max Meldrum nor any of his tonalist disciples ever painted anything as poignant as the work in this exhibition… If this show were being staged at Tate Modern or the Museum of Modern Art, Beckett would be hailed as a figure of world renown.”

For what it’s worth — not much, since I’m no art critic — I had a similar experience. I’ve loved Beckett’s work for twenty years, but like McDonald I was inwardly fearful that seeing a lot of it together might lead to a disappointing sense of repetition. Far from it: each new viewing led to new discoveries, as works overlooked the previous day turned on their own magnetism.

Yet the paintings haven’t changed since they were excoriated almost a century ago by the ageing Arthur Streeton and other critics. They remain the same misty, often melancholy mix of colours, fuzzy outlines of people, trees and buildings, usually painted lightly, seemingly in great haste, and rarely reworked. Trundling her painting trolley around Beaumaris and up the coast of Port Phillip Bay, Beckett produced thousands of them: according to her sister Hilda, as many as five in a morning’s work. All of them different.

How did one young gallery owner rescue her from the oblivion to which she had been consigned? And what did Streeton and the art world of her time miss that today’s art world acclaims?

Rosalind Hollinrake was in her late twenties, and married to Barry Humphries, when she was startled by one moody, haunting painting, and then another, signed only “C. Beckett.” She asked around, but no one in Melbourne in the late 1960s knew of any artist of that name. She thought Beckett might be an American.

She called the journalist Keith Dunstan, whose daily “A Place in the Sun” was Melbourne’s most widely read newspaper column, and he asked his readers if they could shed light on this mystery. Two days later, a well-dressed older woman walked into Hollinrake’s gallery and unwrapped some small paintings, clearly by the same artist. The visitor was Hilda Beckett Mangan: the painter, she said, was her late sister, Clarice. And there were thousands more of her works stored in a farm shed near Benalla.

Evening, After Whistler, painted in Melbourne circa 1931. Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter in memory of Elizabeth through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2019, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

When Rosalind and Hilda went to the farm, though, they were almost too late. The paintings had been stashed there for decades, and the shed was open to the weather on three sides: in that time, rain and possums had destroyed most of them. Only 369 works could be salvaged from the more than 2000 stored there. McDonald calls the loss “one of the great disasters of Australian art history.”

Hollinrake picked out a few dozen works and put them on exhibition at her Melbourne gallery. It was a success: the young Patrick McCaughey, as art critic of the Age, hailed Beckett as a “remarkable modernist… The advanced is never the prerogative of the announced candidates. It sneaks up behind you and raps the knuckles of your taste.” James Mollison, director of the new National Gallery of Australia, bought eight of the paintings on the recommendation of Fred Williams.

Eight Beckett exhibitions followed in a decade, spreading to Adelaide, Sydney and Canberra. Hollinrake published a biography, which soon sold out. Eventually the National Gallery of Victoria bought its first Beckett — although in recent years, in my experience, it is rare to find any of her works on its walls. The main galleries interstate, as well as in Ballarat, Bendigo, Castlemaine and Benalla, all had classics of her oeuvre. Group exhibitions — notably the nationally touring exhibition Clarice Beckett: Politically Incorrect (1999) and the South Australian gallery’s Modern Australian Women (2001) and Misty Moderns (2008) — widened and deepened her following.

Australia owes a great debt to Rosalind Hollinrake. It is largely thanks to her that, in all, about 600 paintings have been preserved. As McCaughey wrote in 2014 in his book Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters, “Without the exhibitions that Hollinrake mounted in her gallery and later curated for tour in public galleries, Beckett would have perished as an artist and the loss to Australian culture would have been immense.”

Clarice Beckett was born in 1887 into a relatively well-off family in western Victoria. Her father was a bank manager with the Colonial Bank of Australasia, which later merged into what is now NAB. He was later promoted to run the Bendigo branch, and then to head office in Melbourne. Clarice spent her childhood mostly in country towns: Casterton, Bendigo, at boarding school at Queen’s College, Ballarat (now merged into Ballarat Grammar), and finally a year at Melbourne Girls’ Grammar. In 1905, the Argus reported that the eighteen-year-old had won a first prize of three guineas in a competition for the best essay on the moral lessons of A Girl’s Cross Roads, then playing at the Theatre Royal.

But where her own road took her next is not clear. As curator Tracey Lock laments, “We know little about her. There are few extant letters and no diaries or journals.” But she clearly decided to become an artist, despite parental misgivings and all the obstacles in the way of a woman taking that path. In 1914 she and Hilda moved to Melbourne to begin drawing classes under Frederick McCubbin at the National Gallery art school: in view of her later nonchalance in drawing the human body, it is interesting that Clarice was runner-up for the prize for best drawings of hands and feet.

A life-changing decision saw her move on in 1917 to study with Max Meldrum, the charismatic theorist of tonalism, whose break with the traditionalists was to divide Melbourne’s art world in two. Meldrum disdained literal painting of human and natural forms and sought to capture instead “the great story of Nature’s colour, tone, proportion, sound and rhythm.” A “Meldrum group” formed around him, with Clarice Beckett as one of its leading members. Their works, overwhelmingly landscapes, rejected sharp lines for fuzzy edges, their blurred images reminding more literal minds of photos out of focus. Many in the art world just didn’t get it.

Beckett pushed the boundaries furthest of all. In her seascapes and suburban street scenes, forms became indistinct, humans became blobs on the beach or footpath, headlights became splotches in the fog or rain, poles were only roughly straight, and one colour merged into the next. She was indomit-able: the more the critics attacked her lack of “form,” the further she moved from what they wanted her to do.

One of the finest works of this exhibition, Tranquility (1933), shows that capturing the mood of nature, not its literal detail, was what mattered to her. Birds are rarely seen in her seascapes. Trees are suggested rather than precisely rendered. In the catalogue of a 1924 exhibition, she wrote that she sought “to give a sincere and truthful representation of a portion of the beauty of Nature, and to show the charm of light and shade, which I try to give forth in correct tones so as to give as nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality.”

Tranquility, painted in Melbourne circa 1933. Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter/Art Gallery of South Australia

The test is whether the viewer of the work senses it to be “an exact illusion of reality.” In her own generation, many did not. While her paintings of cut flowers in vases were universally popular, some critics, all of them painters themselves, disparaged her landscapes, either by ignoring them or by merciless criticism — often for choosing humdrum subjects such as street scenes and cars driving in fog and rain.

“This artist,” Streeton wrote sarcastically in the Argus, “appears to limit her vision to one particular expression of Nature — the misty lightness one sometimes encounters before the sun has risen high enough for its light to separate one object firmly from another. This may be an experimental stage in the study of this artist and when she chooses for a change a subject with hard edges, such as crockery, cutlery or cut glass, she should lend a welcome variety to her exhibitions.”

Yet Beckett was pushing the boundaries — just as Streeton himself had done almost half a century earlier — to create a new genre that would express different emotions. Did the old man remember how his 9 by 5 exhibition with Tom Roberts and Charles Conder in 1889 was savaged by the Argus critic of that time? “The modern impressionist asks you to see pictures in splashes of colour, in slap-dash brushwork, and in sleight-of-hand methods of execution leading to the proposition of pictorial conundrums, which would baffle solution if there were no label or catalogue,” wrote James Smith. “In an exhibition of paintings you naturally look for pictures, instead of which the impressionist presents you with a varied assortment of palettes.”

What distinguishes Beckett’s work so strongly from that of the other members of the Meldrum group, or of her contemporaries Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith, is its appeal to the emotions. As one viewer aptly put it, “her works ache with feeling.” This is as true of her sunlit paintings — the Castlemaine gallery’s Boatshed, Beaumaris (1928), for example, or the privately owned Sunny Morning (1933) — as of those grey melancholy skies and mists she is best known for.

In short, Clarice Beckett was ahead of her time; decades later, the rest of us have gradually caught up. And not only about painting: these days there is nothing unusual about a concerned woman writing to her newspaper about an act of environmental desecration by officialdom. But I suspect that Beckett’s letter to the Argus, published on 7 June 1934, a rare glimpse into her thinking, was likewise ahead of its time:

“Allow me to plead for the protection of the foreshore. The beautiful cliffs of Beaumaris are undergoing what I believe the Sandringham council would call a ‘tidying-up’ process. This process consists of tearing up every native plant and creeper and leaving a trail of turned-over sods and black smouldering ashes where the plants and creepers have been cremated. In the summer we are certain of a plentiful crop of weeds, thistles and Cape weed to replace the native growths. The shallow roots of the tea-tree are left unprotected, and at the first gale of wind are uprooted and blown over. Why cannot the council realise that the chief charm of Beaumaris to residents and visitors lies in the native untouched beauty of the foreshore? Surely the council can find more useful work for the unemployed than in perpetrating such an act of vandalism.”

Fortunately, Beckett has had not just her critics but also her champions. After Rosalind Hollinrake, the Art Gallery of South Australia has been the most active in recent decades. In 2019 it negotiated to buy twenty-one of Beckett’s paintings from Hollinrake using a generous donation from businessman Alastair Hunter. This exhibition is their public debut; some, such as The Red Sunshade, are among Beckett’s finest.

The Red Sunshade, painted in Melbourne in 1932. Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter/Art Gallery of South Australia

Even in her own time, Beckett had supporters. The Age’s Alexander Colquhoun understood her work well, and explained it to readers repeatedly in his columns. Percy Leason, a close friend and colleague in the Meldrum group, was unstinting in his praise as art critic of the Herald’s upmarket weekly, Table Talk. In 1933, a letter to the Age berated the National Gallery of Victoria for refusing to buy any work by this Victorian artist “whose work, as a woman painter, is not surpassed, and possibly not even equalled, by any other woman living in this world.”

And in October 1932, two days after Herald art critic Blamire Young had disparaged her new exhibition — if not as rudely as in his previous review, where he described her paintings as “mist, telegraph poles and service coaches… served up in the Meldrum manner remorselessly to our continued grief” — the paper published a contrary view from its folksy columnist, “The Rouseabout.”

“Though I had biked, hiked and motored along Beach Road around Beaumaris Bay a hundred or more times,” he wrote, “I did not fully recognise the beauty of the place till I looked in at Miss Clarice Beckett’s exhibition of oil paintings at the Athenaeum today. This Bendigo girl, pupil of Max Meldrum, has caught cliff and water in all moods of light and weather and season, revealing that there is not one Beaumaris Bay, but a score.

“I am indebted to Miss Beckett for a sharp lesson. There are bathing boxes in Beaumaris beach the sight of which I shunned unless nymphs happened to be guarding the doorways; petrol pumps on the road which inspired only a thought of the price of the juice they contained; telegraph poles put there, apparently, just to annoy artists.

“But she has courageously brought the boxes, pumps, and poles, as well as motor cars into the picture, and lo! we see that the sun loves to play about them. So I really saw Beaumaris for the first time.”

No name was attached, but around that time the Rouseabout was C.J. Dennis, beloved author of The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. He understood what his fellow artist was showing him. This woman doing her own thing — this painter of moody, misty landscapes — produced paintings that delight, resonate and, in their silence, speak to our emotions in a way few other Australian artworks have done. •

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One of the powerful engines driving this branding has been the blockbuster exhibition. And so, just as our pandemic gloom has begun to lift, we’ve been offered two generous helpings of this cultural comfort food. The Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Streeton was thronged right up to its closing in mid February. And now an even larger show, She-oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism, has opened at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Why can’t we get enough of the iconic paintings of Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and their followers? The legend of the movement’s origins in Heidelberg, its defiant birth in the 9 by 5 exhibition of 1889 and its adoption as a signifier of Australian national identity certainly has something to do with Australian impressionism’s hold on our imagination. The very notion of Australian impressionism implies that here at last was a style we could call our own, combined with a cheeky assertion of kinship with the glamour of Paris.

But the legend’s deepest anchor lies in the paintings themselves, specifically the landscapes of Arthur Streeton. As the historian Keith Hancock observed nearly a century ago, Streeton’s pictures were already a “national habit,” a vision of an unchanging Australian Arcadia. Part of the works’ continuing enchantment is that, as Paul Simon once sung about “Kodachrome,” they still give us “the nice bright colours,” the “greens of summer,” and make us think that “all the world’s a sunny day.” And who would not want to have some of Streeton’s sunshine in their lives at this moment?

Australian impressionism is also an enduring paradigm of Australian art history, one that was firmly established in Bernard Smith’s seminal book, Australian Painting, 1788–1960. During the past six decades our art historians have offered many refinements and reassessments of the origins, character and significance of the work of Streeton, Roberts and their contemporaries, including in recent years Clara Southern, Jane Sutherland and other female artists. There’s even been a prolonged and productive debate about whether it’s meaningful to speak of their style as impressionist.

Yet for all their passion and erudition, the starting point for most scholars of the period 1885–1900 — including Australia’s social and cultural historians — remains a focus on the usual suspects and their most favoured medium of oil on canvas.

But what if we shifted the angle of vision on this most fabled era in Australian art history and saw it through the eyes of a less familiar figure?

This is what I’ve been doing for more than a decade as I’ve researched the art and life of one A. Henry Fullwood (1863–1930). Fullwood (like most British-Australian artists prior to 1900, including Tom Roberts) was English-born and trained before immigrating to Sydney in 1883. From then until 1900 he was probably the most viewed artist of his generation thanks to his work as an illustrator for the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, the Sydney Mail, the London Graphic and the Bulletin.

A close friend and ally of Roberts and Streeton, Fullwood was also regarded as a leading impressionist painter. Indeed, the critic and artist David Souter went so far as to assert at the time that Fullwood was “the most Australian of all our Australian painters.” Between 1900 and 1920 Tom, Arthur and “Remus” — as Fullwood was known to his mates — decamped to London, becoming honoured members of the Chelsea Arts Club before working as medical orderlies and official war artists during the Great War. All in all, Fullwood was a well-known and highly respected artist.

A. Henry Fullwood’s Prince Regent’s Glen, Wentworth Falls (1888). Denis Savill Collection/Macquarie University Art Gallery

So why has his star so waned while his friends have gone on to become icons of Australian art? Put briefly, his art and career don’t easily align with the legend, paradigm or brand of Australian impressionism. If only he had been born in Australia, worked in Melbourne, and camped with Roberts and Streeton in Heidelberg, Remus might still be more widely remembered today.

But it’s not just Fullwood whose contributions to Australian art have been marginalised. The neglect extends to all of his fellow artist-illustrators working in Sydney at that time, including the estimable Julian Ashton and Frank Mahony. Apart from their misfortune not to have been Marvellous Melburnians, their status as “artists” has been anachronistically diminished by their well-paid work as “illustrators.” Their ephemeral black-and-white art has been largely ignored or devalued, and even their distinguished work as watercolourists, printmakers and painters is seen as of secondary importance to the now-iconic oils of Roberts, Streeton and their circle.

What difference would it make to our understanding of Australian art in the Heidelberg era (including Australian impressionism) if we enlarged our field of vision to include the contributions of Sydney’s art-workers who, in Bernard Smith’s judgement, helped to make Australia “one of the most important centres of black-and-white art in the world” during the second half of the nineteenth century?

This is the question at the heart of A Nation Imagined: The Artists of the Picturesque Atlas, an exhibition that recently opened at the National Library of Australia. Produced in partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the NLA show highlights both the Atlas as a landmark moment in the history of Australian art and the contributions of three of its settler-colonial artists — Ashton, Fullwood and Mahony — to the advancement of what journalist James Smith described in 1887 as “a distinctive school of landscape painting.”

A Nation Imagined, which I co-curated with Natalie Wilson, begins by foregrounding the role of the illustrated press’s wood-engraved art in shaping the visual culture of the Victorian era. The high point of this art form was The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia. Produced between 1886 and 1889 in forty-two parts, it brought to Australia a small army of American artists, engravers, cartographers, printers and salesmen who collaborated with local authors and illustrators to create possibly the most beautiful book ever published in Australia.

The chief selling point of the Atlas was its 800 original engravings which, combined with its text and maps, offered a proudly settler-colonial view of Australia’s history, achievements and prospects. The Atlas consolidated a distinctive iconography whose landscapes, seascapes and townscapes emphasised the productivity as well as the beauty and pride of an emerging nation. Its heroes were the men — governors, explorers, miners and pastoralists — who made Australia. While the Atlas’s writers and artists marginalised the history and suffering of First Nations peoples, they ignored altogether the contributions of convicts and white women.

On the strength of its settler-colonial iconography, the Atlas was acknowledged in 1300 newspaper articles between 1886 and 1889 as marking “the birth of art beneath the Southern Cross.” Compared with the prolonged attention lavished on the Atlas’s artists, the 9 by 5 exhibition was a mere flash in the pan. Visitors to A Nation Imagined will have the chance to judge for themselves the aesthetic interest of the many original sketches and engravings on display.

The Atlas transformed Ashton, Fullwood and Mahony almost overnight into three of settler-colonial Australasia’s most famous artists. Ashton used his fame and considerable political skills to take over the Art Society of New South Wales. Between 1889 and 1898, as a trustee of the National Art Gallery of NSW, he successfully lobbied for £500 to be spent annually on the purchase of Australian art. Sydney was now well on its way to becoming Australia’s art capital.

The younger Fullwood and Mahony also went from strength to strength, even collaborating to produce art for both the illustrated press and private patrons. Fullwood was appointed a staff artist for both the Sydney Mail’s Illustrated Supplement — the forerunner of today’s Good Weekend — and the London Graphic. Mahony became the Bulletin’s premier artist of outback life and humour, illustrating the books of its leading writers, including Henry Lawson and Steele Rudd. He was a fine painter of animals, and Sydney’s National Gallery purchased several of his paintings, along with those of his good mate Fullwood.

Not content with these local successes, Ashton orchestrated the placement of Australian art onto the world stage, initially at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and, five years later, at the first exhibition of the work of the “Australian school” in London. Ashton was far and away the most influential champion of Australasia’s settler-colonial artists, and in A Nation Imagined it’s at last possible to weigh up his distinctive artistic contributions alongside the sketches and paintings of his fellow Atlas artists, Fullwood and Mahony.

Two other beneficiaries of Ashton’s growing influence were Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, who came to Sydney in the early 1890s as economic refugees from Melbourne. The National Gallery of Victoria refused to buy their works, but its NSW counterpart was prepared to do so. The two Victorians soon became active members of Sydney’s burgeoning artist colony, finding in Fullwood a fellow impressionist who was glad to share with them his networks, patrons and tradecraft. This was the context that enabled Roberts and Streeton to produce some of their most iconic works.

When the narratives of the NLA’s A Nation Imagined and my work on Fullwood are combined with those attached to the legend, paradigm and brand of Australian impressionism, the result will be a richer and much-enlarged story about this fabled era in Australia’s art history.

For a start, we can begin to see that Australian impressionism was part of a much wider settler-colonial art movement that embraced both Melbourne’s painters and Sydney’s artist-illustrators. Whatever the medium, their work reflected dominant views of Australia’s history, achievements and identity, their pictures defined by their celebration of whiteness, masculinity and settlers’ claims to indigeneity by virtue of their possession of Australia’s sunburnt country. What remained outside their frames were the dispossession of First Nations’ peoples and the lives and labour of settler women.

In addition to sharing a common iconography, Sydney’s and Melbourne’s artists fed off a similar set of artistic influences, largely emanating from London and reinforced by the English-born and -trained artists who dominated these colonial outposts of Britain’s imperial art world. These would include such French-inflected British art practices as plein air painting and tonal realism. In other words, we might start talking about British-Australian impressionism and its distinctive contribution to British art history.

From this perspective, Roberts, Streeton and Fullwood’s move to London can be seen as not the ending but the completion of Australia’s settler-colonial art movement; its homecoming to the heartland of British art. The art they created in England was integral to both their cultural and imperial identities and their artistic development.

The movement ultimately culminated in these artists’ wartime service. It was particularly fitting that Australia’s war art scheme drew on the skills of painters like Streeton but still more heavily on artist-illustrators like Fullwood, whose pictures proved perfect illustrations for Charles Bean’s creation of the Anzac legend — yet another enduring evocation of a settler-colonial worldview.

But my suggested reframing of Australian art history will only work if the art of illustration is accepted as an essential component of how we tell its story. This will involve much debate and research, including the publication of a biography of Julian Ashton that does justice to his multiple roles in shaping Australia’s settler-colonial art movement.

Meanwhile, lovers of Australian art and history have the unique opportunity to compare the work of Sydney’s and Melbourne’s settler-colonial artists, which will be on view, respectively, at the NLA in Canberra until 11 July and the NGV in Melbourne until 22 August. Let the conversation begin! •

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During the next two years, Picasso’s massive painting toured Scandinavia, Britain and the United States, doubtless horrifying many spectators and, as intended, raising some consciousnesses. But it didn’t stop Franco or Hitler or Mussolini.

How many wars have been halted by protest songs? “We Shall Overcome” and “Give Peace a Chance” might offer hope and feelings of solidarity to those who sing them — nothing wrong with that — but they haven’t changed the course of history and never will.

And yet the notion that art can change society must be as old as art itself. They might not admit it, but all artists, at some level, feel their work makes the world a better place. Or why would they do it? Still, changing society with a painting or a poem or a novel, a symphony or a song is a tall order, and it’s difficult to name an example of where it has happened. I suppose we could mention Estonia’s “singing revolution,” but it was the act of singing, more than the songs themselves, that helped along that country’s independence movement.

The reason I have been thinking about art at the service of causes is that I have found myself caught up in one. It began with a commission from the Australian Youth Orchestra.

This is an unusual situation for me. While the majority of my pieces might have poetic rather than generic titles, the music is seldom intended to be descriptive or have any programmatic intent. In so far as it is “about” anything, my music is about As and Bs and F sharps and E flats. I suppose you would say it is abstract.

There have been a few exceptions along the way. Back in the 1980s, I composed a large orchestral piece I hoped might stop the Falklands war. Its efficacy was never put to the test, partly because the war had been over for four years by the time I completed it (orchestral pieces aren’t like protest songs — you can’t knock one off overnight), and partly because, thirty-five years later, it’s still awaiting a performance.

The first performances of my Australian Youth Orchestra piece are scheduled for July, and on this occasion, sadly, the reason for its polemical stance will not have gone away. It is a response to the climate change we once only read about but now see and feel all around us — change to which the next generations won’t be able to turn a blind eye as so many of my generation have. There remain those in our parliaments and media who wish people didn’t talk about this topic all the time. They might as well get used to it.

Now, the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras used to call the AYO the best orchestra in Australia and I know what he meant. The players’ skills are so astonishing that they could — and do — step straight into professional orchestras all over the world. And what they lack in experience, they make up for in enthusiasm and willingness.

I’d have liked my first piece for these talented players to have been only for their musical minds and skills. A concerto for orchestra, perhaps, or a symphony — I’ve long harboured the desire to write a second symphony. But when I look at the players — and when I look at my ten-year-old daughter — I have to wonder about the world they are inheriting. And when they look at the likes of me, they in turn must wonder why my generation hasn’t acted to safeguard their futures against the worst effects of this changing climate. At one level, my piece, The Meaning of Trees, is a sort of apology.

Composers have let the natural world into their music from the start. Indeed, you might argue that the very first music was nature itself. A handful of personal highlights from Western “art music” includes Hildegard’s “viriditas” songs from the twelfth century, celebrations of both nature and the divine (the Abbess of Bingen made little distinction); all those Renaissance madrigals that imitate birds; “Ombra mai fu,” Handel’s aria in praise of the shade of trees in his opera, Xerxes; Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony; the forest murmurs in Wagner’s Siegfried; the elaborate tangle of woodwind lines in the introduction to The Rite of Spring.

Nearer to our own time and place, I’d add Liza Lim’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus and, perhaps especially, David Lumsdaine’s astonishing soundscapes, such as Pied Butcher Birds of Spirey Creek and Cambewarra Mountain, which return art to nature.

That Handel aria — popularly known, in its orchestral guise, as “Handel’s Largo” — lies behind my music in The Meaning of Trees. The title is borrowed from a proverb my sister-in-law heard some years ago when working in Mozambique: the meaning of the tree is in the shade it provides. Handel’s King Xerxes delighted in this meaning, and today we need it more than ever.

I am not, I admit, optimistic about the future of the climate, and I started work on my piece during late 2019 when the Australian sun was hotter than I can ever recall and for weeks smoke filled the air. But I could hardly inflict music of despair on this particular group of players; I felt it my duty to offer something positive. So, without wishing to give the game away, I can say that The Meaning of Trees proceeds from musical desolation — a dried-up, windy tundra — to something like a cry of defiance, one I hope the young musicians will revel in.

Music can do nothing to slow climate change. How could it? And whatever I may call my piece, and however much it might refer to Handel’s song about shade, it is still, really, about As and Bs and F sharps and E flats. Yet if, through its title and a knowledge of its source material, it also offers moments of encouragement to its players and listeners, then it will have served a more useful purpose. •

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The main culprits are the advertisers who once relied on newspapers and magazines, supplemented by radio and later by TV, to sell their products. When the internet began progressively undermining print culture — most dramatically newspapers, with the Murdoch empire recently garrotting more than a hundred local titles in Australia alone — more and more advertising went online.

People who still hanker after the design, feel, smell, typography and physical presence of print will treasure Amanda Scardamaglia’s elegant celebration of Australia’s greatest lithographer, Charles Troedel, best known for his advertising and product-label designs. Printed on Stone is a beautifully designed tribute to the extraordinary output of Troedel and his artists from the 1860s onwards. With a scholarly text and meticulously reproduced images, the book traverses the commercial and imperial imagery of the era, much of it reflecting the booster confidence of “Marvellous Melbourne” before the city’s fall from grace in the 1890s depression.

Lithography, invented in Bavaria in the 1790s, involves drawing on the surface of limestone with greasy crayons. Gum arabic and nitric acid is then washed across the stone to prevent spreading or bleeding, and the ink adheres to the greasy drawing but not to the clean portions of the stone. Less costly than the traditional method of metal and wood engraving, and predating the spread of photography, lithography took off in the nineteenth century, especially as the main means of producing illustrated images for mass production. By the 1830s, multicoloured lithographs had become possible, too, using a separate stone for each colour.

Charles Troedel, born in Hamburg in 1835, became an apprentice to his lithographer father at the age of thirteen, later working in Norway and London. Recruited at the age of twenty-five for a Melbourne printing business, he arrived in the bayside village of Williamstown in February 1860. In a city growing rich on gold, he worked for a couple of years at a paper-bag manufacturing and printing establishment before setting up a small workshop in Collins Street in June 1863.

Just a couple of years later he began producing the Melbourne Album, to which readers could subscribe in twelve monthly parts. The album celebrated the prosperous city, with depictions of Collins Street’s substantial two- and three-storey structures, the grand Treasury building, the churches, the Eastern Market, later demolished, and the imposing set of terraces on Nicholson Street, which remains intact to this day. The album also included the oft-reproduced coloured lithograph of Aborigines on the banks of the Yarra, with a bark habitation and a canoe highlighted by fire and smoke.

“One People, One Starch”: Silver Star Starch poster, Troedel & Co., lithographer, c. 1891–c. 1900

Troedel went on to make a lot of money producing crisp, elegantly designed advertising images in print and on tins. Lithographers quickly dominated the print label trade in a full panoply of products, almost always using a range of colours to good effect. Health remedies were popular: Ralph Potts Magic Balm, for instance, promised certain pain relief for troublesome kidneys and indigestion. Cigarettes and pipe tobacco were marketed using images of cricket players and gladiators, both victorious in their sporting endeavours.

Unlike the marketing and packaging of laundry starches and soap, those advertisements never featured women. But retailers had an inexhaustible appetite for fashion images, from corsets to wedding gowns. And when manufacturers came to order an advertisement they often wanted an inset image showing their grand industrial buildings, to add a sense of substance to their products.

Alcohol purveyors provided a lot of work for Troedel’s firm, from importers of whisky and Jamaican rum to local manufacturers, including the Carlton, Trent and Castlemaine breweries. Some of the labels were so well designed that they have been retained to this day, including the Hardy’s Oomoo wine label (though without the words “and other first class Adelaide wines”).

“Hardy’s Oomoo and Other First Class Adelaide Wines” poster, Charles Troedel & Co., lithographer, c. 1881–c. 1900

We’re fortunate that Troedel’s business records were donated to the State Library of Victoria in 1968. This prescient act by the Troedel family created the biggest nineteenth-century print archive in any public collection in Australia. Its more than 10,000 items, including 400 advertising posters and hundreds of trade marks and labels, have been drawn on for this book.

Printed on Stone, with a foreword by a Troedel descendant, is a hymn of praise to Troedel and his company’s lithographic output. It is also a tribute to local manufacture, adopting and capitalising on European techniques. In a well-researched and accessible account of the technical, the artistic and the commercial aspects of the company, Scardamaglia explains the role that key images played in the development of commercial advertising, which she sees as a “preface” to the explosion in print advertising in the twentieth century.

“The Guard of Honour. Representing the British Army at the Australian Commonwealth inauguration, 1st January, 1901,” Troedel & Cooper lithographers

She also tackles the imperial messaging of the time, well captured in the lithograph of the Guard of Honour representing “the British Army” at the inauguration of the Australian Commonwealth. The image includes the Highland Light Infantry, resplendent in reds and tartans, the Coldstream Guards and the exotic Bengal Lancers.

Scardamaglia, a legal academic who has previously published on colonial trade mark law, has written a fine account of the work of our greatest nineteenth-century lithographer. •

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The Shanghai-born artist is a powerful critic of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, and has drawn many unflattering cartoons of its general secretary Xi Jinping, usually in his trademark German expressionist style. Cartoon images of Chinese leaders are banned in the People’s Republic, so Badiucao’s caricatures — regularly featuring Xi as “silly old bear” Winnie the Pooh — pack an unusually powerful punch for mainlanders with access to his platforms.

Badiucao, who remains reluctant to use his real name, revealed his face towards the end of China’s Artful Dissident, a new film by Australian documentary-maker Danny Ben-Moshe, broadcast by ABC TV on Tuesday night. Now thirty-three, and having lived for a decade in Australia, he also revealed himself at the simultaneous premiere of the film in Melbourne, where he received two standing ovations and answered questions from an invited audience.

Late last year the artist had cancelled an exhibition of his work — including a portrait that merged features of Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam with those of Xi Jinping — after members of his family, who knew nothing about his life as a controversial artist, were interviewed by police in China. They were given the impression that more trouble would follow if the show went ahead.

Banned: Badiucao’s Xi Jinping.

Badiucao already feared that the Chinese authorities had discovered his true identity.

He spent much of last year in Berlin, where the celebrated dissident artist Ai Weiwei had invited him to work. The writer Liao Yiwu, also a Chinese exile resident in Berlin, had responded strongly to criticism by Badiucao, who feared that his identity was revealed by Liao during a testy exchange of tweets.

The two incidents — the pressure on his family, and his identity exposure — drove Badiucao out of public view for six months, until the looming anniversary of the Tiananmen killings sparked new creative work. Now that Beijing knew who he was, he decided to reveal himself to the public.

Badiucao has also exhibited photographs, and is a performance artist. On one occasion he entered the Louvre, in Paris, dressed as Liu Xia, the widow of the late Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who had died of cancer incarcerated in China. At the time, Liu Xia — who has since been allowed to leave China, and is living in Berlin — was still being held incommunicado in Beijing. Before being hustled away by security officers, Badiucao and two supporters unfurled large banners in front of the Mona Lisa, urging visitors to “Remember Liu Xia.”

His reputation broke out of the Chinese-speaking world when he painted an affectionate portrait of Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia, with their arms round each other, on a wall in Hosier Lane, Melbourne, where the city council encourages street art. The painting appeared overnight, shortly before Liu Xiaobo died. Soon, piles of bouquets were laid in front of the picture, candles were lit, and someone provided a brief profile of the great writer and philosopher in Chinese and English. The work was rapidly copied and, with Badiucao’s strong support, reproduced in public areas in cities around the world.

Break-out: Badiucao’s portrait of Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia in Melbourne’s Hosier Lane.

Last Monday he installed a massive new work in Hosier Lane featuring “Tank Man,” the celebrated figure who, still gripping his plastic shopping bags, forlornly attempted to halt the progress of a file of tanks from Tiananmen Square thirty years ago. Badiucao recalled learning of the events in and around Tiananmen Square only when he was watching a a movie downloaded from the internet that suddenly switched to a foreign documentary about the killings, which had been recorded over it. The episode has since become central his work. Masked but otherwise dressed as Tank Man, and also holding shopping bags, he stood on a plinth in Adelaide’s city centre on 4 June 2016.

Badiucao’s grandfather, a pioneering film-maker in China, starved to death in a labour camp in Qinghai after being sent there during the anti-rightist purges of the 1950s. Partly as a result, he told me in an earlier interview for the Australian, his parents’ lives were “stolen by politics” to the extent that they never discussed public events. But “rebellion began to brew inside of me,” he adds. His family, which had lost a generation to art, tried to prevent him from pursuing it as a career, so “that made me want to leave China.”

The lesser reason for his departure was economic. Without relations in helpful positions in party or government, “it’s hard for young people to make a strong future by themselves.” So he came to Australia “to rebuild my life in a very different environment, but one in which I can express myself within a fair system.” He chose the country simply because “it welcomed migrants.”

He is principally self-taught, but took a few fine art courses after he arrived in Australia, though these proved to be “more about conceptual art than about skills practice.” Self-deprecatingly, he adds, “It’s not hard to become a political cartoonist from China, because there are only five or six of us.”

He first met Ai Weiwei, whose sharpness and zest are also prime features of his own work, when the latter visited Melbourne for the launch of an exhibition in 2015. It felt natural to seek out a figure “who is inspiring a lot of young people in China, not just for his art but for showing what is really going on.”

Badiucao continues to puzzle how to combine his fine art practice with his political cartooning: “two very different languages, and different audiences.” The fine art fits more easily within a universal framework, he says, while cartooning usually requires a knowledge of the back-story, so people who don’t follow events in the Chinese world find them harder to appreciate.

His cartooning technique also borrows from print-making and from an older generation of Chinese propaganda. He favours black and red: “China’s complexion… iron and blood.” Where the previous Chinese leader, Hu Jintao, was “pretty dull, a dead fish face,” Xi Jinping is a far more appealing subject because “he likes to promote his own personality, as if we’re going back to Mao Zedong’s time. He likes drama. I don’t need to exaggerate his features.” No other country, he says, provides such a wealth of raw material for cartoonists.

Badiucao has also become a shrewd observer of Australian life. At the brief discussion session following this week’s premiere, he said that it was important to contest the common stereotype — essentially racist — that Chinese people are only interested in making money and therefore naturally support the “stability maintenance” focus of the Beijing party-state.

He questioned whether prosperity was indeed ubiquitous in modern China, and said that Chinese people also sought choices and, given the opportunity, freedoms. He disagreed with those, including some Chinese dissidents, who support Donald Trump on the basis that “your enemy’s enemy is your friend.” It is important to be consistent, he believes: if you don’t like the way Trump works, you must oppose him regardless of his views on the Chinese leadership.

It is a difficult time for new Australian citizens from China, he told me a couple of years ago. “On the one hand there’s the rise of xenophobic groups like One Nation, on the other, people like me who criticise the Chinese government on an entirely different basis. It’s a weird situation, we’re stuck in the middle, we can’t go right and we can’t go left.”

But he stressed this week that countries like Australia that have invited large numbers of Chinese people to immigrate should do more to support those communities, and should provide space and encouragement for them to play a prominent role in working out how we should respond to the rise of China — partly to counter the argument that criticism of the party-state is necessarily “anti-Chinese” or racist.

We can expect the newly public Badiucao to play an increasingly prominent part in pursuing that goal. •

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The winds of modernism were also being felt in distant Australia, and some were already packing for the move to Europe. In Adelaide, Margaret Preston had recently returned from there, having seen Matisse and Kandinsky, to establish a teaching studio where Gladys Reynell and Stella Bowen both enrolled.

But the Adelaide Hills, just a few miles away, felt not so much as a breeze. Hans Heysen, Preston’s contemporary, was buying a large, rather gloomy house near the village of Hahndorf; at the edge of the bush, it looked out to the dry landscape and the magisterial gums he’d paint many times over the remaining fifty years of his life. He had absorbed something about light and recession from Cézanne, though not his colour; beyond that he was, and would remain, staunchly anti-modernist. He and his wife Sallie, the daughter of a well-established Adelaide family, took pride in his growing reputation, each of them conservative in their own way; they bought the house at Hahndorf on the back of the high demand for his antipodean landscapes.

Nora, the fourth of eight Heysen children, was a year old when they moved into The Cedars and Hans built the studio in which she — the child who inherited his talent — would begin her painting life. He was fiercely proud of her, supervised her education, advised her early moves, and let her use his most expensive paints. As the next generation of Heysen talent, she was taken seriously by her father’s colleagues and admired by his friends. Were it not for those distant winds, Nora could be said to have grown up in the best of possible circumstances for a future artist.

Anne-Louise Willoughby’s Nora Heysen: A Portrait has been released to coincide with the National Gallery of Victoria’s exhibition Hans and Nora Heysen: Two Generations of Australian Art. It is timing that puts Nora firmly in the company of the father who cast a shadow so long that even at eighty she could still wonder if she’d come out from it. And it may, paradoxically, be exactly what she — or we — need to see both of them afresh, and to see that shadow for all that it was, and was not. The question Willoughby puts at the centre of her Portrait — a question long debated — is whether Nora’s success was because of this relationship, or in spite of it.

In 1932, aged twenty-one, Nora painted a polished self-portrait with the accoutrements of her father’s studio around her and the corner of a Vermeer print behind her. Severely dressed, with her hair pulled back in a plait, she looks at us over her shoulder — “as if she lived in Delft in the seventeenth century.” In 1933, another self-portrait has her dressed for the twentieth century, with fewer studio accoutrements but that same smooth paint and academic precision. Although this time she turns towards us with an expression that looks to the future, there is still no sign of the modernism that she would encounter over the next few years.

In transition: Nora Heysen’s study for a self-portrait from 1933 (above, detail from the cover of Nora Heysen: A Portrait) and 1938 self portrait (below, Queensland Art Gallery).

Both these self-portraits are in the NGV exhibition — and so is the one she painted in 1938 after she returned from several years in London. In those few years, she had stepped into her own generation. Dressed in blue, and brought forward against a plain background, with loose, broken brushstrokes and heightened colour, she faces us, a woman of the twentieth century. For some this self-portrait marks her coming of age as an artist in her own right; for others the question still hovers, even there. Had she freed herself from him? Could she?

The question of modernism was at the heart of the complex entanglement — “fraught” is Willoughby’s word — between these artists of two generations. Hans Heysen became, increasingly, a conviction anti-modernist. When he was in London with Nora in 1934 — he and Sallie and two of the sisters were there briefly to “settle her in” — even Picasso and Braque left him “cold.” Modernism, especially its “colour box,” was a “conundrum” to him, a dangerous “somersault” away from the “tonal values” that were the “substance” of art. Nora, on the other hand, was excited by that colour box, by the emphasis on expression and feeling. Among the painters she met in London was Orovida Pissarro (the daughter of Lucien, granddaughter of Camille), who told her frankly that her colour was years behind the times. Get rid of all those blacks and browns and ochres! Nora went straight out and bought a new range of colours, plenty of blues, and square brushes to break up the paint. “It’s amazing the depth and richness of the colour that can be got,” she wrote to her father.

Hans and Nora exchanged frequent letters. I read the originals in the National Library of Australia in the late 1990s — since then a selection has been published — and I’m glad that I did. The words can be reproduced, but the hand, the ink, the temperament of the pen, cannot. Hans wrote with a neat and regular hand; Nora’s dashed across the page. There are few corrections by either of them; when their easy exchanges became fraught, his hand becomes more controlled while hers gathers speed.

When Nora first wrote of exhibitions that excited her, conversations with fellow students, her discovery of colour, and the joy of being in Paris with her friend Evie Stokes (of whom Sallie disapproved), Hans tried to be understanding — she was young, after all. And then he became alarmed. Confident that the “somersault” would correct itself, he didn’t want his talented daughter stranded in the tumble. From his perspective he was protecting her. But right then, free of the family for the first time, she didn’t want, or need, his protection — particularly when it meant enduring the assessments of her work Hans arranged with senior artists. “I’m rather inclined to place life and meaning above tone,” she wrote.

The point at which she could not push back came when she heard news of the failure of not one but two of his exhibitions; poor reviews and low sales were an unaccustomed humiliation. She rushed to his support, reassuring him of exactly those “abiding values” she’d been arguing against, caught between the generational shift she was a part of and the desire to protect him from his own generational vulnerability.

“I adored him,” she said when I visited her in Sydney in the late 1990s; we were standing in her hallway looking at her drawing of Hans, a table set up beneath it with candles and flowers, as if a shrine. “I sometimes wonder if it would have been better for me (my art) not to have gone to London,” she told NGA curator Mary Eagle in 1996.

“A woman interrupted” is Willoughby’s summation, and she is at her best when writing of this foundational “interruption.” It provides a tension that gives shape to the narrative of the first three decades of Nora’s life.

On her return from London, the interruptions continued. When she won the Archibald Prize in 1938, the initial boost of success was tempered by the voices of suspicion that it was her name — the Heysen name — that won her the award, as well as the not-so-quiet murmurs about a woman being there at all, let alone as winner. And then there was the shocking death that same year of her eldest sister Josephine, who’d been banished to rural Victoria after an ill-timed pregnancy and a rushed marriage to a man much disapproved of at The Cedars. It seems she contracted pleurisy, was given a caesarean, and died. The child, also named Josephine, was taken back to The Cedars, adopted, and raised as another Heysen. It is a story of the conservatism of the time, and of the family, and particularly of Sallie, who by protecting the Heysen reputation gets most of the blame for this awful event.

While every life has its personal setbacks and tragedies — and they are interruption enough — for Nora’s generation there was also the overwhelming interruption of the second world war. As biographer, Willoughby is confronted with a very different context, a profound shift of narrative. In 1943, a year after the Japanese had landed in New Guinea, Nora took a commission as a war artist. Hans — who had advised against this move for fear of what she might see — takes a backward step, and in his place the authority she must contend with is Colonel Treloar.

This time it is a matter of command. After she was posted to the Allied operations base at Finschhafen, on the north coast of New Guinea, to record the “patriotic duty” of the army nurses and medical personnel, she was almost ordered back to Melbourne for painting the nurses off-duty — reading, looking out to the mountains, even dancing. “Not Florence Nightingale enough,” Nora said. She stood up to Treloar on that one and, surprisingly, he relented. She stayed on to paint more than 250 works, the vast majority of the medical work or war, and to take her sketchbook forward with the troops towards the front, where she did indeed see things hard to forget.

It was at Finschhafen that she met Dr Robert Black, part of a medical team researching the prevention and treatment of malaria. The narrative shifts again as love and war come together in a high-risk affair: Nora in the “unforgiving” khaki of the uniform she loathed, and a handsome young doctor, still in his twenties, with a wife and a child in England. It was a prelude to three decades of interruption: separation, more disapproval at Hahndorf, a double life in England, a marriage, more trips to the tropics, back to Papua New Guinea for Black’s research, sometimes with Nora, sometimes with another, until the final interruption of separation and divorce.

An interrupted woman; an interrupted life.

Biography is a difficult genre. The demands of narrative and character can be stalled by the weight of other people’s stories, and by the disjunction, often, between contemporaneous views and current judgements and realignments. Willoughby’s background as a journalist has served her well for her interviews with curators and family; those with Josephine No. 2, and with Meredith Stokes, the daughter of Nora’s friend Evelyn, add to our understanding of the Heysen context. The second half of the biography is less successful. With a life this interrupted, with the narratives of father, war and husband vying for dominance, the portrait blurs and the through line of Nora’s art becomes fragile, as if it too is dissipated, perhaps inevitably, by the narrative interruptions. •

Hans and Nora Heysen: Two Generations of Australian Art is showing at the NGV until 29 July 2019.

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Florence Emily Kathleen Ussher was born on 19 August 1891 at New Farm in Brisbane. She came from an adventurous family: her father, Captain James Ussher, was a Torres Strait pilot, helping navigate ships through the reefs, and her mother, Florence Eleanor Ussher, escaped the Great Flood of 1893 with Kathleen in one arm and Kathleen’s older sister, Lorna, in the other. The family left Brisbane not long after the flood, and Kathleen was raised primarily in Sydney.

There, from 1901 to 1907, she attended Shirley, a demonstration and training school for girls. Founded by Margaret Hodge and Harriet Newcomb, it aimed to “give the pupils an education which shall develop individual power.” Kathleen epitomised those goals, excelling in French, captaining the swimming team, and becoming school librarian. After Kathleen’s father died unexpectedly on Thursday Island in 1904, Florence Ussher supported her daughters’ careers unconditionally, encouraging them to pursue the interests that would later take them across
the world.

After leaving school, Kathleen briefly joined the public service as a shorthand writer and typist, while continuing to attend drawing classes at night. During this period, her mother and sister moved to Leipzig, Germany, for Lorna to attend the Royal Conservatory of Music. Kathleen joined them in 1912, briefly studying at the city’s Royal Academy of Book Illustration before leaving for London in 1913 to pursue art at Goldsmiths College.

In 1914, she joined Hodge — the former head of Shirley — and Dorothy Pethick on their lecture tour to North America, where they served as unofficial representatives for the Australian women’s suffrage movement. After their arrival in New York in late March, she acted as secretary and press correspondent for Hodge as they visited New York, Chicago and Toronto. Following the tour, she began studying book illustration at the Art Institute of Chicago.

As the first world war continued, Ussher paused her studies and, in May 1915, left for London, where she became embedded in the war effort. During the day she worked with the Royal Australian Navy as a secretary, organising the paperwork for the construction of the HMAS Adelaide; in the evenings she volunteered with the Women’s Reserve Ambulance; on weekends she worked in munitions factories. “Kath’s patriotism,” wrote her friend Miles Franklin, “leads her to go and make munitions on Sundays for a most unpatriotically low wage after working all the week doing a man’s work, for which she is also paid less than a man and jealously kept from expansion.”

In mid 1917 Ussher joined the Scottish Women’s Hospitals alongside Franklin and another friend, Nell Malone (also profiled in this collection). The enduring friendship between these three women is chronicled in Ross Davies’s book Three Brilliant Careers (2015). Ussher and Malone both served with the Girton and Newnham Unit — named after two women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge — of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in Salonika. Ishobel Ross, another of the Scottish Women, described Salonika as “a most exciting place,” crowded with white houses with Venetian shutters, small stalls spilling out into the streets, and soldiers of every nationality. With their grey uniforms, Scottish Women became affectionately known to their patients as “little grey partridges.” New arrivals soon shortened their skirts to move through the wards. Staff were to call one another by their surnames, although an exception was made for Ethel Hore.

One of Kathleen Ussher’s illustrations — captioned “When the Navy withdrew to a dry place at sea” — from “War Wanderings of an Aussie Girl,” a chronicle of her adventures published in Aussie magazine in February 1921. Australian War Memorial

In 1918, after finishing her term with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, Ussher applied to join the Women’s Royal Naval Service, popularly known as the Wrens. She accepted an offer of a transfer to Gibraltar, making her one of the first Wrens to be sent on active service. This reflected something of a family tradition: in addition to her father being a sea captain, her great-great-uncle, Admiral Sir Thomas Ussher, had escorted Napoleon to the island of Elba.

Following her return to Australia, Ussher served as secretary of the Ex-Service Women’s Club while continuing to pursue her interest in art. In 1921, she designed a postcard for the Centre for Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers promoting a proposed memorial drinking fountain at the wharf gates at Woolloomooloo. That same year, she also took part in an exhibition of “cabinet pictures and craftwork” organised by the Society of Women Painters, alongside Australian female artists including Hilda Rix Nicholas, Hedley Parsons and Dora Ohlfsen-Bagge. In 1925, she provided the illustrations for Gum-trees, a collection of seven Australian songs.

Ussher’s attention returned to North America, and she joined her mother and sister in Southern California, where she reinvented herself again, working as a Hollywood journalist with a regular byline in the Sydney Mail. Although her column, “Behind the Silver Sheet,” became widely known after she interviewed the popular American actor Mary Pickford, Ussher focused mainly on the rising careers of Australians in Hollywood. She kept her readers in Sydney informed about the activities of then-familiar actors like Louise Lovely, Mae Busch and Snowy Baker. She continued to interview screen stars throughout the decade, but broadened her scope to include Australian novelists and other subjects after she moved to London sometime before 1930. This expansion included a 1931 profile of Henry Handel Richardson — the pen name of Ethel Florence Richardson — which sparked an enduring literary friendship between the women.

Alongside her journalistic career, Ussher began to publish her own books. These included The Cities of Australia, her contribution to “The Outward Bound Library,” in 1928, and Hail Victoria!, a centenary retrospective, in 1934. Both were well received, although a critic did suggest that “possibly her enthusiasms have led her to place our cities on a rather higher plane than is entirely just.”

The latter stages of Ussher’s life are less clear. Following the second world war, she worked in London in the reference library of the Central Office of Information, the successor to the Ministry of Information. She was then appointed to the organisation planning the Festival of Britain, the national exhibition and fair that extended across the United Kingdom in 1951. She remained in England for the rest of her life.

Kathleen Ussher died in England in 1983, aged ninety-two, after a life spent promoting Australian interests around the world and supporting others, particularly other Australian women. Her varied career is best described in her own words, describing her wartime service in London: “Well, you felt like you were doing your bit. That is all there was to it.” •

Further reading

Three Brilliant Careers, by Ross Davies, Boolarong Press, 2015

Her Brilliant Career: The Life of Stella Miles Franklin, by Jill Roe, HarperCollins, 2008

A History of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, by Eva Shaw McLaren, Hodder and Stoughton, 1919

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In the Academy press room, Spike Lee compared Green Book to Driving Miss Daisy, which won Best Picture twenty years ago, when his groundbreaking Do the Right Thing wasn’t even nominated. “Every time somebody is driving somebody, I lose,” he said. “They just change the driving positions.”

The Oscar for Green Book, ahead of BlacKkKlansman and Roma and, for that matter, Black Panther does say something about where the heart of liberal Hollywood is right now. It wants reconciliation without tears. It is still not ready to face the toughest truths about the American past, and its present. Victimhood is okay. Arguments followed by warm reconciliation are okay. But spiky, pointed representations of a recent past that included thousands of lynchings, at a time when racist killings are ignored by a president playing to a gallery of white grievance: nah.

I take an anthropological view of the Oscars. This is a ceremony at which the storytellers tell stories about themselves. So the Best Picture vote tells us something.

Oscar nominations are voted on by the guilds: writers determine writers, directors determine directors, and so forth. But all Academy members get to nominate and vote for Best Picture. They are still overwhelmingly old, white and male, despite determined efforts by the Academy governors to diversify the membership. (And once an Academy member, you’re a member for life.) The Best Picture award is, in a sense, a snapshot, a poll and, yes, a popularity contest. It’s voted on by digital designers and hair and makeup people and sound mixers as well as the big names on the red carpet. It is speaking for a broader Hollywood, and the members wanted a film that would make them feel good about the race issues rending America.

And feel-good is what they got, with predictable tropes: a story about a casually racist white guy (Viggo Mortensen as Tony “Lip” Vallelonga) driving the fastidious, elegant Dr Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) on a music tour through the segregated south, which in the end has the white guy saving the black guy’s bacon then, after the black guy has learned the white guy a thing or two, welcoming him into the arms of a big, boisterous Italian-American family.

Gosh. Sound familiar?

The film has been popular with audiences at the same time as it has been fiercely rebuked by many for perpetrating the tired “white saviour” trope. And there is truth in that. To be fair, the film does honour Don Shirley’s music, and it does, clunkily, show Shirley instructing Vallelonga how to write love letters to his wife. This, I imagine, is a pass at making the white man learn from the black. Equalising, you know?

But — music aside — the balancing act doesn’t convince.

“We did the best we could with the material we had,” said Mahershala Ali, who won Best Supporting Actor for his role as Shirley.

“This is a film about love,” declared director Peter Farrelly from the stage. “We are all the same.”

No we aren’t, because black and white pasts and present experiences are so very different. We are not there yet.

Viggo, what were you thinking?

Why make another film about Vincent van Gogh? Paul Cox (Vincent, 1987), Robert Altman (Vincent and Theo, 1990) and Vincente Minelli (Lust for Life, 1956) have all had a go.

At Eternity’s Gate is by Julian Schnabel and that says something. Schnabel, a painter and filmmaker, famously infuriated the critic Robert Hughes, who held him up as an example of all that was shabby in postmodernism. Hughes was wrong. Any critic who draws an aesthetic line in the sand should be aware that the next wave will wash over it.

Schnabel’s films are, broadly, about artists and what drives them. He is drawn to outsiders. Basquiat (1996) portrayed the street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Before Night Falls (2000) was about the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, who daringly escaped homophobic Cuba to find freedom in New York and then died of an AIDS-related illness. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) told the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered “locked-in syndrome” after a massive stroke but learned, laboriously, to write, and described his condition in a memoir published just before he died.

Van Gogh is a natural subject for a director fascinated by the process of creating. In Willem Dafoe (nominated for best actor in the Academy Awards) he has found an unforgettable van Gogh. His Vincent is both lonely and yearning — longing for a community of fellow artists, of friendships in Arles. He is also obsessed with showing those around him the world he sees. That gaunt face, that huge jaw shaded by the artist’s beard, is made for van Gogh, and we spend considerable time reading it. Despite a couple of cheesy lines, it’s a compelling performance of shifting moods. Elation, bliss, bewilderment, misery. Nothing overstated.

Broadly, At Eternity’s Gate tells a story of the last years of van Gogh’s life, his passage to Arles, his bonds and his missteps in the community there, his confinement in a lunatic asylum, his release, and his death.

It’s an exceptionally strong cast. Good actors like working with Schnabel: Oscar Isaac as Gauguin, Rupert Friend as Theo, Mads Mikkelsen as a compassionate pastor, Emmanuelle Seigner as Madame Ginoux, Mathieu Amalric as Dr Gachet and, in a single arresting scene in an asylum, the great Niels Arestrup.

There are two contentious things about this film. One is the version Schnabel gives us of van Gogh’s death, at thirty-seven, by gunshot wound to the stomach. The accepted version is suicide, but Schnabel has embraced the theory posed by two recent biographers, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, that the painter was shot accidentally by others. (There is some evidence, both forensic and circumstantial, to support this.)

The other issue is the cinematography. Director of photography Benoît Delhomme uses a handheld camera for many sequences in an attempt to show how the artist sees the light and landscape. At times he uses a dioptre, which gives more depth of field but splits the image. Most of the time, this shaky pursuit of light in nature works, and enhances the mood. But there’s just a little too much bobbing through wheatfields. Mercifully, key scenes are not shot this way.

Despite the wobbles, this is a rewarding film that manages to show not just a way of seeing but a state of mind. There is no doubt that van Gogh suffered considerable mental torment. His great bursts of productivity, broken by misery, may well have been bipolar.

We will never really know. But I am sure we will never see a better van Gogh than this one. •

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In outline their story echoes another, this one unknown but equally compelling as a symbol of love’s universal singularity. It unfolded almost three decades earlier, and was written about but soon forgotten. This article, inspired by both that book, The Monument, and its author, is a long-delayed response to a double oblivion, an attempt to make the silence around them audible.

The setting is an upper English milieu in the mid 1960s, mercantile and art-collecting. Here, too, a teenage boy falls headlong for a married woman, in this case ten years older. Bemused, then moved, by his implacable courtship, she feels herself sliding. As the new emotional forcefield around the unlikely pair slowly becomes apparent, a thorny prelude must be navigated before their world can take its own shape.

As with any couple, a lot had to happen to bring the pair, Justin and Ursula, together. Justin was the youngest of three brothers in an affluent family, his father partly of Hamburg-Jewish origins. At private school he had endured an obscure distress so severe that it led to his flight and then, when he was sent back, a suicide attempt. Now in his mid teens, athletic and handsome, he was coping well with a stint as trainee company manager in northeast England. More at home racing his mother’s Mini around west London, unspecified anger firing his boldness and disdain for convention, the all-or-nothing boy was out for life.

Ursula’s brush with Justin’s family came after years as a magnetic outsider amid the lofty conservatism of art-institution London — a world she had then sidestepped for partnership as a collector and dealer in antiquities. She had arrived as a polyglot Hungarian of Russian-Italian parentage, self-educated in the vast library of her father’s feudal estate near Budapest, a survivor of war, convent school, two morose families, internal exile, and being shot when escaping to Austria — armed only with a compass, dice and slim volume of T.S. Eliot’s poems — during the 1956 revolution.

Her luck held: the British embassy official in Vienna was a fan (“That little book is worth all the passports in the world”), and soon she was on her way, complete with an introduction to Oxford’s art history department. Waiting for interview there, she met another day-visitor, the renowned art historian Anthony Blunt, head of London’s Courtauld Institute, who grasped her star quality and seized the chance to recruit her. (A Soviet agent and talent-spotter from the 1930s to the 50s, Blunt was an expert at this too.) At the Courtauld she married Kenelm Digby-Jones, a mature student a decade older, her scholarship and allure well matched with his ambition and fatalistic humour, not least when it came to their dealership.

From her blonde mane to her tangy wit Ursula burned charisma. She was a virtuoso, but an unhappy one. Their private double act, loving on his side, inwardly restive (and affair-rich) on hers, was struggling. Behind the impermeable, self-protective screen that was concealed by her sparkling presence, Ursula had lost purpose. Yet the business prospered, and when Kenelm sold some Georgian-era furniture to Justin’s parents, the couple became weekend guests at their historic estate, west of London, when the sixteen-year-old happened to be there. Justin’s postscript to a long Saturday morning walk and late-night conversation with Ursula, art the focus of both, was to slip a post-goodnight declaration of love under the marital door.

“An element of the shrine”

The path from there was circuitous: letters, heady summer days on the Mediterranean (Justin’s French crammer being a manic motorbike ride away from Ursula and Kenelm’s holiday villa), a farcical road trip by the trio from Athens to Palmyra to buy artefacts, Justin’s desperate hunt for Ursula in Rome when she briefly faltered. Money worries, an obstacle to the future the couple were already planning, interceded then lifted as Kenelm agreed a settlement and Justin’s father brought forward by four years an allowance now to be paid when he turned twenty-one.

Both pieces of good news arrived when the couple were in Mexico, having travelled from Luxor via Cyprus and Sudan. Justin’s material sufficiency, well husbanded, would underpin their freedom to set the contours of a nomadic but regulated lifestyle, maximum sensuousness its chief requirement. From the outset, Ursula’s greater life experience and learning, and her choice of their itinerary, went with a deliberate yielding to Justin in other areas: sexual, logistical, bureaucratic and even linguistic, as his fluency in Greek, Italian and Arabic would come to equal her own range.

The core elements of their voyaging would endure for fifteen more years, during which Justin and Ursula would spend every moment, the odd hour or two excepted, side by side. Their relationship was conducted with stylised precision and, evidently, undimmed erotic passion, a realm of the senses crafted from sheer complementarity. A pleasing hotel or rented room, fastidiously graced with favoured objects collected on their travels, a good local restaurant or two, markets and opportunities for cooking, an intriguing library, a decent gallery, historical sites, alternate discovery (they sought novelty) and familiarity (they longed to return): these were the essential, almost austere, ingredients.

An intimate, peripatetic world acquired its own seasonal cycle and fixed points. At Nysi in Greece’s southwestern Peloponnese, they bought a headland with a steep drop to the sea, inaccessible by road, where Justin secured permission to erect a small house of vernacular type and lay out gardens and paths, leading a team of local men he had come to know. After spring and summer there they moved to a tiny flat in the Trastevere district of equally beloved Rome, purchased as a base for concerts and to explore the city’s cultural treasures. Autumn brought trips to Paris for theatre and London to see family and friends, then (two years in three) three months of travelling further afield: Cambodia and Laos, India and Pakistan, the Maghreb, west-central Africa, Brazil, the Andes. In the third year, they would explore other parts of Europe, perhaps Spain and Germany — but never Ursula’s long-discarded fatherlands to the east.

Ursula and Justin fitted no tribe: artists and writers of the kind clustering on Hydra and other Greek islands around the period, experimental hippies on the eastward trail (about whom Ursula was amusedly scathing), lotus-eaters or jet-setters, semi-exiles with publishing channels to the metropolis. Patrick Leigh Fermor, a resident of Mani down the coast, knew Ursula in London days but had no idea she had a home in Greece, while the self-absorbed distance of Bruce Chatwin, former confidant, echoed Ursula’s own.

A nearer affinity might be with romantic pre-railway travellers from northern Europe’s elite who discovered civilisation’s patrimony in the noble ruins of, well, Greece and Rome, whose pleasures included “indolent delicious reverie.” This self-conscious relapse would place the couple as all the more out-of-time even in their own time. Indeed, TV, pop music, advertising and the sixties’ politics made no impression on Ursula and Justin’s world. It’s a surprise to find Ursula, in Bangkok, going as far as “reading the Economist on the troubles in Laos.” Also a misleading one, in that by principled design they knew everything they needed to and ignored the rest. In retorting to a suggestion that Ursula was anachronistic, the brilliant if unreliable Chatwin, deep time in mind, ventured, “No — she was futuristic.” The grand tour was no intermission, but life itself.

Still, their space of freedom was timebound, as their itinerary foreshadows: pre-genocide Cambodia and Darfur, pre-revolution Iran, prewar Afghanistan and Iraq, pre-terrorism Egypt, Niger, Mali. At the end of the 1970s the world lurched. Later explorations in Sudan pushed Justin and Ursula towards a disharmony that goes to the very root of their mutual devotion. At some level hard to fathom, the rift contains too the inrush of forces already jolting the larger world.

“Nudging closer to the truth”

That protracted episode, taking place mainly in southern Darfur, between Nyala and El Fashir, 700 miles southwest of Sudan’s capital, and afterwards in England, Rome, Nysi and Khartoum itself, is the tragic culmination of Ursula and Justin’s story. A book composed in the aftermath, vital source for the above account, ends with a scrupulous investigation into these months’ often-elusive events. Published in 1988, The Monument was written by T. Behrens, elder brother of Justin by eleven years.

Reaching far across space and time to track Ursula and Justin’s evolving interior lives, The Monument is distinguished by its composite flavour. An interplay of biography, memoir, analytical narrative and (in effect) journalistic inquiry, it draws in turn on three unpublished texts: Ursula’s journals, entries from which compose a third of the book, her lightly fictionalised version of the crisis (also called The Monument), and Justin’s lengthy homage to her, entitled Style, again incorporating Ursula’s writings. The lucidity, subtlety, humour and cultivated self-awareness with which this mosaic is handled make for an indelible work.

Its opening lines nail its promise: “I heard that my sixteen-year-old brother was involved with a most exotic creature, some sort of Hungarian countess, married and probably a spy. Having hardly seen him since his voice had broken, I was curious to know more.” The next page glows with a spellbinding portrait of Ursula, of which but a taste can be quoted:

She would talk about anything to anyone. She had a most charming and discreet technique for extracting people’s life-histories. Like a skilful interviewer she’d lay an extra pertinent question whenever the subject seemed to be running out of steam. She was almost a better listener than talker, and that’s saying something. And her intelligence was infectious, you raised your game like some random qualifier at Wimbledon taking a set off the defending champion.

Having found that the “little brother to whose existence I’d given so little thought was suddenly involved in a scandalous adventure with one of the most original women I’d ever met,” closer acquaintance would result in no less perceptive scrutiny, increasingly freighted by the sorrow that, alongside the need to know and record, is the book’s spur:

If one single quality can be said to have directed my brother’s life, it’s the kind of moral and physical courage often to be found in the characters of men of action… The analogy of the knight isn’t wholly fanciful — there was something archaic about him, discernible in his identification with primitive culture, his immaculate clothes, even the occasionally eyebrow-raising stiltedness of his language. He really did resist the twentieth century. I’m not entirely at ease with it myself, but like most people I inevitably feel obliged to give it the benefit of the doubt. But Justin was both a hero and my brother… My frustration with the distance he kept from me hardened slowly but surely into an unadmitted jealousy of his heroism.

Ursula and Justin’s coupledom is lit with empathic acuity:

If Justin had idealised Ursula he would hardly have forced himself on her either at the beginning or when she wrote him a goodbye letter in Cairo. Instead he recognised with absolute certainty, as if he were in possession of private information, that she needed him for her survival. And Ursula, although it took her longer to commit herself — which wasn’t surprising considering her comparative lack of freedom — finally did so in the same spirit of absolute recognition.

Its dialogic element further enhances the work, as when the author’s own “rather harsh conjectures” on why Ursula, “having been gregarious, hilarious, cynical and all-questioning, became reclusive, serious, mystical and omniscient,” are tested against the scepticism of her good friend Eve Molesworth, or when he hands its closing section to Riri Howse, valued confidante of Justin in Khartoum, on account of “the disinterested love, the honest indignation, and the unflinching regard for the facts [her words] conveyed to me.” The Monument’s diversity of voices itself radiates wisdom and confidence.

The Monument’s luminous narrative opens up Ursula and Justin’s lives without ever claiming or diminishing them, enabled by an ingenious kaleidoscopic structure around its characters’ names. This melding of content and form is the key to the work’s haunting effect, in turn augmented by the crucial absence of photographs (Justin having taken many of Ursula), and even T. Behrens’s spare moniker and biography.

The Monument should have been recognised as pioneering, a sui generis classic, but was not. It had few friends and no champions. Amid the burgeoning fashion for travel and romance in exotic settings, the characters were too odd, real, disturbing or even risible: a pair of self-absorbed loafers on an endless gap year, she a gold-digging voluptuary catapulting from murky Europe to the esoteric London art market, he a privileged, precocious toy boy. A snooty notice by the Olympian editor Karl Miller in the London Review of Books damned with mispraise. Oblivion called.

In fact, morally intelligent and thus searing versions of such caricatures are already weighed in a steadfast narrative true to the emotionally complex lives that are The Monument’s subject. Ursula and Justin as literary dilettantes, as children in a game called Art (“Les Enfants Terribles in the territory of Le Grand Meaulnes”), as “a bit of a joke” in the family circle, as leaning to hippiedom in their first two months in Sudan; Ursula as a dead ringer for Mikhail Lermontov’s anomic dreamer Pechorin — nothing is avoided in the book’s crystalline search for the entangled heart of things.

“Does this gentleman exist?”

The book’s erasure would be matched by that of its author, the figurative painter Timothy (Tim) Behrens, a seventeen-year-old student at the Slade in the mid 1950s when he became protégé, friend and (see Red-Haired Man on a Chair) model of Lucian Freud, in a carousing, priapic relationship with an acrimonious end. His, at best, shadowy life in Britain’s art world is illustrated by his near invisibility even in Martin Gayford’s excellent Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters, published in 2018, and his scarce mention in or omission from many surveys of the 1950s and 60s “school of London” (at most a drinking club) to which he notionally belonged.

After Tim’s death in February 2017, the Portugal-based artist António Cerveira Pinto, a long-term advocate of Behrens’s work, was alone in noting this absurd situation. (“Does this gentleman exist? I still don’t understand why Tim Behrens is missing in all surveys of British art from the early sixties.”) The meagre and perfunctory obituaries (the Times’s an exception), filled out with tattle, admittedly juicy, on earlier years — La Ronde in the territory of Caravaggio — sealed the pact of silence on his earlier work, not least later decades’.

At least Geordie Greig’s encomium to Freud, Breakfast with Lucian, published in 2015, contains morsels from an interview with Behrens conducted in A Coruña in Galicia, northwest Spain, where he lived for thirty years. “I could not believe anyone could be so cold. I had seen (Lucian) as a substitute for my father who had been a complete bastard. I truly loved him and that was what made it so painful when we had our bust-up.” Behrens said elsewhere that Freud, fifteen years older, “adopted me, but then threw me out of the nest, as birds do.”

Just a tad more prosaically, it was when he was Sunday Times literary editor from the mid 1990s that Greig sent me a charming postcard rejecting my submission on The Monument to the paper’s series on underrated books. This bittersweet memory was later eclipsed by the pleasure of exchanging letters with Behrens and receiving from him a copy of an early collaboration with the photographer-doctor Federico García Cabezón, whose images of Galicia are accompanied by Tim’s limpid poems in Spanish.

Behrens’s novel of memory, Poniéndose ya el abrigo (Putting the Coat On) — translated by the peerless Roger Wolfe from English, but not yet available in that language — is well worth seeking out. His editor and friend Eduardo Riestra contrasts this story of his “search for a place to live in” with El Monumento, that “magnificent, rigorous, respectful, but very complicated work.” Both books are published by Ediciones Del Viento in A Coruña, where Tim Behrens was long a convivial and esteemed figure in the area’s fertile cultural scene. “I prefer to belong to the School of La Coruña,” he wrote in 2003.

He was survived by the printmaker Diana Aitchison and, among five children, the graphic designer Charlie Behrens, whose book of interviews is also yet to appear. Besides Behrens, its subjects include the Slade alumnus Nicholas Garland, Britain’s greatest living political cartoonist, and the writer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, indispensable figure in The Monument’s own hard road to publication.

“Because I do not hope to turn again”

The Monument’s cast bears the imprint of history, family, class and England, all of which in varying degree drive a longing to flee yet exert a continuing hold. These impulses, replicated in the coil of shelter and freedom that sexuality and love offer, weave through its characters’ lives.

Thirty years on, the book’s blend of genres extends to documentary and even social history. If Ursula’s early trajectory, fittingly unique as it was, is also part of the 1956 Hungarian diaspora and Britain’s immigration experience, Justin’s thirty-four years could be a case study in the ambiguities of Englishness and class. The teenager rejected England early and, mindful of the family’s continental heritage, always called himself European. On a mid-sixties stopover in Naples on the way to Ursula with photographer friend Tom Hilton, the long-haired pair were threatened with “extermination” by actual fascists “because you are existentialists.” At the same time, his weekends home from Newcastle featured mimic-laden vignettes of his factory’s workers, while in Nysi — barely twenty — he would lead his fellow housebuilders with officer-like responsibility.

His own input on that job was unremitting, “a real labour of Hercules,” said Riri Howse, who with husband Christopher would purchase the Nysi cottage. When the Greek-English couple, a rock of support to Justin in Khartoum, came to England to finalise matters, Riri noted Justin’s demeanour in the land of his birth. “All the time he seemed aloof from the natives as if he could barely tolerate them.” In London, “we went to Fortnum and Mason’s to buy cheese and chocolate for a friend of his. I was amused to see that he behaved in a typical English upper-class manner. It was not put on, he switched to it automatically, without realising it. I told him about it, and he laughed and shook his head.”

The same Justin had invited to Culham Court the venerable Sheikh Mohammed, father-in-law of the Nyala police chief Ali who was at the centre of his and Ursula’s Darfuri world. When this majestic figure toured the property and reached a room commanding a verdant arc to the Thames, he was moved to offer advice to Justin, who reluctantly translated from Arabic for his mother: “He says that, although I am like a son to him, I belong here among all this beauty, and that I should not go back to Sudan.”

The Monument is now also an episode in these buildings’ life. Culham Court was sold in 1997 by that matriarch, Felicity Behrens, to whom the book is dedicated, and currently belongs to a Swiss-born financier with big plans for it, while the Nysi cottage also changed hands to become a holiday home (“beautiful secluded tranquil paradise on the sea with stunning views of mountains and islands”).

Might Ursula and Justin equally have been able to prolong their world by ceding to, then navigating, the more fluid if rockier one forming around them? Justin today, still only seventy, as a socially minded entrepreneur or producer? Ursula as an acclaimed niche gallerist, her enigmatic past more than ever an asset, her style signifier an ivory monkey neck chain, Justin’s part of the ritual exchange on their first night of lovemaking in Cap Ferrat over half a century ago?

But changing from within, and in sync, is hard, even more for such a couple. T. Behrens describes his litany of “if onlys” as “whines of impotence, whimpers of desolation, which are no help at all in deciphering the network of contradictions that is the map of an individual’s destiny.” The actual ending governs all.

In its own journey, The Monument renders Ursula and Justin ageless, powerfully so in requiring no surrender to myth. Here they are sauntering on a Rome street, ahead of the author and his then wife Harriet, the chance sighting recorded with André Kertész–like immediacy:

They too stopped, exactly as if we had turned a switch. They turned to face each other without, however, noticing our presence fifty metres behind them. Justin cupped one hand round the back of Ursula’s neck in its sheath of silky, yellow hair, while he tenderly stroked the curve of her jaw with the other. They looked fixedly into each other’s eyes. There was a feeling of slow motion — he was caressing her with an intimacy all the more erotic for being slightly distanced. No question of anything like a clinch, nor had they in any way ruffled their immaculate grooming. After a minute or two, when we didn’t dare move for fear of being caught in an act of blatant, if inadvertent, voyeurism, they slipped an arm round one another’s waist and resumed their leisurely progress towards the Tiber. We quickly retreated to the Piazza Farnese, where we burst out laughing — though both of us knew that what we had just seen was no laughing matter. It was the laughter of relief.

Amazement entertains or appals as well as entrances. The Monument, a book about love, can do the lot. If only there is room left in this world for it and discerning readers to meet. •

The post A love supreme appeared first on Inside Story.

But what exactly is the subject matter? Clark and the presenters of the new series agree that civilisation is a great human achievement. But what counts as a civilisation and what’s so good about it?

In the original series, Clark refused to say what civilisation is. But dressed in a suit and tie, standing on the banks of the Seine with Notre-Dame in the background, he tells us that he knows civilisation when he sees it. He assumes, of course, that we see what he means. But an ostensive definition requires an indication of what civilisation is not, and for him the necessary contrasts are the barbarians who sacked Rome, the Vikings who ravaged the British coast and the Muslims who threatened Europe.

Barbarians, he said — in an echo of those who defined Aboriginal Australia as terra nullius — have no fixed place; they do not build anything lasting. Later in the series he became more explicit about what makes people civilised: a love of order and rationality embodied in a sophisticated artistic development. And so began his story of how civilisation, born in the Greek world, eventually became the inheritance of the West.

The new series rejects this story and finds the products of civilisation all over the world. But the presenters are as reluctant as Clark to pin down the meaning of the word. Schama shows Islamic State’s destruction of Palmyra to make us aware of what we lose when its achievements are destroyed. He emphasises artistic creation as the activity that “makes us human” and begins his story of civilisations with early examples of cave art found in Africa and Spain. (Aboriginal art may be at least as old as the latter, but no one has managed to accurately date it.) Civilisation, we might conclude, is another term for an art-producing culture — applying as well to Aboriginal communities as Greece or Rome. But in this series, as much as in the first, the emphasis is on monuments and other remains of empire, or on what we now call “fine art.”

Part of the problem is the shady past of the term “civilisation.” In the nineteenth century it stood for the culmination of a progression out of savagery and barbarism, with Western civilisation — and, for the Victorians, British civilisation — as the pinnacle. Those who had not managed to become civilised according to this standard were thought to be either deficient or in need of assistance (in form of colonial rule). Given that baggage, it isn’t surprising that many people prefer to be vague about what civilisation means, or to make its meaning depend on how they use it. But that raises the question of what these programs are actually about.

According to some archaeologists and historians, a society counts as a civilisation if it has urban settlements, surplus agricultural production, a class system, a central government, specialists such as engineers, priests, builders and artists, monumental public buildings, monumental artwork, and writing. But must a civilisation have a system of writing? The Incans didn’t. Must it have monumental buildings or a central government or a class system? Yet a list like this may have its uses, and it has the advantage of being value-neutral. It also allows a person to judge that civilisation is not an entirely good thing.

But neither Clark nor the presenters of the new series focus on the technological and political know-how that enabled the inhabitants of cities and empires to achieve surplus agricultural production, provide infrastructure for urban life, run a central government or conquer their neighbours. The emphasis of both series is on art: its production and dissemination, its function and aesthetic value. This reflects the conception of civilisation that motivated the making of these series: that it is characterised by a superior form of life. Civilised people have good taste. They are able to appreciate the finer things of life. They are refined in dress and manner. Clark, well-spoken, dressed in a suit and tie and talking knowledgeably about works of art, embodies civilisation.

Civilisation in this sense has always been for an elite. Most of the people living in cities and empires of the ancient and modern worlds were not makers or appreciators of art. Some of it could only be found in places inaccessible to them, and in any case they had neither the time nor the education to appreciate it. What was groundbreaking about Clark’s series was that it used the latest technology — colour television — to bring civilisation to a mass audience.

The new series presents a cosmopolitan idea of what it is to be civilised. Civilised people are able to appreciate the works of all cultures and to understand how they influenced each other. They value aesthetic achievement but don’t suppose that their culture is superior. They are open to different ways of seeing. The ideal is worthy, but it is obvious that the new series lacks the impact of the original. One reason is that people now have many ways of accessing information about art, history and culture. But another is the cultural distance that separates us from Clark’s world. Clark could speak with authority about what civilisation means because people were ready to accept the standards that he presented and represented. In our world there is not only a disagreement about standards but scepticism about their very existence. •

The post What is civilisation anyway? appeared first on Inside Story.

The story serves to confirm the myth of Australia as an egalitarian, knockabout sort of place, a haven from the murderous, bureaucratic brutality of fascist Europe and the indignities inflicted by the British. But it’s also a reminder of the vagaries of memory. In some versions the guard goes on to teach the internees how to roll their own cigarettes; in others he isn’t having a smoke at all but is off to the toilet. According to the version recounted by the writer Walter Kaufmann at a 1990 reunion of the Dunera boys in Hay, the guard explicitly recognises the injustice of their treatment:

“Jesus,” says the digger, “I thought you were enemies, but you’re friends. Jews! Jesus Christ!”

This anecdote is among the many examples of the mythologisation of the Dunera boys, a process Ken Inglis, Seumas Spark and Jay Winter deal with deftly in Dunera Lives. The three historians don’t set out to tear down the myth as much as to gently dismantle it, replacing it with something far richer and even more extraordinary.

The “boys” were enemy aliens transported from Britain to Australia on board the HMT Dunera, a passenger ship used by the British military during the war. They were variously detained in camps at Tatura in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley, at Hay in the flat Riverina of western New South Wales and, later, at Orange on the central tablelands. Most were men rather than boys, the youngest aged sixteen, the oldest sixty-six. Dunera Lives also encompasses another 266 internees brought to Australia from Singapore on the Queen Mary, women and children among them. Helmut Neustädter, who went on to become the famous fashion photographer Helmut Newton, was aboard that vessel, as was sculptor Karl Duldig, his wife Slawa and their daughter Eva.

Karl Loewenstein and his son Fritz in the North Sea, 1927. Courtesy Monica Lee Lowen and Jocelyn Lowen

The Dunera boys are generally remembered as Jewish refugees, but this is an oversimplification. Four out of five were of Jewish background, but only a minority practised Jewish rites and customs. The Nazis had persecuted some of them simply because they had a single Jewish grandparent. The authors see them, rather, as a group of “modern Europeans” of German, Austrian, Czech or Polish origin, mostly “city dwellers” and “often bourgeois,” who “enjoyed the fruits of the Enlightenment.”

Nor were they technically refugees, as is sometimes assumed. Many of them had been living freely in Britain prior to September 1939, some having arrived there as children thanks to the Kindertransport organised by the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany after Kristallnacht in November 1938. With the outbreak of war, they were under suspicion as potential fifth columnists who might secretly assist a German invasion. Prime minister Winston Churchill declared them enemy aliens and swiftly had them shipped off to Canada and Australia.

Dunera Lives, the first of two volumes, is essentially a history told through images; the second volume will include narrative accounts of individual Dunera lives. Together, they constitute the final collaborative project of the highly regarded and much-loved historian Ken Inglis, who died late last year. Inglis’s interest in the men was stirred many years ago when he mixed with several of them as a student at the University of Melbourne. In one photograph late in the book we see Inglis with Dunera boy George Nadel and other Queen’s College residents who achieved first-class results in their 1947 examinations; also reproduced is a sketch by another of the former internees, Leonhard Adam, showing students relaxing outside Queen’s College.

The camp at Orange: Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Desolation, 1941, woodcut. University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of Mrs Olive Hirschfeld 1979. 1979.0179. Copyright: Chris Bell

The camp at Tatura: Fred Lowen, Watch Tower with Searchlights, Barbed Wire and Gum Trees, 14 July 1942. Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, H94.95/29. Copyright: Monica Lee Lowen and Jocelyn Lowen

Several Dunera boys studied or worked at Australian universities after their release from detention, and many became significant academic figures, including philosopher Peter Herbst, economist Fred Gruen, political scientist Henry Mayer, fine arts scholar Franz Philipp, physicist Hans Buchdahl and mathematician turned oceanographer Rainer Radok. Part of the Dunera mythology is that they generally went on to stellar careers as scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, industrialists, public servants and artists. As a group, they undoubtedly possessed “substantial education and cultural capital,” as the authors put it, but the story of their postwar lives “is not one of uniform achievement, but of striking variety.”

Fewer than half of them settled in Australia; the rest returned to Britain, emigrated to the United States, helped found the state of Israel or ended up in a variety of other counties. A few dozen returned to Germany, West and East. Both Walter Kaufmann and Heinz Eggebrecht chose to settle in the German Democratic Republic: Eggebrecht rose to senior ranks within the communist regime and died a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall; Kaufmann, one of the youngest Dunera boys, still lives in Germany, where he continued his writing career after reunification. He was back in Australia doing interviews as recently as 2014.

A remarkable number of visual artists, illustrators and photographers figured among the internees, and they left a rich legacy of images. Concise introductions and informative captions put the images in context, but this volume doesn’t so much tell the story of the Dunera boys as show it, in roughly chronological order, beginning with the interwar period in Europe. The affecting photograph (above) of Fritz Loewenstein (later Fred Lowen) holding his father’s hand as they stand ankle-deep in the North Sea on a 1927 holiday speaks to the forthcoming trauma that will wrench Europe apart in a manner that could not be conveyed in words.

From arrest to internment: Untitled drawing by Fritz Schönbach, c. 1940, pencil on paper. Jewish Museum of Australia collection 3067.15.4. Copyright: Schonbach family

Among the images from wartime Britain are a haunting self-portrait by the artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, and a series of compelling cartoon-like sketches by Fritz Schönbach (later Fred Schonbach) depicting the overnight transformation of refugees into enemy aliens. Then come images from the voyage itself, including Schönbach’s sketch of their “reception” by the guards who would destroy, confiscate or steal their possessions, including treasured letters from loved ones, left behind to suffer under the Nazis, whom the boys would never see again.

Fritz Schönbach, Dunera Reception, 10 July 1940, watercolour and pencil on paper. Archive of Australian Judaica, Rare Books and Special Collections, the University of Sydney Library. Copyright: Schonbach family

The ship was terribly overcrowded, and the indignities suffered by the internees included a daily limit of two sheets of toilet paper. Despite the scarcity, a stolen roll of this precious commodity was used by Gerd Buchdahl, Peter Herbst and Peter Lasky to draft a constitution for the boys to manage their own affairs once they were incarcerated on land. Based on the principles of liberal democracy and British parliamentary procedure, it was, to a large degree, implemented in the camp at Hay, which assumed, in the words of internee Klaus Loewald, “the character of a small working republic.” The camp also had its own short–lived currency, printed by the publisher of the local newspaper and praised for its artistry by the manager of the local Commonwealth Bank. Closer inspection revealed that its designer, George Teltscher, who had fought in the Spanish civil war and studied at the Bauhaus, had secreted the words “WE ARE HERE BECAUSE WE ARE HERE BECAUSE WE ARE HERE” into the curls of barbed wire decorating the edge of the banknotes. This soldiers’ lament, sung to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” was known to the internees as the Hay–Tatura hymn.

A performance of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata at Tatura on 8 March 1942. Leonhard Adam, Kreutzer Sonata, 1942, watercolour and ink on paper. Jewish Museum of Australia collection 4024

So it’s not entirely surprising to find that Tatura had its own university — Collegium Taturense — which delivered an average of 113 lectures a week attended by nearly 700 students. Concerts, theatre performances and sports matches were another feature of life in the camps, as the internees did their best not only to fill time and combat boredom but also to retain a sense of dignity and purpose in the face of an indefinite wait for freedom. As the editors of the first edition of the Hay camp newsletter, the Boomerang, put it in February 1941: “Please remember that your mind is not interned, nor is it confined to this camp.”

The injustice of the Dunera boys’ treatment was recognised early. Churchill came to regret the decision to order the indiscriminate detention of those who had sought Britain’s protection. He apologised and instigated a court martial that documented the abuses the boys endured at sea. The Dunera’s senior officer was severely reprimanded and a regimental sergeant major was discharged and jailed for theft. A fund of £35,000 was used to compensate the Dunera boys for their lost and stolen property.

Their treatment in Australia began to change too. By mid 1942 at least 1300 had been set free, hundreds of them returning to England as soon as they could. Some — including the novelist Ulrich Boschwitz — died at sea when the Abosso and the Waroonga were sunk by enemy action. Many of those who stayed joined the 8th Employment Company, a non-combatant battalion of the Australian army, which they sometimes referred to as the 8th Enjoyment Company, a reference to the fact that the numerous musicians and performers in the ranks combined their military duties with theatrical pursuits.

One of the heroes of Dunera Lives is the much-loved commanding officer who made this possible, New Zealander Edward Renata (Tip) Broughton, who even played himself in one of the internees’ colourful productions. Karl Duldig cast a bronze bust of Broughton, and one of the images in this collection is of a handwritten note from Broughton to the soldier-tenor Erich Liffmann. First in Māori, then in English, Broughton expressed, “in thoughts emanating from the depths of my soul,” the belief that Liffmann would one day “ascend to the peak of the mount of song and there dwell for ever.” The enjoyment ceased after Broughton retired, and a number of Dunera boys were court-martialled for minor indiscretions. Michael Levin was punished after he complained about “being treated like a schoolboy, herded about the parade ground by a professional soldier whose only ambition in life seems to be bigger and better wars… and who once actually had the impertinence to call me a ‘queen’ — just because I am in the habit of wearing my hair rather longer than customary.”

Baron Martin von Koblitz, a Viennese connoisseur of the arts, at Orange. Fred Lowen, Baron von Koblitz, 1941, pencil on paper. Jewish Museum of Australia collection 3419

The main tasks of the 8th Employment Company were unloading cargo from ships in Port Melbourne and transferring goods between trains on the border between Victoria and New South Wales, but a few Dunera boys were called to higher duties. Bruno Lipmann had learnt Japanese before the war and continued to study it while interned, with the aid of a Japanese–English dictionary. He was seconded to the “listening post” in the headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur. There, translating Japanese radio broadcasts into English, this one-time enemy alien became part of sensitive Allied intelligence-gathering.

The authors touch on, but don’t labour, parallels with the treatment of displaced and vulnerable people today, noting that the Dunera boys were persecuted both by the regime that they fled and by countries in which they sought protection. Many moved to Britain before the full extent of Nazi persecution became apparent, not so much in immediate fear of their lives as in the hope of a brighter future. Today they would probably be dismissed as “economic migrants.” As the authors put it, once set in motion “internment and deportation turned into a gratuitous exercise of brutality.” The Dunera boys, like millions forced from their homes today, had “no rights and no nation.” They were not incarcerated for what they had done but because they were wrongly perceived to pose a threat.

The final section of the book shows the boys’ postwar lives — marriages, careers, achievements, disappointments and, as the decades rolled on, reunions and commemorations. A “memory boom” was spurred on by new recording technologies and a few key “memory activists,” and supercharged by books and films, including the 1985 telemovie starring Bob Hoskins. In the process, a diverse group of people, thrown together by fate, were fashioned into one large family. As Inglis, Spark and Winter write, the Dunera Lives constitute a “fictive kinship group” based on “a family of experience rather than of blood lines” and the bonds “these men and women forged and continue to forge in the process of together remembering the past.”

Although the quality of the reproduction is high, not all the images in this volume are visually arresting, nor do all of them unlock a compelling narrative. In determining what to include, the authors’ editorial path has veered towards the compendious. Perhaps a slimmer, more selective volume published on slightly heavier paper stock would have better conveyed the story to a broad readership. But others with a more direct connection to the Dunera generation, or anyone wishing to engage more rigorously with the detail of its history, will have good reason to appreciate the comprehensive approach.

This first volume of visual history is like a series of snapshots, moments rooted in a particular place and time. The second volume promises to complement it with longitudinal narratives of individual lives. Separately and together, they will make a rich contribution to our understanding not only of the Dunera and Australia, but also of the complexities of migration, flight and refuge. ●

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That the figure of James Cook (1728–79) should feature simultaneously, and so prominently, in two different hemispheres — joined, it’s true, by more than 200 years of colonial history — is powerful testament to a legacy that has been vigorously debated not only in Australia but also in other places where his shadow still falls: in Canada, New Zealand and a succession of Pacific islands from Tonga to Fiji to Hawaii.

Through much of Australia’s modern history, Cook was the archetypal “hero of Empire,” the very embodiment of civilised British virtues. His “discovery” of the eastern coast of the continent is still widely regarded as the founding moment of the modern Australian nation. But his legacy has been clouded by a reconsideration of the violence perpetrated on Indigenous peoples, not only during the voyages themselves, but also during the process of colonisation after he took possession of Australia on 22 August 1770.

The first of those two views of Cook was captured in the early twentieth century in E. Phillips Fox’s imagining of his landing at Botany Bay (above); the second can be seen in Daniel Boyd’s reworking of that image in We Call Them Pirates Out Here, painted just over a century later. Both are on display at the British Library in an exhibition that valiantly ventures beyond the dichotomy they encapsulate. What the library’s curators attempt to offer — using an enormous array of documents, artefacts, maps, videos and other installations — is a more complicated appraisal of the man in his historical context.

Viewing this exhibition as an Australian is both a privilege and a provocation. Cook is not a figure towards whom indifference is possible; but nor is he someone whose legacy we should let be plundered for political purposes. Like all treasurers, Scott Morrison is accused of cooking the books for political advantage; the metaphor is apt here, as our evaluation of the man and the figure of James Cook is subject to another kind of cooking the books.

At the behest of both the British Admiralty and the Royal Society, James Cook undertook three voyages to the Pacific Ocean, first as Lieutenant James Cook aboard the Endeavour in 1768–71, and later as Captain James Cook in command of the Resolution and Discovery in 1772–75 and 1776–80. The voyages were remarkable feats in their way, arduous and exacting, involving years away from the comforts of home amid storms at sea, towering icebergs in the far southern latitudes, and near shipwreck off the Australian coast. The toll was enormous. Disease, bad food, and the physical rigours of voyaging meant that many were never to return. By the time of his final voyage, Cook was worn down by the pressures of command, a punishing workload and illness, fated to be killed in a confrontation with Hawaiian islanders.

Using the words of Cook’s own journals and the writings of the naturalists who accompanied the voyages, the exhibition curators seek to do justice to both the geostrategic and the scientific purposes of the expeditions by showing us how its members interpreted oceans, lands and peoples previously (largely) unknown in Europe. Aboard the Endeavour were Joseph Banks, gentleman botanist and later president of the Royal Society, and Daniel Solander, a favoured former student of the great Swedish botanist and natural historian Carl Linnaeus. Father-and-son German naturalists Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster travelled on Cook’s second expedition. Other naturalists on the various expeditions included the Swedish naturalist (and another former pupil of Linnaeus) Anders Sparrman, and the Scottish surgeon and naturalist William Anderson, neither of whom, sadly, feature much in this exhibition.

The expeditions were partly the product of the Enlightenment. That renovation of European intellectual, artistic, scientific and religious endeavours gave rise to the agricultural and industrial revolutions, economic and cultural globalisation, unprecedented movements of population, and new patterns of global encounter and exchange. The Enlightenment was also entangled with Europe’s slave trade and its eventual abolition, and it played host to the first conflict that can genuinely be considered a world war (the Seven Years’ War), which reached into all theatres of European imperial rivalry, including the Americas, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the Philippines and India. It was this conflict that gave the young Cook his first commission, enabling him to display his talents as mathematician and cartographer as part of Britain’s conquest of the French colony in Canada.

From France and Sweden to Scotland and Germany, intellectuals engaged in the task of reconstructing and reordering knowledge, not just of nature but of society, history and humanity itself. Cook’s voyages were inspired by efforts to investigate and to catalogue the world, and the voyages themselves (and the works they inspired) became favoured sources of data and matters of debate among intellectuals who never left Europe.

In anticipation of their significance, all three expeditions were accompanied by naturalists, botanists and astronomers. Each was expected to observe, record and write about what he saw and heard and learned, and to communicate these findings to an eager public. The artists who accompanied the three expeditions all worked under trying conditions. Alexander Buchan, Herman Sporing and Sydney Parkinson, each of whom travelled aboard the Endeavour, were botanical illustrators who soon found themselves painting landscapes and even portraits inspired by the scenes and the people they beheld. The expedition also claimed their lives, first Buchan’s and then Sporing’s and Parkinson’s, but not before they had created a rich record of cross-cultural encounters.

The formally trained professional artists who accompanied the second and third Cook expeditions were more fortunate. William Hodges (Resolution, 1772–75) and John Webber (Resolution, 1776–80) each left a considerable body of accomplished images, often framed by dramatically rendered scenery or classically posed figures that echoed the neoclassical sensibilities of the period. They also amplified a more overtly propagandistic image of Cook the peace-maker and Cook the civiliser, benevolently spreading Britain’s Empire. Both men also produced arresting portraits and social scenes that provided the ethnographic insights for which there was an insatiable appetite in Europe.

A Canoe of Tongatapu by William Hodges, 1774. British Library

The exhibition presents a great variety of images — landscapes, seascapes, portraits, botanical illustrations, drawings, paintings and sketches — some of which reveal the artists’ attempts to work out exactly what it was they were seeing. In Parkinson’s sketch of a kangaroo, for instance — the first known European drawing of the marsupial — we can see on the paper a rapid search for the right lines, the correct bulk and heft.

Inevitably, the magnificence of Hodges’s dramatic scenes and the humanity of his intimate portraits make the most vivid impression. A high point of the exhibition is the pairing of Hodges’s preparatory sketches and portraits with finished works such as his large painted cartoon of the Tahitian war fleet. These images, surely difficult to execute aboard the ship, would serve as preparatory sketches for paintings to be finished back in London.

By contrast, scenes from the earlier voyage — Buchan’s depiction of the interaction between Cook’s crew and a group of Tierra del Fuegan people at the A View of the Endeavour’s Watering Place in the Bay of Good Success (below) and Parkinson’s curious image of a New Zealand War Canoe Bidding Defiance to the Ship — are less stagey and self-conscious records of encounter. Buchan seems to show the prosaic search for communication in trade. Parkinson’s image is more of a mystery. His journal, like those of Cook and Banks, testified to complex encounters between British and Māori, in both eager trade and loud defiance. But what did he depict in this image? This is no haka. Was the botanical artist trying things out again, searching for the forms and rhythm of the scene?

A View of the Endeavour’s Watering Place in the Bay of Good Success by Alexander Buchan, 1769. British Library

The encounters with Indigenous people were often charged with tension and mutual incomprehension. They could end in violence, though frequently a more peaceful exchange of goods and of information took place. The curators of Captain Cook: The Voyages want to make us aware of how the travellers sought to understand peoples so different from themselves, and how they earnestly tried to convey their humanity to audiences at home, there to be reinterpreted by other writers and artists. In the process, the distorted lens of colonial travel and observation was further distorted by a range of factors, from ignorance to arrogance and from prurience to commercial interest. To its credit, the exhibition challenges the distorted lens through which episodes of violent contact were viewed, and especially the accusations of cannibalism made in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Arguably the most potent case of a distorted lens was the depiction of the death of Cook himself. The circumstances are hazy and the eyewitness accounts vary. The bald facts are that, having spent a month peacefully in Hawaii in 1779, the Resolution and Discovery departed amid signs the islanders were sorry to see them go. Was the departure regretted because ties with the Europeans provided the islanders with access to prestige and knowledge of use to them in island politics? Was Cook’s departure mourned because his arrival had coincided with the harvest festival of Makihiki, and he regarded as the personification of the god Lono?

Whatever the case, when the Resolution returned to Kealakekua Bay a few days later, after breaking its foremast, the islanders were tense. Quarrels and arguments broke out, and the travellers described the islanders’ behaviour as “insolent.” When Cook attempted to assert his authority by marching through the town with his armed marines and seizing King Kalaniʻōpuʻu-a-Kaiamamao, an angry crowd gathered. Stones were thrown, and Cook was hit. He fell, and was clubbed and stabbed to death in the crowd. Guns were fired. Four marines were also killed, and two wounded. Cook’s body was taken by the islanders and disembowelled, the flesh baked off the bones in accordance with islander funerary practices. Some of the remains were eventually returned to the distraught crew for burial at sea.

Whether or not Cook had been deified by the islanders, news of his death led to his European deification, or apotheosis. Omai: Or, a Trip Round the World, a play produced in 1785, culminated in the figure of Cook rising heavenward above the island, borne aloft by the figures of Fame, blowing her trumpets to the ages, and Britannia, the female embodiment of Britain’s national and imperial identity. The island and ocean he did so much to chart and claim recedes beneath his ascent, inviting other Britons to follow in his wake. The image of the apotheosis was based on a drawing by Webber, and the shipboard artist was front and centre in the myth-making. James Cook the man would become Captain Cook the imperial icon.

The exhibition uses the death of Cook as an opportunity to explore the unreliability of eyewitness reports and the shifting tropes of representation. The small selection of images depicting Cook’s death includes Webber’s, which appears to show a peaceful Cook — arm extended to dissuade his marines from firing — about to be stabbed by sinister, crowding islanders. Webber, who was on board the ship that day, would not have seen the events close up, but his image appeared to provide a powerful verification of European assumptions about islander savagery.

Other artists used Cook’s death as a subject for grand historical drama. In George Carter’s 1783 Death of Captain James Cook (below, but not in the exhibition), violence on both sides is emphasised, and Cook himself is implicated, his musket raised as if to club assailants who are imagined as very dark-skinned and sinister. In Johann Zoffany’s unfinished painting of 1795, The Death of Captain James Cook (also below and not in the exhibition), the islanders are used to epitomise “savagery” in muscular, neoclassical forms, hinting that these were people, like Europe’s ancient Greeks and Romans, of another, less civilised age.

Death of Captain James Cook, George Carter, 1783. British Museum

The Death of Captain James Cook, Johann Zoffany, 1795. Royal Museums Greenwich

Whose savagery? Which civilisation? What benevolence? Why violence? The voyages raise so many intersecting questions, amplified by a visual legacy that includes the meticulous maps and charts that Cook himself produced. Visitors to the exhibition are shown how science and art, mathematics and emotions, knowledge and ignorance were all decisively intertwined, bequeathing a compelling and complicated legacy.

That legacy is entwined with the mantle of “discovery.” Cook’s expeditions encountered peoples who were in no sense in need of “discovery.” The Pacific had been voyaged across and its islands populated hundreds of years before the arrival of Cook and the other European travellers who preceded and followed him.

The curators of Captain Cook: The Voyages have striven to represent Indigenous agency and register their orders of knowledge. They draw attention to the Tahitian islander Tupaia, who (with his companion Taiata) accompanied Cook for part of the Endeavour voyage. (He would die in Batavia, or modern Jakarta.) Not only did Tupaia leave images indicating how he saw these newcomers and others along the way, he also provided vital information about local Pacific islander geography and languages. Cook valued his knowledge even as he appropriated it in his own maps and charts.

Banks and a Maori, Tupaia, 1769. British Library

On the Resolution voyage, the Ra’iatean islander Mai (Omai) accompanied Cook all the way home to Britain, where he became, to Cook’s chagrin, a social sensation. But Cook was annoyed by more than Mai’s fame: he had been embarrassed by the Admiralty’s publication of his own journals from the Endeavour expedition, prepared by a professional writer, John Hawkesworth. These editions, beautifully produced in bound volumes with accompanying maps and engravings, sold like hot cakes. The suggested sexual improprieties of Banks with the Tahitian “Queen” Purea (Oberea) sparked ridicule. (Cook, who was scrupulous in such matters, had good reason to fear unregulated sexual relations between his crew and islanders; they could easily lead to tension and bloodshed, as they had on Captain Wallis’s voyage to Tahiti aboard the Dolphin in 1767.)

Further controversy — this time over which imperial nation was responsible for spreading venereal disease among the islanders — would erupt in the pages of published accounts of Cook’s expedition and in contemporaneous publications based on the French expedition under Louis Antoine de Bougainville.

The exhibition doesn’t avoid uncomfortable truths about colonial encounters in the Pacific. But it prefers to dwell on perceptions: who was looking at whom, and what did they see? Through Tupaia’s images, and through William Parry’s portrait of Mai with Banks and Solander, it allows us to see the moment of “discovery” from the other side. Colonial encounters were moments of seeing that were seen; the discovery was mirrored. One arresting image in the exhibition is Tupaia’s sketch of Indigenous Australians — people he and other Pacific islanders had not (to our knowledge) ever encountered before — fishing from their canoes. Who discovered whom here?

This is a reminder that it is time, finally, to retire “discovery” from the vocabulary that for so long framed Cook’s expeditions. It is like a mantle of lead, cast over Cook’s shoulders, bearing the impression of Empire. It’s no wonder that the human has sunk beneath the waves without trace, leaving only monuments in his place.

Monuments of empire cast long shadows, and Australians should be willing to cast more light into the gloom to see what the shadows conceal. In 1768, the British believed that Cook’s expedition would cast its own new light of knowledge. Aboard the Endeavour, Banks and Solander, working in conjunction with the illustrators who accompanied them — Sporing, Parkinson and Buchan — undertook an enormous amount of botanical work. Among them they collected, catalogued and illustrated 110 plant genera previously unknown in Europe and 1300 new species.

The ostensible purpose of the voyage, though, was not botany but astronomy. Cook was instructed to observe the Transit of Venus, which offered an opportunity to map the path of the planet between the Earth and the Sun. The calculations involved were not only of scientific interest, but also promised significant advantages in navigation. That the British should be so interested in better navigating an expanse of ocean still largely unknown to Europeans spoke of their rapid rise to global imperial status. It is therefore highly significant that Cook was also instructed, having completed the observation from Tahiti, to proceed south and to “discover,” chart and take possession — “with the consent of the natives” — of the presumed vast southern continent, Terra Australis Incognita.

It is his compliance with those orders that still divides Australians to this day. By his act of possession, he turned Terra Australis into British imperial territory and, as some see it, created the lie that this could be done because that territory was also a terra nullius, an empty, unpossessed, unowned land. In reality, he did no such thing. The characterisation is simply too crude. At no point did Cook declare or assume that Australia was a terra nullius. Indeed, he famously expressed his own misgivings about the imperial quest on which he was embarked (others, such as William Anderson, gave voice to more strident criticism).

Nonetheless, it was Cook’s Endeavour voyage that facilitated (and Banks and others who avidly promoted) the colonisation of Australia. Cook’s second and third expeditions also consolidated British claims and ambitions against other rival European imperial powers (notably France, Spain and Russia) on the northwest coast of Canada, in the central Pacific and in Aotearoa/New Zealand. He did this not just by raising flags and firing guns to take possession of various locations, memorably also by scratching out the inscription of prior Spanish claims to possession of Tahiti. He also did it by enabling the colonisation of knowledge.

The exhibition celebrates the scientific legacy of the expeditions, especially in the field of botany. Even here, though, a more critical appraisal would be welcome. In the eighteenth century, botany had become a kind of master science of European colonisation. It was a means to render known the untapped potentials of nature, to map landscapes, and to appropriate local knowledge in the authoritative cadences of scientific credibility. Colonial travel and exploration were the means whereby new catalogues of plants and new possibilities for harnessing their potential could be exploited.

It was for this reason that Solander and Banks accompanied Cook aboard the Endeavour in 1768–70. By ambitiously botanising at each and every port of call, they were claiming new ground for European knowledge, just as Cook was claiming seas and territories for Britain’s Empire. Both claims were a form of colonisation, extending a new dispensation that echoed in new names for places and for plants, where they presumed no prior names should remain. To botanise was to give purpose to colonisation by collating and curating the means to turn “wasteland” into Empire. To collect and catalogue plants on new shores was to botanise in terra nullius.

The exhibition allows us to see how intimately scientific activities were interwoven with colonial aspiration. Cook’s own journals from the expedition attest that Banks and Solander were direct participants in the key moments of colonial contact throughout the expedition. When the two men ventured ashore, as they did at every opportunity, they collected and catalogued as many plants as they could find. In 1768, at Tierra Del Fuego, they became lost gathering plants on shore and almost died from exposure to the extreme cold. (Two of Banks’s servants actually did die.) The following year, on Tahiti, Solander assisted Cook in making his important astronomical observations, and was also an unwitting subject of the islanders’ efforts to acquire the sacred prestige of the newcomers by picking their pockets, in his case depriving him of his spyglass. As unfortunate as that sounds, it was not as bad as the theft of Captain Cook’s stockings one night from under his very head.

Later that year, on Aotearoa/New Zealand, Solander accompanied Cook and Banks on their first landing and meeting with the Māori. And in Australia on 29 April 1770, he again accompanied Cook and Banks on their first encounter with Indigenous Australians. It was an inauspicious meeting: the Indigenous warriors they saw on the beach all ran off at the sight of the boat coming ashore. Cook and his party resolved, Cook wrote, to “throw them some nails, beads, etc., a shore, which they took up, and seem’d not ill pleased with, in so much that I thought that they beckon’d to us to come ashore; but in this we were mistaken, for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us, upon which I fir’d a musquet…” They threw a spear in reply. Cook then fired “a Second Musquet, load with small Shott,” which hit one of the warriors.

It was in this way that the colonisation of Australia began: with misunderstanding, shouted threats, thrown objects, and gunfire. Banks and Solander were there again at another and even more telling incident on 22 August 1770. On this day, at a place forever since named Possession Island, Cook recorded:

I landed with a party of men, accompanied by Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander… Having satisfied myself… [that] from the Latitude of 38 degrees South down to this place, I am confident, was never seen or Visited by any European before us… I now once More hoisted English Colours, and in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole Eastern coast from the above Latitude down to this place by the Name of New Wales, together with all the Bays, Harbours, Rivers, and Islands, situated upon the said Coast; after which we fired 3 Volleys of small Arms, which were answer’d by the like number from the Ship.

This was a moment of profound significance in Australia’s recent history. Despite the continuous 60,000-year (or more) inhabitation of the land by a people rich in culture and knowledge, subjects of laws and of lore since time out of mind, as fully in possession of themselves as it is possible for a people to be, by this simple act of possession they and the land on which they lived became subject to another’s ownership. Australia, from Cook’s act of possession forward, was to be irrevocably colonised.

In the early days after Federation in 1901, Captain Cook was a useful symbol to reassert British identity and imperial belonging. In his reimagined majesty he became the semi-divine presence invoked in statuary and art — an anaesthetising balm for a hapless nation of arriviste white-skinned ex-colonials earnest to deny the antiquity of prior inhabitation by a peoples they were engaged in supplanting, and troubled by their isolation in a region teeming with other peoples they feared would do the same to them. Cook became an image of how Australians of a particular pedigree wanted to see themselves: as bold, brave, heroic and civilised.

In 2018, Cook certainly continues to symbolise, but what exactly? Most recently his likeness in heroic bronze has intensified the dispute over the date of Australia Day (since 1988, commemorated on the anniversary of the landing of the first British convict-colonists in 1788) and the accusation that the date commemorates a colonial genocide.

The bronze relics of Australia’s colonial insecurities in the early twentieth century have attracted new commentary.

Boyd’s We Call Them Pirates Out Here, like the British Library exhibition, is a provocation to think carefully about our national symbols. Symbols are never just symbolic; they tremble with a latent power. Cook as a pirate is an image that confronts us with the reality that European colonisation was a theft, not just of land and resources but also of whole peoples’ futures. Those thefts were sanctified with laws and justified by the other peoples who inherited the theft by building their own futures.

Pirate, hero, coloniser, civiliser, scientist. Who was James Cook? The question lingers over another recent reimagining, Michael Parekowhai’s The English Channel, on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. A larger-than-life figure of a dejected-looking Cook, fashioned in highly polished stainless steel, it is sitting on a sculptor’s tripod and positioned to look down through a large window onto Sydney Harbour (but not Botany Bay, where he actually landed). This Cook reflects all attempts to answer that very question.

Michael Parekowhai, The English Channel, 2015.

He seems weighed down by his own legacy, and we see ourselves reflected but weirdly out of shape. We might be led to ask why we remain so convinced that the figure of Cook should bear images of ourselves.

This is not a question the British Library exhibition asks directly, but it is a question that it invites us to consider. The decision by the federal government to fund the renovation and enlargement of the memorial to Captain Cook might seem an anachronistic gesture if not for the fact that our colonial and military past has become so relentlessly politicised, mined for bullets in the pitiless war for momentary advantage, and carried on in confected tones of aggrieved and indignant pride or sentimental advocacy.

Captain Cook: The Voyages is the kind of exhibition that might provide impetus for a more complicated public appraisal of Cook. But few Australians will have the opportunity to see it, or to hear the videotaped views of Indigenous Australians, Māori, Canadians and Pacific Island peoples who have the opportunity, in the course of the exhibition, to reflect on Cook’s complicated legacy.

Not long ago, the Australian government dismissed the latest attempt by Indigenous Australians to present their own vision for the future, in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Cook is not the appropriate avatar of Empire to embody this continued denial, but his persistent enrolment as national icon ensures that his legacy will continue to shadow the nation’s future. Would it be too much to ask that, instead of avatar or icon, hero or villain, we begin to see Cook with fresh eyes? We might then begin to see beyond him, beyond the reflection of our wished-for selves, and begin to perceive new possibilities. ●

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The work shown in Stuttgart and Venice is also part of the Triennial, which opened last week at the National Gallery of Victoria. Or is it? In Melbourne, the work is titled Wilson Must Go. The renaming, just a couple of days before the exhibition opened, is Breitz’s protest against the NGV’s use of Wilson Security staff.

Wilson has provided guards for Australia’s infamous offshore detention centres in Nauru (since 2012) and on Manus Island (from 2014 until October 2017). Wilson staff have been accused of having committed or been implicated in human rights violations, including child abuse, detailed in the Guardian’s Nauru files. To use Breitz’s words, “Wilson security has violently enforced the imprisonment of refugees and people seeking asylum in Australia’s offshore immigration detention centres.” She therefore felt that “it would be morally remiss… for me to remain silent in the context of the current conversation that is taking place around the Australian government’s ongoing and systematic abuse of refugees.”

As she put it on another occasion, “The same eyes that watched over murder, rape and child abuse in the detainment centres where these refugees are held would be watching over my work, these same people would care for my work. This scene became repulsive to me and I just felt the responsibility not only to my practice but also to the interviewees [featured in the art work] and to this museum that has been so generous to me.”

Breitz has been careful to stress that she does not have an issue with the NGV, which claims it was not responsible for appointing Wilson as the gallery’s “interim security provider” (to replace the previous contractor, which had been accused of underpaying its employees). Under the title, “Why I’m Sabotaging My Own Work,” Breitz wrote last week that “I trust that the NGV will receive this gesture as one of solidarity.”

Solidarity, if not love, was on display two days after the exhibition opened when the NGV hosted Candice Breitz in Conversation, a ticketed event with Ivan O’Mahoney, director of the SBS reality TV series Go Back to Where You Came From. “I care deeply about this museum,” Breitz told the gathering, which included her Melbourne gallerist Anna Schwartz and Simon Maidment, the senior NGV curator who has been Breitz’s main point of contact. She also emphasised how “very rigorous” and “very generous” the NGV had been in providing her with information about its relationship with Wilson Security. If anybody had bought a $25 ticket in the expectation of witnessing a controversial discussion, they would have been disappointed. All speakers seemed to share Breitz’s view and agree that Wilson must go.

The NGV has not endorsed Breitz’s protest — or those of two other Triennial artists, Irishman Richard Mosse and Mexican Rafael Lozano-Hemmer — but it has been accommodating, suggesting that it sympathises with the artists’ decision to protest. The gallery’s public stance is understandable. Wilson Must Go has generated publicity and allowed the NGV to position itself as a critical voice. In a city such as Melbourne, where many inner-city residents pride themselves on their liberal politics, public cultural institutions can be expected to be sympathetic to asylum seekers.

“It’s important for us that the museum remains as a platform for people with all kinds of views and to make those views heard,” Maidment explained during another panel discussion on the Triennial’s opening weekend. “People like Richard [Mosse], like Candice [Breitz], like many of the artists in the NGV triennial… people who have voices and issues they want to tackle in new and in engaging and emotive ways, and we try to enable those voices… And we’re thankful that they are willing to engage with us like this, in productive ways.”

But while the NGV has not objected to the renaming of Breitz’s and Lozano-Hemmer’s art works and changes to Mosse’s installation, it has apparently been less accommodating when it comes to the Artists’ Committee, a Melbourne-based group of art practitioners “that makes collaborative public work around the intersection of money, ethics and culture.”

It was the Artists’ Committee that first alerted Breitz to Wilson’s role. For the past six months or so, it has protested against the NGV’s partnership with Wilson. In August, it petitioned gallery director Tony Ellwood to dump Wilson by presenting a letter signed by hundreds of artists. In early October, members of the group covered the art gallery’s most prized possession, Picasso’s Weeping Woman — in 1986 famously stolen and later returned by political activists — with a black shroud featuring Wilson’s logo. Last week, at the occasion of the Triennial’s VIP reception, Committee members picketed the NGV entrance.

The Committee claims that the NGV has retaliated against local artists critical of its involvement with Wilson; according to a statement posted by the group last week, two Melbourne artist-run initiatives had been “in discussions with NGV programming staff about participation in the Triennial EXTRA program, but were promptly dropped from the program after they expressed concern about Wilson Security’s contract.”

Artists picketing the Triennial opening at the National Gallery of Victoria. Artists’ Committee

The NGV has also been careful to frame the protest as an issue to do with the freedom of artists, rather than an issue about Manus and Nauru. It did not object when Richard Mosse amended his art work by incorporating a message from Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani, who is currently held on Manus; an art museum sympathetic to his plight — rather than that of artists with a conflicted conscience — might have invited Boochani to join by phone or video link one of the discussion panels held in conjunction with the Triennial’s opening. He would have been an obvious choice, because his voice, via an interview with Melbourne writer Arnold Zable, is featured in the Triennial catalogue.

Breitz’s own experience also suggests that the NGV’s accommodation of the protest is only part of the gallery’s response. When she visited the art gallery the day after the Candice Breitz in Conversation forum, she reported: “As I entered the main door, the Wilson security guard posted at that door audibly got on his walkie talkie… ‘She’s carrying a “Refugee Rights Bag,”’ he told the person on the other side. The museum has me under surveillance.”

The bag that had attracted the guard’s attention was one of 5000 tote bags handed out at the Australian pavilion during the preview of this year’s Venice Biennale. Advertising Tracey Moffatt’s “My Horizon” solo show, the bag is emblazoned with the words “Refugee Rights” and “Indigenous Rights.” When Breitz “had a quiet chat” with the Wilson guard, he told her “that he and his colleagues were under strict instruction to report anyone who looked like they might have ‘political overtones,’ and especially anything to do with the ‘whole refugee thing.’”

The Triennial has five broad and unconnected themes: movement, change, virtual, body and time. Breitz’s installation, categorised under “movement,” is located in two adjoining rooms on the gallery’s third floor.

The visitor first enters a space resembling a movie theatre. On a large screen, the Hollywood actors Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore perform the narratives of six refugees. The visitor is made aware of the dynamics of representation and attention. Breitz reminds her audience that the experiences of refugees are not as highly valued in the “attention economy” as the fictional stories produced and disseminated by Hollywood. The fast-paced montage produces an awkward — and involuntary — dialogue between the two actors, in which different parts of the world, different kinds of borders and different reasons for fleeing one’s country become interwoven.

Only by passing through the space featuring Baldwin and Moore can the visitor enter the second space of the installation. Here, six television screens and accompanying headphones allow the visitor to sit across from the six refugees and listen to their stories. Each of the six testimonies is several hours long and screened in its entirety. The work engages with the multiplicity of being a refugee and in doing so potentially makes the spectator identify with the predicaments of displacement: anyone, including the spectator, might be forced to flee.

Breitz’s work is a thoughtful comment on our lack of attentiveness to the voices of people with whom we have little in common, and our propensity to tune in to the voices of celebrities. Her renaming of Love Story suggests that she is similarly attuned to the attentiveness towards herself as a critical artist, and that the new title functions to clarify her position, rather than sabotage her work, as she claimed when explaining her decision to protest. In other words, for Mosse, Lozano-Hemmer and Breitz, the reframing of their works may have been more than an attempt to avoid being “morally remiss.” The knowledge of the Wilson controversy in the Melbourne art scene created a context in which their art might have been misread.

Breitz expressed surprise that none of the Australian artists whose work is part of the Triennial was willing to join the protest. On the day of the Triennial’s opening, she commented on her Facebook page: “What I’ve learnt about Australia so far: You can put a lid on things here. Most people are willing to look the other way. Most people are comfortable remaining silent.”

One of the silent artists is Ben Quilty. His work — the painting of an orange life jacket he picked up on the Greek island of Lesbos — was also prompted by the issue of forced displacement. In a review for the Guardian, Brigid Delaney quoted him as saying, “Look at Peter Dutton, it’s a disgrace. You have to teach empathy and compassion — and a great place to do that is a gallery or museum, where you have all these children coming through.” In this instance, moral outrage directed at the likes of border security minister Dutton seems to do little more than legitimate the aestheticisation of forced displacement.

Breitz’s work demonstrates that the representation of the experiences of refugees — or the exhibition of objects representing these experiences, for that matter — does not automatically engender compassion and empathy. But what if a work of art produced awareness — or compassion and empathy, as Quilty claims? Could that be enough?

A visitor to the National Gallery of Victoria, although she might become more aware, more empathetic or more compassionate, would not necessarily act in solidarity with refugees as a result of her visit. That goes also for the artists: an engaged artist like Quilty may feel for the suffering of the people he encountered on Lesbos, but he did not translate his feelings into actions beyond the production of a work of art. Breitz, Mosse and Lozano-Hemmer, on the other hand, faced with the question “Is it really me who needs to act?,” decided to go one step further, not least because they could.

We love Breitz’s work, applaud her stance and admire her ability to articulate it so well. But we are also unsettled by the silence with which it has been met. This silence seems indicative of the ease with which the protest could be accommodated and appropriated by a major public cultural institution. Instead of serving as a call for denouncing the Australian government’s human rights abuses, the reframed art works became exemplars of artists’ freedom to have their say. Mind you, the freedom to speak up is not necessarily extended to anybody carrying a bag emblazoned with the text “Refugee Rights.”

The opportunity to host the artists’ protest allowed the NGV to dissociate itself from human rights abuses in offshore detention centres. It could also be argued that Breitz let not just the NGV and the Triennial’s Australian artists off the hook, but also the exhibition’s visitors, who applaud her stance because she could be seen to have acted also on their behalf.

The NGV, however, is an easy target for people concerned about Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. Wilson has far bigger contracts. It provides comprehensive security services to Arts South Australia, for example. In Victoria, its government clients include the Department of Human Services and the Department of Treasury and Finance. And of course, Wilson Security is only a subcontractor on Nauru; the human rights abuses occurring there are ultimately the responsibility of the Australian government and of the political parties that have lent bipartisan support to its policies.

But let’s finish by returning to those words of Breitz’s: “What I’ve learnt about Australia so far: You can put a lid on things here… But it’s hard to put a lid on the world.” ●

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There he was, James Oswald Fairfax AC, the one-time heir to a media empire and among Australia’s greatest philanthropists. This was the person who usurped his father to take control of the country’s oldest broadsheet newspapers and who, in turn, was forced out by his half-brother, partly in revenge for the way their father was treated. It’s one of the epic sagas of Australian media history, involving a supposedly scheming wife who raised a son to resent his cousins and half-brother. It reads like the plot for an operatic tragedy, and the events shaped much of Australia’s modern media landscape.

No question; I would profile him.

Before long I was on the phone to his home at Bowral, in country New South Wales. A kindly assistant answered and transferred the call, and a soft voice with a rather exaggerated plumminess came on the line.

“How lovely of you to ring,” said James Fairfax. He had been tipped off by the school and was already committed to an interview. The question was how it was to be done.

“Well, perhaps I could ask you some questions by phone,” I suggested.

“Yes, we could do that,” he replied, unconvinced. “But I would rather like to do this in person… Where are you living nowadays?”

It was as if we were old friends who had lost touch for a year or two.

“I’m in Melbourne,” I replied, assuming that would settle the matter and we could get on with a phone interview.

“Oh, well, I’ll send the car,” he said, in a tone of absolute assurance, like he had solved a simple problem. After all, what was all the fuss about?

“Ah, thank you,” I offered. “But it’s a long way.”

“I would rather like to talk to you in person,” he repeated. “You could come for lunch. You could stay the night if you like.”

Clearly he had something important to say. Either that or he was very keen for someone to chat to. So I asked to be put back to his assistant, who I think sighed just a little as I explained Mr Fairfax’s wishes. Did he do this for everyone, I wondered.

And so – I hereby declare – James Fairfax flew me to Sydney, and there his chauffeur was waiting to drive the one hundred kilometres to Retford Park, his grand, pink Italianate mansion on the edge of the country town.

The grounds had that imposing aspect you hope for when you approach a country estate along a winding driveway through manicured gardens. Only the lake was a little disappointing, more like a stagnant pond than a river of gold. Fairfax later gave the entire $20 million estate to the National Trust, with the adjoining land sold off to ensure the property’s upkeep.

The chauffeur, who spoke of his boss with reverence, called ahead to signal the incoming guest, and so when we arrived he was standing on the verandah with his two perfectly groomed dogs. He was a little stooped in his comfortable slacks and casual shirt. We swapped pleasantries and he beckoned me onto the verandah, where we were served champagne and ate wafers and a selection of pate and cheeses from a tray.

Now, you should probably know that the school in question was Geelong Grammar, which was a sandpit for a remarkable number of future media moguls. James’s father Sir Warwick went there, as did his cousin John B. Fairfax. Kerry Packer was a student, along with members of the Holmes à Court family and Ranald Macdonald, who went on to run the Age. On one of his first days as a boarder at the junior school, James Fairfax was told that “the commo” was waiting outside to see him. So out he went to find yet another future mogul, young Rupert Murdoch, standing on the lawn.

Murdoch was a couple of years ahead of Fairfax, and was known at the time for his left-wing views. It was the first time the heirs to Australia’s two major newspaper companies had met. They would later become intense rivals, but at the time Fairfax appreciated the gesture of welcome. “It was nice of him to do that,” he recalled.

“I am determined to be positive about Geelong Grammar,” James Fairfax wrote in his memoir, My Regards to Broadway. I asked him about that intriguing line and, as a cockatoo screeched in the trees and he poured us another glass, he explained how he had been the subject of “ragging” during his school days. Nowadays it’s better known as bullying. “They took it out on me from time to time. It was mainly verbal but they made things unpleasant.”

“In senior school,” he added, “they had it down to a slightly fine art. I might have appeared reserved. They thought I didn’t like them or want to be close to them. I didn’t think I was all that different to anyone else.”

But it wasn’t all bad. His headmaster deeply influenced him, and one particular art teacher, a postwar eastern European refugee, changed the course of his life by exposing him to 1920s German art. “He taught me to appreciate modern art going into abstract art,” Fairfax said.

By now we had moved inside to the dining room, where lunch was to be served. The dogs followed and lay on the floor. As he poured red wine, we admired a John Olsen painting on the wall and he explained he had “no idea” how many pictures he had donated to galleries across the nation. “Quite a few I’d imagine,” he said.

At least a couple of red wines later, the conversation made its way to the failed takeover bid by James Fairfax’s younger half-brother, Warwick. It’s the topic that’s defined the Fairfax company and family since 1987.

Young Warwick is the son of James’s late father, Sir Warwick, and Sir Warwick’s third wife, Lady Mary. Instead of waiting for his inheritance, Young Warwick launched a reckless, debt-fuelled takeover bid, advised by the discredited Western Australian businessman Laurie Connell. For James and his two cousins, Sir Vincent and John B. Fairfax, this was a complete shock. The bid coincided with the stockmarket crash and the family eventually lost control of the business. It ended James’s career at the company, where he had been a director since the 1950s and chairman since 1977. He sold his shareholding for an estimated $168 million.

So, in the twilight of his life, how did James Fairfax reflect on both the destruction of the dynasty and the people he considered responsible, namely his half-brother Young Warwick and stepmother Lady Mary?

On one level, he seemed quite sanguine and forgiving: “It’s all in the past now. I really stopped thinking about it years ago, not that it kept me awake at night, but what’s done is done and cannot be undone, can it?” But as the lunch meandered on, other feelings emerged, suggesting that those events still hurt a quarter of a century later.

He described the day Young Warwick visited his Darling Point home after lodging his bid with the Sydney Stock Exchange. “He came to see me at Lindsay Avenue and he sat there motionless and [almost] speechless for about forty-five minutes, well it seemed like forty-five minutes, and then he went to cousins John and Vincent and we all fairly briefly rang each other and he pretty well said the same thing to all of us. Vincent was absolutely broken up, poor old boy. And, well, John and I felt the same thing about it and there was nothing to be done because the offer, whatever you do, was put into the Stock Exchange on the Monday morning and then the phones ran hot.”

He went on: “I thought to myself, how ironic. My father used to refer to Young Warwick as ‘the hope of the side’ and, one thing, Warwick said he would not have done it if his father was still alive. Well, that was fairly obvious, one would have to say, and I think it was several years before I really spoke to him again.”

Did he ever wonder, I asked, what might have been for the Fairfax company if Young Warwick hadn’t made his bid?

“I think the family would still be owning it and controlling it. What he did was bugger himself and nearly bugger the company. To what degree his mother was either behind it or knew anything about it, well, your guess is as good as mine. I personally think he would have certainly spoken to her about it because anything to get me out and John out would have been an aim in itself.”

An aim of his or an aim of Mary’s?

“An aim of Mary’s. She could influence him any way she wanted.”

What would Sir Warwick have thought about it?

“It would have depended a little on how successful it had been or wasn’t, and as it was a miserable failure he would have… if he had been involved in it he would have accepted his own responsibility, which was the last thing Mary did of course. But he [Sir Warwick] was honest and he would have accepted, I think, that he had made a few misjudgements. I think he would have been absolutely horrified.”

Does Warwick now reflect on it and talk about it?

“Oh well, he’ll talk about it up to a point and do his best to get out of any awkward questions, but at my age I frankly don’t care anymore.”

And have you and Warwick reconciled?

“I never see him. It’s that simple. We’re polite to each other when we do. There’s no point, when everything is over, in bearing old grudges. Well, what’s the point of not speaking to him? Absolutely none. Not that he has ever apologised in a sense, but still, what’s over is over, and we’re never going to be buddies. But I say hello to him. I don’t see him particularly. If he rang me up, I’d answer the telephone.”

Would an apology for the disastrous bid be appropriate?

“Well, again, if his mother let him, which she never would, his own inclination probably would be. But I’m not going to sit here for five years waiting for an apology because I’m not going to get one.”

After a short pause, and with perfect elocution, he continued, “And I don’t give a fuck, quite frankly.” The distinct articulation of give-a-fuck was a little shocking. He was clearly done with this topic. “I’m not going to let it worry me and I’ve long ceased to let it worry me,” he concluded.

On that day in Bowral I saw one of the last vestiges of the power and privilege associated with Australia’s establishment media. James Fairfax was one of the last great patrician proprietors. While he was unashamedly conservative in outlook, he also valued and upheld the traditions of free speech and pluralism. He respected the craft of journalism and, as chairman of the family company, generally allowed it to prosper.

But I suspect that he and his cousins were saved from the inevitable. I suspect they would have been just as ill-prepared for the digital revolution that was about to sweep across the business. Instead, James Fairfax excelled at a life of splendid retirement, surrounded by the trappings of the wealth that he became so very good at giving away.

To end the interview, I thanked him for his hospitality and asked whether there was anything he wanted to add. My recording of that conversation cuts out with these words: “Great pleasure. Now, I tell you what, if you give me a tiny bit more wine I’ll endeavour to think of something…” Sound of wine being poured. “Thank you, that’s fine. Now, where were we…?” •

The post “Now, where were we…?” appeared first on Inside Story.

She had been asked by a curator to explain the ideas behind her first film, titled Imbalance. She had made it the year before on a borrowed DVD recorder, casting her classmates at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in a study of “restless adolescence.” In a competition in Hong Kong it had caught the attention of curator Hou Hanru, who chose it for a photography festival in Madrid.

Hou was attracted by Cao Fei’s filmmaking flair, the skewwhiff camera angles and tracking shots. But what struck me when I saw Imbalance years later was how free her classmates seemed to be, despite their adolescent angst, how mockingly they faced the world. The whole thing read like an advertisement for the pleasures of “spiritual pollution.” All the things that had agitated the Communist Party’s Old Guard back in 1983, all the toxins they had sought to expel from China – “pornography,” drugs, gambling – were there, and not even as the main point of the film, but just as part of the background of these college kids’ lives.

They were enjoying the luxury of adolescence – an indulgence that was still new to China – in a city that was booming and open to the world. Guangzhou was the capital of Guangdong province, which by the year 2000 was producing 42 per cent of China’s exports and attracting the majority of the country’s foreign investment. Workers were flocking to the factories of the Pearl River delta, and by the turn of the century Guangdong province was home to a third of the 144 million workers who had left their villages in search of a new life.

The south was being transformed socially and physically, and this was the subject of Cao Fei’s next project. Through the 1990s she watched as her home town grew, rolling out into the countryside, turning fields into factories, farms into condos. As Guangzhou expanded it began to swallow entire villages whole. The farmers would lose their fields but keep their houses. Robbed of their old livelihood, they built tenements on top of their homes and set up as landlords, offering cheap accommodation to the floating population of workers who had left other farms around China to find work in the city.

Villages that had once been home to three or four thousand people now housed ten times that number in these strange pockets within the city. Slipping down an alley off a main street you could find 130 such urban villages in Guangzhou, with the tenements crowded in so tightly that sunlight reached the ground only in shafts, and the old village life continued side by side with a whole new service economy for immigrants. Long-distance phone offices sat side by side with nail bars, dumpling shops and workshops that restored discarded white goods for sale. The landless farmers planted vegetable crops and raised chickens on their roofs. On feast days, traditional dragon dancers squeezed their way through the narrow alleyways. One of these villages – a place called Sanyuanli – became the subject of Cao Fei’s first major documentary film (produced in association with her then boyfriend, the artist and writer Ou Ning) in 2003.

Cao Fei saw the face of her home town transformed. She was gripped by cities, and in the new century she returned to urban landscapes again and again, creating whole fantasy cities on video, in animation and on the internet, while taking her camera out to explore real cities in her documentaries. In all of these she was working out how people live in these urban spaces, and while living there how they could still find a way to dream.

By the turn of the century, with more than 10 per cent of China’s population on the move, many itinerants found themselves working in appalling conditions. Exploitation was rife in the factories and much of the alternative urban work was dirty or dangerous. And yet those who came still believed they had made the right decision by leaving home.

Despite booming profits, non-payment and underpayment of wages was rife, as were inhuman hours of work. Research by the Communist Party Youth League found the majority of factory workers in Guangdong worked twelve to fourteen hours per day with rarely a day off. Conditions were particularly severe in the garment industry, where pressure to fill orders pushed conditions to new extremes. A new word, guolaosi (“overwork death”), entered the language to describe cases where workers dropped dead of exhaustion. The Chinese press reported twelve or more cases per year of guolaosi in the early years of this century, while deaths due to industrial accidents were reported to be occurring at a rate of one every four days in Shenzhen during 1998. Incidents of serious injury were also common, with Amnesty International counting more than 12,000 such accidents in that same year in Shenzhen.

Cao Fei’s Cosplayers – A Mirage. C-print, 2004/Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space

The special economic zone of Shenzhen was in the vanguard of China’s transformation into a manufacturing superpower, its GDP growing by more than 30 per cent a year on average throughout the 1980s and ’90s. In the ’90s, Shenzhen would also become a pioneer in labour activism, as workers there tried to enforce the rights that were laid down for them in China’s national labour legislation. These laws, which prescribed conditions such as maximum hours and minimum pay rates, were routinely ignored by employers, but in the ’90s there was an increasing number of cases where workers would, often after Kafkaesque manoeuvrings through the system, achieve limited redress.

Some industrial actions began in almost comical circumstances, as in the case of an export textile factory recounted by the sociologist Ching Kwan Lee in her brilliant study of labour activism in China, Against the Law. In this instance the workers were made aware of their rights when their bosses set out to drill them on the correct answers to give to a visiting inspection team from the factory’s American customers. This was how they learnt of their entitlement to five-day work weeks, eight-hour days, Sundays off and limits on overtime – all entirely absent in their workplace.

China’s Labour Law was enacted in 1994 but, like many other laws passed in the country since the beginning of reform, lofty ideals were not matched with the means (or often the will) to enforce them. Workers’ frustrations over the inability to get what was legally theirs made Shenzhen infamous throughout the country as the worst city in China for labour disputes. By the turn of the century, even conservative estimates suggested that there were hundreds of large-scale protests or strikes breaking out annually in Shenzhen.

Yet, despite the harshness of life in the cities, workers continued to leave the countryside in droves to try their luck. It is the dreams of these workers that have driven the urbanisation of China, turning a country in which 70 per cent of people once lived on the land to one in which more than half live in cities.

The notion of success in the city persisted because most of those who came, despite all the difficulties they faced, did end up better off. Most earned more than they would ever have been able to make at home. This was money that could be remitted to their families or used to fund vocational study or investment in a small business. Then there was the intangible, but exhilarating, gain that they made – a sense of control over their own destiny.

Cao Fei’s father recruited many of these rural itinerants to work with him on the massive sculptures which he was now being commissioned to create. Cao Fei spent hours hanging out with them, listening to the stories of their floating lives. The workers told her how they would fake their identity cards, lowering their age over and over again, as the young always found it easiest to find work. She was fascinated by their stories and curious about their dreams, which she put at the centre of her art when she made the documentary Whose Utopia?

She spent six months in a Guangdong lighting factory charting both the minutiae of the work and the fantasy lives of the employees. In Whose Utopia? the workers pirouette in tutus among the machines, play electric guitar, sweep through store rooms in evening dress, and dance like Gene Kelly across the shop floor. Young workers look out dreamily over the rooftops of the city and don T-shirts with the slogan “My future is not a dream.” For Cao Fei the message of her film was clear: even when life is difficult or boring for people, their dreams can give them some power.

But when Whose Utopia? was released, audiences saw it as a commentary on the cruelty of capitalism, the fantasy elements inserted to highlight the workers’ wretchedness. She was hoping that they would see something more complex. When she talked to the workers, she discovered that rather than feeling exploited, they felt lucky to have escaped poverty in the countryside for a job where they could help their families and themselves. Cao Fei was wry when she told me this, pointing out that it was important to not just see issues from a “correct line perspective.”

Despite my natural cynicism as a journalist, I knew immediately what she meant: I had been there myself. In 1996 I had teamed up with ABC TV’s new China correspondent, Jane Hutcheon, to tell the story of China’s floating population. We had decided to look at it through the eyes of a young rag-picker from Anhui who we had found living on the fringes of Beijing. He had sunk all his resources into a pedal cart on which he scoured the city collecting cardboard, plastic bottles, cans and every other kind of rubbish that could be turned into cash, selling it on for tiny sums to professional recyclers one rung up the economic ladder from him.

Yet he was managing to house and feed his wife and child on the money he was making, as well as sending some funds home to his parents and saving a little, too. When we travelled back with him at Chinese New Year to his home in a hardscrabble village in the heartland of Anhui, we saw him greeted like a hero and glowing with happiness at his parents’ evident pride. We saw the benefits his remittances had brought – in the quality of the food his parents ate, and in the improvements to their house. Nearby we saw the local version of a mansion being built. It was owned by a man known as “Mr Shanghai,” named after the city in which he had made his fortune. In this village everyone but the old or the very young had either left for the cities or were planning to do so. It was hard to deny the power of the urban dream. •

This is an edited extract from The Phoenix Years by , published this month by Allen & Unwin.

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Who would dare? Xi’s speech has been likened to Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” of 1942, in which Mao demanded that art serve the Party and the people and help vanquish the enemy. Xi did the same, extolling the Stalinist idea that writers are engineers of human souls; but he also talked about market influences, popular culture and other contemporary phenomena. He called for Chinese artists to create “socialist culture and art” that is “artistically outstanding and morally inspiring,” and stressed that art must serve “correct” views of history, nationality and culture. It must feature, he said, “positive energy.”

At the forum, Xi praised two young bloggers – Zhou Xiaoping (over eleven million views) and Hua Qianfang (over 87,000 fans on Weibo) – for their “positive energy.” Among Zhou’s writings is a blog post from June 2013 called “Please Don’t Be Unworthy of This Age.” A paragraph towards the end of the piece gives some idea of what “positive energy” means:

I, Zhou Xiaoping, do not deny that China has corrupt officials, prison guards, bad people, bullies and crazy people. In the same way I wouldn’t deny that a beautiful woman has thickened skin on the soles of her feet, snot, bowel movements, bacteria or germs, inflammation of the mouth, swollen lymph glands, or pancreatic juices (what’s more, these things make up no small proportion). But when I see a beautiful woman I still feel delight in my heart and eyes, and I still hope that I can hold her in my arms. If at the moment, you are standing to one side nattering on, saying: “You’ve been brainwashed, this beautiful woman is made of the skin on her feet, snot, bowel movements, germs and viruses, inflammation of the mouth, pancreatic juices, intestines, organs and lymph, it’s extremely disgusting, hurry and wake up.” I honestly don’t know whether I’m blind or you’re mad. If you don’t do anything but natter, at most I’ll just smile. But if one day, someone makes a move to eliminate this “harmful beauty,” I will certainly not stand idly by. The reason is very simple: if I failed to act, would I be a man? A man’s greatest virtue is that of guarding and protecting.

Zhao Benshan was only one of a number of major state-supported artists, including the veteran painter Fan Zeng, who lavished praise on Xi’s speech – much as state-supported artists have done since 1942, whether out of genuine enthusiasm or simply because they are mindful of the price of opposition. (The writer Wang Shiwei, the first to pay the ultimate price for dissent, was expelled from the Party in 1942 and beheaded in 1947.)

Xi has expressed specific as well as general views on the arts. He has revealed, for instance, that he hates the “weird” architecture that has come to define China’s modernising cities. Weird architecture presumably includes the work of figures like Zaha Hadid and Ma Yansong (of MAD Architects) as well as numerous high-concept, low-value knockoffs and buildings designed to look like lotuses, teapots, coins and even a piano and violin. “No more,” said Xi. It’s uncertain what this diktat will mean in practice for projects already contracted or under way – or what the speech as a whole will mean for art, literature and film that is already out there but doesn’t sing along with what the Chinese media and propaganda arms have long promoted as “main melody” art.

After all, China has been home since the 1980s to a flourishing counterculture of independent visual artists, film-makers and writers who support themselves outside the state system or use it cannily to pursue their careers. Many other artists who work within the system (in the sense that they must pass the censors) have nonetheless managed to make boundary-pushing works. Take, for example, the directorial debut of rock star Cui Jian, whose songs have been banned and unbanned over nearly thirty years. Blue Sky Bones, which deals with the Cultural Revolution, sexuality (including homosexuality) and a corrupt media, screened nationally in Chinese theatres from October 2014.

Or take Chen Qiufan’s first novel, The Waste Tide, which describes a dystopian near-future where, on an island built with e-waste off the Chinese coast, migrant workers battle capitalist elites and powerful local forces for control. The novel won Best Novel at China’s Nebula Awards in October 2013 and the Huadi Best Work of Science Fiction Award, sponsored by Guangzhou’s Yangcheng Evening News, in March 2014. The Waste Tide “paints China as a conflicted nation,” according to the Women of China website, “powerful enough to convince other countries to accept its ideologies, but not strong enough to pull its population out of poverty.”

Chen, who was born in 1981, obliquely addressed the question of Shared Destiny when he wrote that his generation encompasses Foxconn factory workers, princelings “who treat luxury as their birthright,” entrepreneurs pursuing dreams of wealth, and college graduates who must “compete ruthlessly for a single clerical position.” Yet, Chen observes, the Party persists in speaking as though the “People” all share a monolithic Chinese Dream. “Between the feeling of individual failure and the conspicuous display of national prosperity,” Chen writes, “lies an unbridgeable chasm.”

How the party-state will address political heresy in the domestic cultural sphere – including among “globalised” artists and writers and in imported popular culture – will become clear in the coming year. In the Mao era, and through much of the Deng era, the authorities accused creative artists whose work offended them of “counter-revolution,” “spiritual pollution,” “bourgeois liberalism” and other ideological crimes. In more recent times, the party-state has preferred criminal to political charges. These have the potential to smear artists’ reputations, especially within China itself, punish them financially through fines and tie them up in legal cases they can’t win.

When authorities detained the artist-activist Ai Weiwei from 2011, for instance, they charged him with tax evasion and put him under continuing surveillance. After the Australian-Chinese artist Guo Jian created a diorama of Tiananmen Square smothered in rotting meat to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the violent suppression of the 1989 protest movement, the authorities detained and then deported him on charges of visa fraud.

The consequences are generally more severe for artists with less clout. In November 2014, for example, the independent film-maker Shen Yongping, who had produced an eight-episode internet documentary about China’s constitutional governance (posted in April or May 2014 through Weibo), faced trial. During the filming, police had warned him that if he went ahead he would go to prison. What they have charged him with, however, is engaging in “illegal business activity.” (This came during the last week of October, when state media was singing the praises of the Fourth Plenum under Xi Jinping, with its stated focus on rule of law and constitutionalism.)

There is also a third way: in October, police detained thirteen artists in the Beijing “artists’ village” of Songzhuang on charges of “creating trouble.” All had indicated support on social media for the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong or were planning to attend a poetry reading in solidarity with the protests. (Human rights monitors have reported the arrest of dozens of mainland citizens who have indicated support for the Hong Kong protesters.) Reports in the foreign press at the end of October indicated that police were swarming through the once-relaxed village and many artists had closed their studios to outsiders.

The artists, for their part, can accept the Party’s leadership and reflect Xi’s guidance in the kind of art they produce. Or they can make the sort of art they consider meaningful and risk the consequences. Or they can attempt to hit “graze-edge balls,” named for a play in ping-pong in which the ball grazes the edge of the table – technically still “in” or legal and yet almost impossible to counter.

Or, if they have the means, they can send their art overseas. Chen Qiufan published the essay from which the earlier quotation was taken, translated by his fellow science fiction writer Ken Liu, on the science fiction and fantasy website Tor.com in May 2014. Writers Murong Xuecun, Yu Hua and Yan Lianke (a finalist in the 2013 Man Booker International Prize and, the following year, the first Chinese writer to win the Franz Kafka Prize) are among those who have increasingly turned to websites, journals and newspapers including the New York Times to publish essays that can’t appear at home.

Working remotely, Ai Weiwei created a giant, site-specific installation for the infamous former island penitentiary of Alcatraz, in San Francisco Bay. It includes a colourful dragon with Twitter-bird eyes, 175 Lego representations of prisoners of conscience from around the world and a dozen gleaming steel stools individually installed in one of the cells in Cell Block A. Into the cell are played songs and speeches of protest, including Martin Luther King’s 1967 anti–Vietnam War speech, music by the imprisoned Tibetan singer Lolo, and Hopi chants representing the Native Americans incarcerated in the nineteenth century for resisting assimilation.

Guo Jian, meanwhile, went to New York in the second half of 2014 to collaborate with the American artist and Iraq war veteran Marcus Eriksen on an anti-war multimedia installation called Surrender. They asked people all over the world, especially soldiers in uniform, to send photographs of themselves with their hands up in surrender. Like Ai Weiwei’s Alcatraz work, it was a rather different vision of Shared Destiny from that of Big Daddy Xi. •

This extract is from the China Story Yearbook 2014: Shared Destiny, which will be launched by Andrew Leigh MP at Parliament House, Canberra on 24 November, 6–7 pm.

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I had most recently visited the region towards the end of the dry season in October last year. The contrast was marked. Then, all the bush roads were passable and people were mainly gathered at two outstation communities: over a hundred at Yikarrakkal for a three-week funeral, and another group at Marrkolidjban for a Kunabibi, a regional ritual ceremony that had been running for two months and would reach its finale on the night of the November full moon. Three months later, the monsoonal wet had cut the Kuninjku off from their outstations, a patchwork of tiny hamlets on their ancestral lands in western Arnhem Land.

It was not just the weather that had changed; so, once again, had the volatile Indigenous policy landscape. In December 2014 the federal Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, announced that all able-bodied unemployed Aboriginal people aged between eighteen and forty-nine would be required to work for their welfare five hours a day, five days a week, twelve months of the year.

The Maningrida region, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory.

Minister Scullion has since confirmed that there are insufficient jobs in remote Australia to meet the scheme’s goals, so people will be forced into “work-like activities.” As long as jobseekers are taking part in twenty-five hours of meaningful community activity each week, perpetual work-for-the-dole was not a negative outcome, according to the minister.

The minister also got into a spot of bother for his description of living conditions in some communities. “Many of my communities live on the floor, it is like a cave,” he said. “I think that one of the characteristics of civilisation must be that you don’t have to eat at the same level as your animals, it must be something like that. I feel very strongly that we should try and provide furniture.”

During an intense week, Murray and I recorded interviews with a number of Kuninjku, mainly people with whom I had worked since I had lived with them at an outstation called Mumeka in 1979 and 1980 as a young doctoral student. We often found ourselves sitting on the ground as we talked, because being connected to the ground is often a preferred disposition in these lands.

Most of what I write here draws from these interviews, carefully translated by Murray Garde into English, and I will highlight the views of one man, John Mawurndjul, for a number of reasons. John is a senior figure in his community; we have collaborated closely for thirty-six years; and he has a life story that covers a series of policy phases, from the pre-colonial past, before Maningrida was established, to what might be called the neo-colonial present. I will not explicitly identify other interlocutors to protect them from any possible retribution, referring to them instead by their subsection names, the terms that establish relationships between all Kuninjku.

John – or Balang, the subsection name by which he is generally addressed – was born in the bush in 1952, and lived there as a child when his family were self-sufficient hunter-gatherers. In 1963 he was among the last group who moved to Maningrida, in his case for treatment of the early signs of leprosy at the government settlement of Maningrida established in 1957. He led a precarious life at the settlement, and recalls sickness and hunger as a child. In 1972, following his father, Kalumba, he returned to Mumeka outstation as part of the decentralisation movement associated with that period of decolonisation. Over the past five years he has increasingly lived between Maningrida and his own outstation, Milmilngkan, which he established in the early 1990s. He and his family often get stuck in Maningrida without any transport.

Balang is an especially interesting interlocutor because, among the Kuninjku, it is he who has undergone the most dramatic transformation over the years, from hunter-gatherer to internationally renowned artist. His bark paintings of his totemic sites are the subject of several books in several languages, including Claus Volkenandt and Christian Kaufmann’s Between Indigenous Australia and Europe: John Mawurndjul. He has won a series of Australian art awards, and in 2005 he was the subject of a major retrospective, Rarrk – John Mawurndjul, at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland and then at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany. In 2006, he was heavily involved, on site, in Australia’s contribution to the decoration of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. In 2009 he was the first Indigenous artist to win the Melbourne Art Foundation’s Artist of the Year award, and not long after that he was inducted as a member of the Order of Australia “for service to the preservation of Indigenous culture as the foremost exponent of the Rarrk [cross-hatching] visual art style.”

John Mawurndjul at the Musée du Quai Branly in 2006. Ianna Andreadis

Balang was at his peak, living entirely and comfortably on his art earnings. Is this what it means to live the good life? If it was, it didn’t last. His fortunes began to decline. The global financial crisis affected sales of his artworks and his agent, Maningrida Arts and Culture, went into fiscal freefall; in 2012, he stopped painting. He had lost his livelihood and, at the age of sixty, had moved onto welfare.

When I asked Balang what constitutes “the good life” for Kuninjku people in February 2015, when he was seasonally marooned in Maningrida, he replied as follows:

Being able to go to your country and being able to live here too, that’s the good life. Sometimes going bush, sometimes living here. The main thing is to have enough food. When you have enough food to eat, that’s good. I don’t change my thinking, and I think about my grandparents and their country. What makes me happy is when I go back to my home out bush and I can go out hunting and I can live like the old people from olden times. That makes me happy, when I’m in my camp. I can paint, I can drink tea and walk around my camp and the sun goes down. Good, happy.

In Maningrida, sometimes happy, sometimes not. I only think about my country. I get sad when I think about my home out bush and I can’t get out there. This place here is for white people, but it does give us access to food [from the shops] and to health services at the clinic. We can go bush but the problem is when we get sick or when we have no food out there. So it pushes us to come and live here to get food and health services, but we still want to live out bush. It’s a contradiction that frustrates us!

When people are themselves, free to be Bininj [Aboriginal] they are happy happy! When they come to Maningrida to live they become like Balanda [white people]. “Hey you blackfella, you’ve got everything you need in Maningrida, come in here and live here.” But we’ve got our own country, our outstations too. So I’m still pulled between the two… It all depends on trucks and transport. I’m worrying too much about transport.

Balang’s frustration contrasts with what so many Australian governments have seen as constituting the good life for Aboriginal people in remote communities. Tony Abbott, for instance, who anointed himself as “the prime minister for Indigenous affairs” after he took office, attracted considerable opprobrium recently when he supported a WA government decision to defund 150 small communities. “What we cannot do is endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices,” he said, using a phrase that generated enormous controversy, “if those lifestyle choices are not conducive to the kind of full participation in Australian society that everyone should have.”

The government now proposes to “develop the north” and simultaneously develop remote-living Aboriginal people. The rhetoric is not new – the federal government made similar commitments that failed when it administered remote Arnhem Land fifty years ago. People like Balang experienced at first hand the failure of those policies, as well as the intense political conflict with other Aboriginal groups and the structural violence under the trusteeship of the colonial state. As soon as they could, Kuninjku people escaped this “total institution” and went bush.

The challenge to deliver development and citizenship services to remote Australia is enormous and should not be understated. But it is a gross oversimplification to base policy on the hope that if you just get the kids to school and the adults into some imagined mainstream employment, development will automatically follow.

The size of the challenge can be appreciated if we scale up from the Maningrida region to Indigenous lands Australia-wide. These now cover over two million square kilometres, and they are dotted with what the Australian Bureau of Statistics terms “discrete Indigenous communities.” Those communities include townships like Maningrida, which add up to about 200 places on Indigenous titled lands, and nearly 1000 small places like Mumeka, with an average of about twenty residents each.

Developing these communities in accord with market logic is replete with contradictions. Extreme remoteness, small size, poor communications infrastructure, a lack of commercial land value, poor soils – these are among the reasons why Aboriginal people were able to get these lands back under land rights and native title laws. They were unwanted and “uninvaded” lands, and they generally still are – except for their mineral extraction potential, which rarely benefits land owners because they lack property rights in these valuable resources.

For Kuninjku people today, “the good life” seems invariably to lie in the past, a past that generally goes back to 1972 and is but a dim memory for many younger people born since. Back then, the now-revered old people led them back to the outstations and revived their hunting way of life, supplemented by welfare and meagre arts earnings.

Over the next thirty-five years this hybrid economy creatively combined the customary, government and market sectors. But it remained dominated by a domestic moral economy, underpinned by kinship relations, in what might be thought of as a relational ontology.

During this time, as they highlight, Kuninjku people were assisted by their own community-based outstations resource organisation, the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation in Maningrida, and by Balandas, the white people who were employed, who cared about them and supported their aspirations.

And so Kuninjku people were able to engage with market capitalism on their own terms through their art, mediated by Maningrida Arts and Culture, a business arm of Bawinanga. Bawinanga also engaged with government on their behalf to have welfare payments delivered to outstation residents as a basic income through the Community Development Employment Projects scheme, or CDEP. And so, using these funds and the dollars they earned from art Kuninjku were able to buy vehicles and guns to ramp up their hunting, and to divide their time increasingly between Maningrida, where a few worked, and the outstations. Their interlinked hybrid economy and lifestyle mixed Balanda and Bininj (or Aboriginal) ways to accord with their aspirations.

This hybrid economy started spiralling downwards rapidly after 2007, first with the Northern Territory Intervention and associated policy changes, including the abolition of CDEP, and then with the global financial crisis, which saw returns from sales paid to Kuninjku artists plummet by 80 per cent. Bawinanga was effectively disempowered and depoliticised partly as a consequence of a political battle with the Australian government, partly because it lost the relative autonomy afforded by CDEP.

Once a strength, the articulations between the three sectors of the hybrid economy became a weakness. The arts engagement with the market economy crashed, the mediated relations with government became strained, and Bawinanga, under new management, adopted the developmental rhetoric of successive Australian governments and expanded its commercial operations to such an extent that it became insolvent. Hunting declined alongside reduced access to vehicles and guns, mainly owing to new and excessive police surveillance. And the means of production and sources of subsistence were eroded, with feral animals and dangerous estuarine crocodiles taking over the most productive hunting grounds.

My Kuninjku interlocutors see all this very clearly: they lament the fact that today they barely have enough welfare income to purchase expensive store-sourced food, and are increasingly stuck in town and unsupported when they do spend time at outstations. Colin Barnett and Tony Abbott might deplore the high cost of delivering services to remote outstations, but in the lived reality of Kuninjku people such services are not being delivered.

Kuninjku people see that government policy has changed and so has their Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation. As another man, Bulanj, put it “why the government rules changed… and why the government came and made Bawinanga do what the government wanted and then they didn’t want to work with us anymore. They got tired of us Bininj. They weren’t interested in us anymore?.”

People are feeling acutely what anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli has termed “the economies of abandonment.” They are deeply concerned about the new generation, which is stuck in Maningrida developing a taste for Western foods and perceived by the older generation, as another Kuninjku man, Bangardi, said, “to lack the confidence to live on country.” They feel the contrast with a time when “the old people had the true power to be self-sufficient.”

What worries people most is the constant pressure for the new generation to move to Maningrida, transform into Balandas, and forgo Kuninjku ways. As Balang said, “the government wants us to stay here in Maningrida. They want us to come and live in houses here. They make the houses here to attract us.”

Kuninjku people are pushing back in two interlinked ways: by maintaining a moral code of sharing with family; and by escalating their participation in a rapidly transforming and hybridised ceremonial life. These are big topics that I cannot address in detail here. But on sharing, let’s just say that people continue to participate in such practices mainly with their kin and they value such activity highly. Especially in ceremonial contexts, they are forms of behaviour that are regarded as demonstrating the very best of Kuninjku norms.

Ceremony in turn has changed. Old rituals like Kunabibi, used to discipline initiates through months of seclusion in bush camps, remain, but new ceremonies have emerged, including Yiwarrudj or Christian fellowship. Funerals increasingly mix Kuninjku song cycles with English gospel, largely replacing earlier mortuary ceremonies.

All of these ceremonies constitute work for Kuninjku people, and such work is inseparable from sociality: work at ceremonies as one performs song and dance; work organising and managing ceremonies; and work garnering resources by soliciting anywhere and anyone for assistance to sustain people at ceremonies; and work as ceremony-linked hunting opportunities arise.

Conversely, ceremony provides an opportunity to escape surveillance and training and work supervision, as long as employers or local Centrelink officials can be persuaded that this is all legitimate cultural practice according to government guidelines.

Ceremonies also have a strong integrative function, linking the Kuninjku community with other regional groups to celebrate tradition and to mourn and bury the dead with proper decorum on country. And ceremony allows the Kuninjku to assert their difference and make strong public statements about their exclusive country; increasingly, signs are posted on access roads warning that ceremony is in progress and that any trespassing will not be tolerated.

Yiwarrudj, or Christian fellowship, is especially important in bringing young and old together to dance in front of ghetto blasters for hours on end: these are important ceremonies of hope. Fundamentalism is creeping in too; as another young man, Gela, told us, “Jesus is coming back and will take the Christians up to the sky and the non-believers will be left behind.” Many Kuninjku traditionalists worry about the emerging tensions between new Christian fellowship and their custom.

Beyond praying to Jesus, what hope is there for a revival of the good life that all our interlocutors saw as increasingly a feature of the past?

At the national political level, there has been an unexpected backlash against Tony Abbott’s “lifestyle” comment and his support for the closure of small communities. Even his chief Indigenous adviser, Warren Mundine, referred to the prime minister’s “foot in mouth disease” in the national media.

The proposed closures have attracted a storm of protest both nationally and internationally, including at the United Nations. The prime minister’s comment unintentionally opened up public awareness and heightened debate in mainstream print and social media. What do people do out there at outstations? Are they really more costly than other Australians? Isn’t habitation of remote Australia in the national interest? What are the alternatives and their costs? Aren’t there strong social justice grounds to allow people to reside on their lands claimed under Australian law? And can’t super-rich Australia afford to support 20,000 people living on their ancestral country?

When I asked another Bulanj man about the future, he responded in this way:

When we talk to each other, we say that we want to teach the young people about the country out bush, but there are too many crocodiles to take them. [A Kuninjku child had recently been killed in a crocodile attack.] And then they say there’s no food or the kids get sick. But when we lived out there with the old people, we were fine. We want to explain the country to the young people. All the children need to learn about those places, otherwise there’s a disconnection.

As Murray Garde and I left Maningrida in February we got a sense of just how draconian government intervention today can be. On our plane were two social workers taking two Kuninjku kids back to Darwin to their Fijian foster parents. The authorities have separated them from their parents, both of whom I had first known as toddlers, because the children had been medically assessed as “failing to thrive” two years ago. Surely more creative means could be found to address such a problem within the community? Their six-year-old son Narritj has already lost his Kuninjku language and struggled to communicate with his parents. For the Kuninjku there was deep shame in this separation; this is a most devastating deployment of state power for ongoing child removal.

On the next day we visited “the Fifteen Mile,” a long-established Darwin town camp which, according to a sign on the main road, has no official name. Here a group of Kuninjku had rented a decrepit shelter, number 5, from Territory Housing. About thirty Kuninjku people were there providing moral support to two family members, Wamud and Bulanj, who were in Darwin for dialysis treatment for kidney failure; some family were visiting with the additional aim of gaining access to alcohol.

Here, on the outskirts of Darwin, the Kuninjku moral economy and relationality were alive and well. People were collecting bush foods in the nearby suburbs and producing art for sale. Families were cohabiting as if at an outstation, sharing everything. One of the sick, a skilled young artist Wamud, a protégé of Balang’s, was busy painting his country, some 500 kilometres away, on bark to sell in Darwin.

And finally back to Balang himself. During our visit I raised the sensitive issue of his arts practice, which was again getting some profile in the secondary market. A 2002 bark painting, Mardayin Design at Kukodbebuldi, had recently sold for a record $120,000; under the resale royalty scheme he received none of that amount because this was the painting’s first sale since the scheme was established in 2010. But he agreed to return to Sydney to attend exhibitions of his works at the Museum of Contemporary Art and at a major commercial gallery. At the age of sixty-three, Balang is seriously contemplating reviving his arts practice. Even if his career doesn’t return to its former glory, he will be recognised as a nationally significant artist rather than being labelled a member of the undeserving poor.

And it just so happened, two months later, that Balang’s new exhibition, Rarrk Masters, was a sell-out success; he might even earn enough from a share of sales to purchase a second-hand vehicle to get him back to his outstation at Milmilngkan.

Occasional wins aside, though, circumstances have moved heavily against the Kuninjku community in the past decade after they had moulded, with the assistance of those who shared their aspirations, a vibrant hybrid economy following the dark days of the colonial era.

American critical theorist Nancy Fraser has developed a tripartite schema for gauging social justice, based on recognition, redistribution and representation. Today, the struggle by Kuninjku people for recognition of difference, redistribution of meagre financial resources, and representation of their views by a strong community-based organisation appear defeated. Instead, unsympathetic Australian governments, one after the other, have imposed a program of “improvement” that is disconnected from their realities and aspirations and that is undermining both their livelihoods and their ways of living. For Kuninjku people, the good life seems more precarious today than it has since the colonial era some forty years ago. •

The post Living the good life in precarious times appeared first on Inside Story.

In the mid 1930s, Pastor Friedrich Albrecht at Hermannsburg mission introduced Battarbee to Albert Namatjira, whom he invited on a painting expedition to Palm Valley. Namatjira had already revealed his talent by burning designs on artefacts and producing several watercolours, including an imitation of a Battarbee landscape hanging in Albrecht’s office. During their trip, the first in a series of collaborative artistic ventures, Battarbee taught Namatjira watercolour techniques. Theirs was far from a conventional master–pupil relationship, for Namatjira “reciprocated with a knowledge of country that ran the gamut from simple foods to complex story-telling.”

Namatjira was a quick, even virtuosic, student. His first one-man show, in Melbourne in 1938, sold out in three days; reproductions of his watercolour landscapes, which became synonymous with the Australian interior, would eventually hang in households across the nation. Although Battarbee was also reasonably successful by the standards of the thirties, his life, work and art are now less remembered outside central Australia.

Martin Edmond’s dual biography, Battarbee and Namatjira, re-centres Battarbee’s story and contribution in the better-known narrative of Namatjira and the emergence of Aboriginal art movements in central Australia. He shows how Battarbee was particularly influential in the development of the Hermannsburg Art School, teaching young Aboriginal men painterly techniques, acting as an agent and dealer for the Namatjira Arts Committee and staying on to keep the Hermannsburg mission open after the Lutheran missionaries were accused of having Nazi affiliations. Later, he proposed an Aranda Arts Council, which he chaired himself, after it was set up in Alice Springs, to make sure it didn’t fall under the control of the mission or the Native Affairs department.

Edmond revisits the question of whether Namatjira’s renown was built on the novelty of an Aboriginal man painting successfully within Western traditions and forms during a period marked by a “vogue for the primitive.” To use John Reed’s words, was his art “only the clever aping of an alien art form”? Battarbee, who worried that his influence meant that Namatjira’s work and techniques too closely mimicked his own, went on to encourage other Aboriginal artists to develop their own style.

Using previously unpublished material from Battarbee’s diaries, Edmond explores what each man brought to their artistic partnership (although he doesn’t elaborate on the skills and techniques Namatjira may have brought from his own culture). Battarbee said that he taught Namatjira how to “analyse the landscape” and to “see colour in a way that was sound and true,” in the process enhancing his own artistic rationale and technique: “I felt the need to work out a new way and to achieve luminosity.” Central to his approach was the use of techniques developed by John Ruskin and other nineteenth-century watercolourists, including the layering of pigment to intensify colour and bring out “the essence beyond appearances.”

Although Namatjira learned “to see differently,” Edmond suggests that this way of looking did not replace “but augmented” how he already saw. As a result, Namatjira’s work expressed Arrernte perceptions of landscape and cosmology through the medium of watercolour. “Namatjira painting,” Edmond writes, “can be representational of a landscape, an actual simulacrum of it and also embody equivocal presences that resemble – and perhaps are – totemic beings who are neither representation nor simulacra but partake of the essence.”

Battarbee and Namatjira’s other achievement is to portray an unconventional cross-cultural friendship. It takes up the challenge of negotiating how two lives intersect without the formal constraints of marriage, for example, and managing the weight and influence of each subject’s trajectory on the other.

For much of the book, Battarbee is an unobtrusive, self-effacing figure, the leading support actor to Namatjira’s tragic protagonist. Both were quiet, reticent men: Edmond describes Battarbee as “an even-tempered, even-handed man,” while Namatjira was “a highly emotional and extremely sensitive man who must, because of his circumstances, keep what he feels hidden most of the time.” The book’s early chapters face the particular difficulty of trying to relate two quite different lives in separate reaches of the continent, which perhaps makes the friendship all the more interesting and unusual. Edmond suggests that the “lockstep” arose from the fact that both had spent a period in exile from their society: Battarbee during his wartime experience and years in hospital, and Namatjira after marrying a bride “wrong way,” both culturally and as far as the missionaries were concerned, and then leaving Hermannsburg for some years.

For me, the narrative gains traction with the men’s initial meeting and the development of their partnership, after which events in Namatjira’s life take on the painful momentum of tragedy. Edmond’s depiction of their friendship has resonances with anthropologist Peter Sutton’s notion, in his book The Politics of Suffering (2009), of “unusual couples” or negotiated relationships that are marked less by the pairing of “representatives of coloniser and colonised, male and female, or black and white” than by “individuals whose experiences of each other were unusually complex, may have been at times unusually intense, and often had an impact on both individuals over a long period.”

As anthropologist John von Sturmer writes, “What is crucial to these relationships is that they create their own order – in which blackness/[versus] whiteness and the rest of that categorical baggage simply go out the window.” Sutton lists various “frontier pairings” between Aboriginal individuals and missionaries, anthropologists, nurses and others who have contributed to “the creation of knowledge and understanding” that transcends the cultural divide in ways more balanced than the dynamic between the individual and the corporate in contemporary Australian Indigenous affairs.

For Battarbee and Namatjira, it is the exchange of artistic and cultural knowledge and the pursuit of luminosity that takes their alliance beyond this divide. Each man, writes Edmond, is “less a wanderer between worlds than a progressive sojourner in a sophisticated, manifold reality.” In Battarbee’s case, it’s his autonomy as a largely self-supporting artist – not subject to structures such as the mission and native affairs – that enables him to develop not only an artistic partnership but also a lifelong friendship with Namatjira. His story contrasts with the more controlling interest of others who are embedded in conventional structures of the time, including Pastor Albrecht at the Hermannsburg mission and John Brackenreg, Namatjira’s agent in later life.

A career as an artist also provided a satisfying psychological and spiritual fit for Namatjira, allowing him to experience some independence as well as maintain connection with country. But he was unable to exercise his autonomy as an artist and capitalise on his career’s success to the fullest. One of the book’s refrains is Namatjira’s request that he be left alone to paint in the way he wanted – free from the supervision and demands of missionaries, art dealers and others – and to spend his money how he chose. In one poignant example, Edmond describes how Namatjira was able to purchase land in Alice Springs on the proceeds of art sales but unable to build a house to live on it because the provisions then in force did not permit him as a full-descent Aboriginal man to stay in town after dark.

Namatjira was understandably disgruntled at having to pay income tax while living in poor conditions in a camp on the edge of town, the circumstances of which later brought him into contact with the law and custody after he supplied alcohol to relatives. An increasingly embattled figure, Namatjira’s story is that of the Aboriginal man who achieves some success in joining “mainstream” society but is ultimately ruined by its punitive and contradictory structures.

Battarbee and Namatjira interweaves the narratives of this unusual couple against the backdrop of a series of seismic shifts in post-settlement central Australia. Beginning with a wide-angle focus on essence (tjurunga) in Arrernte cosmology, it recounts the arrival of the explorers, Lutheran missionaries and anthropologists, as well as the impact of two world wars (in stimulating an interest in Aboriginal art and souvenirs, for example) and of policy regimes such as assimilation and the extension of citizenship rights to Aboriginal people. Edmond also provides a fascinating account of the development of the Aboriginal art sector in central Australia, including the management of artists’ sales, issues concerning provenance, authenticity and the early use of an Aboriginal trademark, and the influence of Namatjira, Battarbee and the Hermannsburg school.

Battarbee and Namatjira counterpoints personal narratives, histories and paradigms of thought and policy dexterously. It presents a richly detailed, carefully realised and absorbing portrait of an unconventional alliance across a cultural divide, and it reads as smoothly and compellingly as a novel (with the italicisation of quoted material aiding the flow of the prose more than standard forms of academic citation). In revisiting Battarbee’s contribution to Namatjira’s development as an artist, it’s a testimony not only to the value of friendship but also to a quiet and unassuming life well-lived.

Battarbee and Namatjira is a nuanced and sophisticated portrayal of the complexities and ambiguities of mid-twentieth-century Aboriginal–settler relations, and a captivating read for anyone interested in the history of central Australia and its Aboriginal arts movements. •

The post Achieving luminosity appeared first on Inside Story.

MARCH is Art Month in Sydney, which this year comprises over 200 exhibitions and events intended to “celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary art in Sydney.” In line with recent trends, Art Month focuses not only on art and artists but also on the roles of curators and collectors, and on the relationships between art and such cognate fields as design, fashion and film. Meanwhile, in what could be mistaken for a parallel universe, Sydney has just hosted, on 7–9 March, the sixth Australian Tattoo and Body Art Expo, in which local and international tattoo artists showed what they could do, often on the skin of willing canvasses.

Much can be made, and sometimes is, of the category of artists who have a foot in both of these universes, the fine art one and the tattoo one. But in reality it is a very small group indeed. There are occasional examples, like the New York artist Scott Campbell, of tattooists who have crossed over successfully into non-skin art, and many more instances of tattooists who began at art school or trained in illustration and design before embarking on what is still essentially an apprenticeship. Of the many who cross over in this way, few return.

Some might argue that the “artist” bit of “tattoo artist” is a misnomer, a piece of professional credentialism that obscures the fact that tattoo designs, far from being original, are typically repetitive, derivative and uninventive. The same kinds of motifs – mythical, botanical, anatomical – recur and recur, filling folders with templates for the consideration of the prospective client. And yet there is much in the tattoo world that the art world can legitimately envy: the strength of the relationship between artist and client, the willingness of the client to stick with the artist in building up a portfolio, the sense of an art-loving community that crosses boundaries of gender and class, and the knowledge on the part of the artist that the work will remain on display – or potential display, depending on how rugged-up the “canvas” is at any given time – for many decades to come. Tattoos literally unite the work with the owner. And for the viewer, the reaction to the work is mixed up with the reaction to the personality of the canvas. Most importantly of all, tattoos are moving pictures, in an age that values movement over stillness. Unlike paintings that hang on a wall, tattoos get about, constantly changing location, constantly acquiring new viewers.

More and more people are getting themselves tattooed, but not all tattoo owners are happy with their choices. In 2011, the actor Mark Wahlberg began the long and painful process of having his tattoos removed. Among the images acquired in his youth were a misaligned shamrock on his ankle, which he first tried to deal with by having it inked over with Tweety Bird, and one of Bob Marley on his upper arm. Years later, and as the father of four children, Wahlberg felt that the tattoos spoke too loudly of a less responsible past. “I’ve taken my two older kids to the procedure so they see how painful it is and what I have to go through,” he said. “It’s like getting burned with hot bacon grease… Hopefully that will deter them.” By means of erasure – an expensive and painful process involving repeated laser treatments or in drastic cases surgery – or else by means of so-called cover-up tattoos, the supposedly indelible past is consigned where it belongs, to the past.

Yet tattoos don’t necessarily speak of irresponsibility or of a past that belongs in the past. The Sydney Morning Herald recently carried an eye-catching and in its way inspiring report of another father, Tony Hilton, who has been working as a bricklayer on the new building designed by Frank Gehry for the University of Technology, Sydney. Hilton regards the opportunity to help realise Gehry’s daring and complex vision as the best thing that has happened in his working life so far, and to celebrate he has had his arm and shoulder tattooed with one of the several unusual bricklaying patterns that are being deployed on the structure. The names of his wife and three daughters have been incorporated into the design, explicitly linking the two most important parts of his life, his family and his work.

Meanwhile, the NSW Police Service is banning neck tattoos – or “job-stoppers” – on new recruits, although exceptions can be made for those already employed. The Body Art and Modification Policy, approved in late 2013, proscribes “any form of body art or modification that is on the face, neck, ears, scalp or hands.” It comes down to a question of community relations. “Some of the older generation don’t like tattoos,” explained assistant commissioner Carlene York when the policy was announced, navigating her way with PR professionalism through a cultural minefield. “They feel a bit scared.” And yet, as York allows, not all older people are worried by tattoos. They might be tattooed themselves, or quite like the idea of getting one done, preferably on a part of the body less likely to be showing the adverse effects of age, given that skin, like canvas, bulges and sags over time. The veteran British broadcaster David Dimbleby, aged seventy-five, was photographed recently having a tattoo – of a scorpion – inked onto his right shoulder. It was something, he commented at the time, that he had “always wanted to do.”

The aura of permanence surrounding tattoos affects people differently – what puts one person off is the very thing that attracts another. For the cautious, an awareness of how you might feel in the future, as opposed to how you feel now, will seem to be a useful attribute, preventing all kinds of “mistakes.” On the other hand, you can think too much about that sort of thing. What prospective bride or groom wants to be told, for example, by a Jeremiah masquerading as a friend, that X per cent (insert a very high number here) of marriages end in divorce within Y years (insert a very low number)? In the same way, who wants to be told that you and Lisa or Ben, whose name you are planning to have tattooed on your arm or your leg or your lower back, may no longer be an item next month, never mind in ten or twenty years? A tattoo sends a message to your older self, a reminder of something important that should not be forgotten. It’s an expression of faith in the present, defying the future and daring it to do its worst.

ON THE FACE of it, the continuing popularity of tattoos is something of a paradox. We generally think of anything fashionable as having a use-by date built into it – the whole point of fashion being that it changes. A designer jacket remains in vogue for a season, maybe two, and after that, if put away and kept in reasonable condition, it will qualify one day as retro-fashion. In the meantime it will be defined not as retro (good), but as yesterday (bad). Yet tattoos, which have never, despite what the naysayers say, been more popular, cannot be so easily put aside. They can be disguised – a sleeve tattoo by a shirt-sleeve, for instance – but they are still lurking there, underneath, a fashion that never dies. Even when the tattoo is removed or over-stamped, traces remain.

Commentary on the fashion for tattooing, whether for or against, will often focus on the state of mind of the people getting tattooed. They may think about it for ages – will I, won’t I? – but when they finally make the decision it must have been because they were drunk at the time, or under the malign influence of something or someone, or in some way or other not their true, autonomous selves. They just weren’t thinking clearly. Or, runs the counter-proposition, they were living “in the moment,” as the confident, unworried, spontaneous self they would like always to be. The tattoo will go on reminding them of that freer version of themselves, whatever other embarrassments it might call to mind.

And as for the embarrassments of the past, who cares? They’re moments in time, and moments in time have their own validity. The advantage of a tattoo is that, unlike those ever-accumulating images on phones and Facebook, images that can soon spin out of the individual’s control, a tattoo is personal in the most literal sense. People will often comment on the way that a tattoo represents a stage of their lives, its emotional significance fully apparent only to the wearer of the tattoo. “My body is like a scrapbook,” says one interviewee in a recent Guardian feature on the growing number of women with tattoos. “Tattoos are markers on my body,” says another, “ to show how I was feeling at the time. They don’t have to have huge symbolism.”

In the digital world, we can keep on posting images and observations – markers of “how I was feeling at the time” – for as often and as long as we wish. There are no limits. By contrast, each of us has only so much skin. In the first episode of the first season of the UK series My Tattoo Addiction, one of the seemingly dozens of reality television programs that revolve around the tattoo culture, there is an unsettling encounter with a man who has, after going through a difficult divorce, fallen in love with Miley Cyrus. He has sixteen tattoos of Miley – her face or her name or the title of one of her songs or albums – when we meet him and is about to acquire his seventeenth. (He has since, apparently, acquired several more.) The tattoos make him happy, but he has two main fears, and both of them, we can’t help recognising, are founded securely in reality. One is that he will run out of space, and the other is that he or Miley will change, that she will no longer be the girl of his dreams. “I’m scared,” he confesses, “that this obsession might just leave me.” It is indeed a prospect to be dreaded. Instead of, for example, the name of a former girlfriend with Cupid’s arrow through it – a relatively minor embarrassment – he will be lumbered, forever and a day, with seventeen more or less indelible reminders on his skin of the woman he no longer loves.

As any collector will testify, it is hard to stop once you get started. One of the recurring motifs of what might be called tattoo literature – the abundant supply of commentary and reflection on what the tattooing fashion is really all about – is the observation that one tattoo is never going to be enough. “It’s all about coverage,” says the American fashion and style guru, and keen acquirer of tattoos, Nick Wooster, thereby downplaying the aesthetic role of the tattoo-ee. Leave that to the experts, he more or less says. Even if the tattoo artist – the expert – is not in fact particularly expert, the finished work will still say something about you, because it’s the coverage, the entire display, the story, that counts. Tattooists are artists, and artists have certain privileges, including the privilege of determining what in the end the finished work will look like. Just as the portraitist traditionally does not allow the sitter to see the painting until it is finished, so the tattoo artist is typically able to hold off until the big reveal. (The practical realities of tattooing help here – it’s hard, even with mirrors or display screens, to keep track of what someone is inking onto your back.)

All this suggests that, in a very traditional sense, the real power remains with the creator, whose vision is being realised on the canvas. But just as the supremacy of the artist is increasingly challenged in the art world, so it is in the world of tattooing. Patrons, collectors and curators are the new pretenders to the creative laurels in fine art, and the same holds true for the world of tattoos. What is more, the patron who commissions a tattoo holds a couple of extra cards that the art curator or collector doesn’t – he or she is also the canvas, and the exhibition space as well. The canvas, moreover, is quite capable of talking back. In another example of tattoo television, Ink Master, the success of the various tattooists, competing against one another to produce the most successful design, is judged not only by a team of experienced tattooists but also by a “canvas jury” – a case of the medium quite literally sending the message.

The web abounds with examples of tattoo disasters – the phrase or character in a foreign language, for example, that turns out to mean something quite different from what you thought it meant – but this has done little to slow the rate of increase. Celebrities celebrate – an occasion, a milestone – by getting tattooed together, as do classmates and teammates and family members. The story of the celebrity’s tattoo, how it was acquired and why, is an item of general interest. Spelled out step by step on Twitter, it forms a genre in itself, a tale for the times. Where celebrities lead, others follow, to the point where, for some time now, not getting a tattoo has required decisiveness rather than inertia. To remain a cleanskin is no longer the clear default position it once was. “See the amazing untattooed man,” exhorts a fairground sign in a cartoon by Michael Heath, recently reproduced in Private Eye: A Cartoon History (2013).

THE RISE of the tattoo as a lifestyle statement is explored in the second number of the new, lively and London-based photography journal The Quarterly, which features articles, and numerous images, devoted to the practice of tattooing as both art and fashion, and to the way tattoos now sit somewhere on the boundary between edgy and mainstream. Among the interviewees – and photographic subjects – is the comprehensively-inked Billy Huxley, who has, in a short space of time, gone from unemployed roofer to highly successful model, something that would have been unlikely even just a few years ago.

Huxley is keen to counter the idea that tattooing is all about consciously getting what everyone else has (a skull, a dragon), even though you might well end up doing just that without even knowing it at the time. He’s dismissive, too, of the idea of getting a tattoo just “to look cool.” It’s all about your tattoos in toto, about building a collection that works as a whole. It’s about curating your own individuality, creating over time your life story on your skin. (He is rather disdainful of an unnamed fellow model who has embarked on an accelerated inking strategy, all the better to capitalise on the trend for tattooed models – it’s just all too deliberate and fake.)

For Huxley, the meaning of his own body art lies in the way the images have been accumulated, and in what they uniquely say about him. “A girl once told me,” he says, that “having roses tattooed on your body means you’re a prostitute. I’ve got twenty-four roses tattooed on me, but it’s not like I charge for sex.” The subject defines the art, and not the other way around. Nor does Huxley see his tattoos as limiting his career prospects, for the very good reason that the career he is currently engaged in – modelling – already has a pretty inflexible age limit on it. The tattoos won’t make much difference to his professional end-date, about which he is philosophical. Which raises yet another paradox. The permanence of the tattoo (whether it’s under your clothes or on your face or hands) offers to separate you from the permanent – for “permanent,” read endless and dreary – side of life, from the dullness of being a time-server, in thrall to the organisation. “People call them job killers,” says Huxley in another interview, referring to his hand tattoos. “I call them office killers.”

But for how long will tattoos remain office killers? Tattooing has embraced age and class and gender to the point where no one – no grown-up anyway – can now be considered ineligible for canvas-hood. As Deborah Hill points out in the introduction to her photographic anthology Body Art, published recently by the National Library of Australia, the attraction of tattoos is that they take self-expression to an irreversible extreme. You put your money where your tattoo is, or something like that. But it won’t always be that way. Though the time has not quite arrived yet, it seems certain that one day soon tattoo technology will provide us with images that, while convincingly mimicking the real thing, will also be easily erasable or changeable, or will slowly fade away to nothing, leaving space for something that more accurately reflects the new you. The element of risk and daring, a gamble on the future, will be lost. But then again, perhaps it is already being lost. As tattoos are progressively mainstreamed – no longer the province of particular social groups but open to everyone – the element of risk declines. It is harder to be edgy when everyone else is edgy too. •

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THERE is a cosy and largely unremarkable genre of British daytime television, usually relegated to the early afternoon timeslots that busy people rarely notice, which revolves around the buying and selling of antiques and collectibles. Members of the public will search for antiques in various places (usually at markets, sometimes in their own homes), before bringing them to auction in the hope of making a small (often very small) profit. These shows are not at all glamorous. They are set in small towns and middle-class neighbourhoods and their presenters tend towards the eccentric. It is not uncommon for competitors to go home with just a few pounds, or even to end up making a loss.

But the programs do have a quiet allure, principally because the viewer is always aware that the next item might turn out to be worth a small fortune. For me, they evoke intense nostalgia; as a student in the deepest throes of procrastination, I would often sit on my ragged sofa, cup of tea in hand, and guiltily watch episodes of Bargain Hunt or Cash in the Attic, telling myself that I would get back to the thesis just as soon as I had seen how much the next teapot fetched.

The auction process lends itself well to television. Viewers quickly learn the backstory of any item brought to sale and then become invested in the outcome. As bids increase, suspense steadily builds; the process can be strung out, according to the requirements of the next commercial break, or swiftly culminate with the fall of the hammer. In the real world, too, auctions have become an increasingly popular way to buy and sell, and have come to dominate the trade in fine art and antiques. But what are the elements of auction that make it so compelling for both buyers and sellers, not to mention for the many people employed by the auction houses and their associated businesses?

This question is considered in quite some detail in Christian Heath’s new book The Dynamics of Auction. Heath, a professor of work and organisation at Kings College London, tells us that although auctions date back to the Romans, the structures and customs that we’re familiar with mostly developed in post-medieval Western Europe. By the first half of the eighteenth century, the British auction house looked more or less as it does today: having examined a detailed catalogue of goods for sale, buyers had their bids for furniture, merchandise, art or collectibles managed in a public process by an auctioneer. This stability of form means that auctions are a reassuringly familiar way of making sales at great pace and across a variety of situations.

In Heath’s words, “Auctions provide a solution to a social problem.” They offer a speedy and transparent way of selling goods using a process that can work equally well for items that sell for a few dollars or those worth a few million dollars. In contrast to some popular representations of auctions as dangerous or unpredictable, Heath emphasises how important it is for auctions to be seen as trustworthy and legitimate. These very public performances of buying and selling, played according to long-established conventions, render transparent the inherently unstable act of negotiating a sale between strangers for an item that may be unique. The trust and legitimacy comes not only from the reputation of the particular auction house, but also from the very specific actions and interactions that happen at auctions. The words, gestures and practices of everyone involved in the auction happen in particular and recognisable ways.

Heath provides several chapters of closely studied examples of how the people who make up an auction — the staff of an auction house and the potential buyers in the room — interact in a nuanced way to preserve trust and transparency. Auctioneers must practise a finely honed craft of managing bids: first enticing reluctant bidders, then accepting bids according to a strictly “first in” basis, working to “establish a run” back and forth between two bidders to move the price steadily upwards. Only when a run is exhausted will the auctioneer turn to other bidders waiting to jump in. Such rules are observed not only through words, but also through gestures, as auctioneers sweep their arms and move their bodies from left to right. Being attentive to bids can be made harder for an auctioneer by the equally nuanced physical behaviour of customers; while bidders obviously need to catch the attention of the auctioneer, they often want to keep others in the room from knowing their identity or level of interest. While overseeing the current run of bidding, an observant auctioneer will notice how a potential bidder in the audience moves his pen, or shifts her body slightly in preparation to raise her hand.

The auction’s need for clarity can be seen most vividly at the moment of the strike of the hammer. “It is not a sound that can be sustained,” writes Heath, “and serves to mark the precise moment at which the contract is concluded,” rendering the conclusion of the sale transparent to all in the room. With bidders having been warned by the auctioneer that a sale is imminent (in itself another chapter’s worth of discussion from Heath), there can be no going back once the hammer has struck.

As Heath explains, economists have for some time puzzled over one seemingly illogical aspect of the auction’s popularity: the winning bidder must always know that he or she has paid a higher price than anyone else thought an item was worth. Why, then, would a purchaser feel satisfied with the price paid? While there are occasional cases of buyers trying to backtrack, or pushing for the price to rise in smaller increments, on the whole the conventions of the auction seem to discourage this from becoming a problem. In practice, at least, the “winner’s curse” doesn’t seem to have diminished the popularity of auctions and auction houses.

Although recent years have seen several of Britain’s best-known auction houses take hits from the global financial crisis, and suffer the odd scandal, money continues to flow even at the highest end of the auction market, in the selling of art for many millions of dollars. While more established art markets may have receded, art is as subject as any other commodity to the trends of the global economy; the areas of fastest growth in high-end art are now largely prompted by the desires of wealthy buyers from Russia, Asia and the Middle East. The emergence of online auctions, and the introduction of online bidding as well as telephone bidding in the standard auction house, have also contributed to the globalisation of auctions in the contemporary era.

The Dynamics of Auction doesn’t dwell exclusively on the most expensive end of the auction market; much of the study concentrates on the more frequent sales of curios and collectibles in small auction houses across the smaller towns and regional cities of England. It is a careful and detailed book, but it does not make light reading for the casual browser. It is likely to be of greatest interest to researchers looking to replicate Heath’s methods for tracing and analysing the social moment of the auction. He and his team recorded video footage of hundreds of auctions across Britain, and studied the footage to identify what is common in the minute actions, gestures and inflections of phrases that make the auction what it is. The project represents a kind of sociology that retains a deeply empirical focus — working from extensive data to construct its argument — but which also understands the seemingly minor nuances of everyday interactions that we must all learn in order to participate successfully in social conventions. It is hard work to carry out — and not always easy work to read, even when written as clearly and structured as neatly as the work of Professor Heath. Much easier, perhaps, to sit back and watch another auction on the telly. •

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AS A COMPOSER, I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who are also composers. I know some writers and visual artists, too. Most of my composer friends read current fiction or poetry, and many of them also pay attention to new work in the visual arts. But hardly any of the writers and visual artists listen to new classical music.

There are certain paragons. Two writers I see at concerts from time to time are Rodney Hall and David Malouf. Both are well-versed in classical music in general – Hall has a musical background, Malouf was once beseeched by David Marr to become music critic of the National Times – and both are knowledgeable about new work. The photographer Bill Henson is someone else I’ve bumped into at concerts of new classical music, and not only when his images are being projected. But these are people who are making an effort to listen, leaving home to hear new music. Most visual artists listen on the job and their listening tends to be quite different.

My impression is that, like dancers, visual artists use music to generate energy, their studios resounding – or so I’ve observed – to heavy rock and Dylan (which suggests that little has changed since the days of Brett Whiteley). I suppose it is a bit like a mood enhancing drug, except that with music the consumer is still capable of clear-headed work, and when you think of it, this is only a more extreme version of how many listeners use music to change or enhance their mood, to energise themselves or to relax.

Among my writer friends, there seem to be more who listen to classical music, but it is usually Classical with a capital C – Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven – or baroque music. The surprising thing to me is that, like the painters, they also often listen while they work. Composers can’t do this, any more than we can read books or look at art while we’re working, and you’d think that music would similarly interfere with the thought processes of writers. But more than one writer has explained to me how music cocoons them. They are not so much listening to it as erecting a sonic barrier between themselves and the rest of the world. Cut off from everything else by Bach or Vivaldi, they find they are able to concentrate on their own work.

For obvious reasons, writers tend to eschew music that involves words, and in most cases, they also opt for music that is already familiar to them, and it’s the same with visual artists. Certainly, if the aim is to crank up the volume but ignore the content, that will be more easily achieved if the music contains few surprises. “You don’t shave to Schoenberg,” as Pierre Boulez once remarked. If music demands our attention, it will be difficult to concentrate on other tasks, dangerous indeed if a razor blade is involved.

So it seems there’s not much hope for new music in the painter’s studio or writer’s study, and particularly not for new classical music or jazz, which, on the whole, requires more concentration, over a longer time span, than the latest pop or rock. But none of that explains why writers and visual artists seem in general less interested in living composers than we are in them. Admittedly my evidence is all anecdotal, but I have accumulated too much of it over the years to think I may be mistaken. Occasionally, when two or three composers are gathered together, this subject comes up and we are glum.

I WAS surprised therefore, to walk one day into the studio of my friend and neighbour, the painter Carlos Barrios, and hear my music playing. He’d known I was coming round, and so of course I assumed the music was on for my benefit (I’d given him the recordings myself). But no, it turned out that he had been listening to little else for weeks on end and, what’s more, was creating a series of paintings with titles taken from my music. One of them already had a buyer.

Naturally I was anxious to see what he had produced. He told me that he drew a certain creative strength from the music, but that also the pieces put him in various frames of mind that in turn generated textures, rhythms and images. He also said that the stranger he found the music, the more he liked it.

Carlos’s paintings are typically shot through with a certain dark ecstasy I have always taken to be Latin American in origin (he grew up in El Salvador), and some of these images surprised me. His Elegy in a Country Graveyard, for example, is Goyaesque, all skulls in torment, whereas my piece of the same name is wistful (at least that’s how it seems to me). And so I confess that stumbling innocently on these canvases I wouldn’t necessarily recognise my music as their inspiration. But then often enough I don’t recognise my music from the descriptions in reviews either.

I think what I find so genuinely touching about Carlos’s responses to my music – and I feel the same way about a review that really grapples with one of my pieces, even when it seems to have missed the point – is that he took it seriously and engaged with it. In the end, no listener – however intently they listen – will ever find in the piece exactly what the composer intended (quite often the composer doesn’t, either). But that is how all art works, and especially music.

What gratifies the composer more than anything – and what we hope for above all – is the listener’s effort. •

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THE cataclysmic eruption of Vesuvius on 24 August AD 79 wiped out Pompeii, Herculaneum and other towns on the Bay of Naples. Yet the event would scarcely have rated a mention in the annals of Roman history had it not been witnessed by a member of the Roman elite, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (Pliny the Younger), whose uncle, the commander of the Roman fleet, sailed across from the naval base at Misenum to inspect the eruption (and died as a result). Pliny the Younger was a prolific letter-writer, and his first-hand account of the eruption has come down to us in two letters he wrote years later at the request of the historian Tacitus.

There the matter would have rested except for the chance find of Roman antiquities in a well at Resina (now known as Ercolano) near Naples at the beginning of the eighteenth century. What began as an accident led to the rediscovery of Herculaneum and then of Pompeii. The excavations of these two Roman towns caused sensation after sensation and still have the capacity to create headline news.

Although The Last Days of Pompeii takes its title from the immortal novel Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote in 1834, it is not concerned with the finds at Pompeii or the archaeological history of the region. Instead, under the three broad themes of decadence, apocalypse and resurrection, it explores the perennial public fascination with Pompeii and the way artists have used the town as a metaphor for ideas that are essentially contemporary and have little to do with antiquity.

The publication of the book coincides with an exhibition that began at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, has just left the Cleveland Museum of Art and is due to open shortly at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. The exhibition, which looks at Pompeii not as a window to the past but as a mirror of the present, consists of paintings and objects drawn from major art collections around the world. These are finely illustrated in the catalogue section of the book and are prefaced by essays written by a number of distinguished scholars.

Attempts to portray Pompeii as another Sodom and Gomorrah, a decadent city of excess that somehow deserved the disastrous eruption, have taken different forms at different times. An 1827 painting by Joseph Franque, of a mother and her two daughters being enveloped by the fire of the eruption, shows voluptuous, semi-naked creatures decked in jewellery and lacking classical decorum. Their selfishness and greed in lingering to gather up their jewellery has spelt their doom. Francesco Netti’s Gladiator Fight during a Meal at Pompeii (1880) is a frankly shocking scene of an orgiastic banquet taking place while attendants drag off the body of a gladiator who has been killed for the delectation of the diners. In a 1984 interview for Playboy the British actor and writer Joan Collins used the analogy of Pompeii to underline her belief that herpes and AIDS were plagues sent to “teach us all a lesson.”

The ancient setting gave nineteenth-century painters like Théodore Chassériau and Lawrence Alma-Tadema licence to show naked females flaunting their bodies in archaeologically correct Pompeian spaces, and allowed Wilhelm von Gloeden and Guglielmo Plüschow to indulge their taste for young male nudes photographed against an antique backdrop. Sometimes a painting adopts a more moralising tone, like An Exedra by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, which shows the sorry state of an exhausted slave while his masters idly take their ease. Sometimes titillation is the subject, such as in Luigi Bazzani’s A Visit to Pompeii, in which two well-dressed young women of the late nineteenth century are shown eyeing a fresco of a naked man.

This ambivalence towards the perceived sexual licence of Pompeii is exemplified by the Secret Cabinet of the Naples Archaeological Museum, a repository for objects from Pompeii that were considered obscene. Access to this chamber, now open to the public, was once strictly limited to men who had undergone the complex procedures required for admission. Women, young people and persons in holy orders were not admitted at all. Murray’s Handbook to South Italy and Naples (1853) sanctimoniously states that because permission was exceedingly difficult to obtain “very few therefore have seen the collection; and those who have, are said to have no desire to repeat their visit.”

The rediscovery of Pompeii coincided with a number of natural disasters, such as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the eruption of Vesuvius came to be seen as illustrative of the insignificance of human beings when confronted with disasters of such magnitude. Painters such as Jacob More depicted the erupting mountain as a sea of red threatening to overwhelm a handful of small, pitiful fleeing figures. Other saw it as God’s judgement on a heathen people, another Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, by John Martin (British, 1789-1854) ca. 1822–26. Oil on canvas, 83.8 x 121.9 cm. © Tabley House Collection, University of Manchester/The Bridgeman Art Library

John Martin’s 1822 painting The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (above) is one of a series of apocalyptic visions influenced by dioramas of historical disasters. Extremely popular at the time, these dioramas, or “pyrodramas,” were accompanied by dancing and gladiatorial battles and culminated in the fiery destruction of a set depicting Pompeii. Henri-Frédéric Schopin’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1850) (main picture) shows a chaotic scene in which men, women, children, chariots, horses and even a bullock team trample each other in an effort to escape the inferno. The most famous painting of this genre, Karl Bryullov’s enormous painting of 1833, The Last Day of Pompeii, shows an apocalyptic scene with terrified figures fleeing a fiery holocaust that lights up their faces and reveals expressions of fear, greed, hope and heroism. Significantly, an elderly man in the foreground wears a Christian cross as he faces the sea of fire.

James Hamilton’s painting of 1864 on the same theme shows a great column about to topple, a reference to the statue of Augustus, which fell and killed the villainous Arbaces at the end of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel. One of the most moving apocalypse paintings is Edward John Poynter’s Faithful unto Death (1865), which shows a solitary Roman legionary lit up by the red glow of the flames, standing ready to meet his end. The young man, under orders not to leave his post but tense with fear as the fireballs rain down behind him, is the embodiment of the ideals of Victorian England.

Perhaps the most curious painting reproduced in this book is Auguste Desperret’s Third Eruption of the Volcano of 1789, painted in 1833. It shows the word “liberté” exploding from the mouth of Vesuvius, which erupted in 1789, thus marking the French Revolution during which Louis XVI was beheaded. Another eruption in 1830 marked the overthrow of Charles X, a younger brother of Louis XVI. Desperret is here looking forward to a third eruption, which would mark the overthrow of King Louis Philippe, who had inspired such great hatred among the lower classes of France and was to be the last king of France.

Some painters chose to depict not the eruption but its aftermath. In 1799 Jakob Philipp Hackert painted Pompeii as a ruin through which humans and animals were wandering, and a painting by Christen Kobke (below), The Forum, Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the Distance (1841), shows only a ruin, devoid of human beings, a city destroyed and deserted. The sky is clear blue, Vesuvius is tranquil and no longer a threat, and the ruins are gradually becoming overgrown.

The Forum, Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the Distance, by Christen Købke (Danish, 1810–48) 1841. Oil on canvas, 70.8 x 87.9 cm. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 85.PA.43

During the second world war Pompeii suffered extensive bombing, but it was not so much the damage that evoked artistic responses; instead, the horrors of the war modified the way artists viewed the town. As a reaction to the depiction of formal beauty, a sculpture like César’s Seated Nude, Pompeii (1954) showed a dematerialised skeletal form composed of metal castings. In the Seagram murals (1958–59) Mark Rothko used Pompeian red to create an atmosphere in which his wealthy clients would seem to be stifled and buried like the people of Pompeii. Andy Warhol likened the eruption of Vesuvius to the explosion of an atomic bomb, and his depictions – with their frenzied, somewhat erotic quality and Vesuvius’s flesh-coloured cone – were designed to give the impression that they were painted only minutes after the eruption.

WHAT makes Pompeii and Herculaneum unusual archaeological sites is how complete are their buildings, furnishings, wall-paintings and even the food that their inhabitants were about to eat that fateful morning. Despite this abundance of material, though, little is known about the identity of their inhabitants, except for a few names and a few graffiti scratched on walls. This has resulted in an unparalleled attempt to repopulate the city with imaginary characters. The most celebrated attempt was by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose fictional characters became a point of reference for many of the houses in Pompeii – especially the House of the Tragic Poet, which was the residence of the novel’s hero, Glaucus.

Unfortunately, attempts to infuse life back into Pompeii by, for example, staging gladiatorial battles in the amphitheatre, failed, extravaganzas of this type proving more successful when enacted elsewhere. The recreation of the bodies of dead Pompeians from plaster casts also failed to resurrect the town’s inhabitants, but it did spawn a new industry. These white ghostly figures were taken out and set up in dramatic poses, often facing up instead of down, the way they were discovered. They were then photographed in bright light, sometimes against a dramatic backdrop such as Vesuvius, the mountain that killed them. Allan McCollum found these casts – and especially the cast of a chained-up dog writhing in its death throes – unsettling. His work, The Dog from Pompei (1991) consists of multiple casts of the same original to show that no amount of copying can bring the dog back to life.

Another comment on our tendency to use artefacts to engage with history is Michael Huey’s Pompeii (2008). On the face of it, this is simply a large-scale coloured reproduction of a Fourth Style wall-painting from Pompeii. But it is produced by an analog process and based on a modern photograph of a photograph taken in 1870 that shows the reconstruction of the painting based on surviving fragments. Huey’s work is thus so far removed from the original of AD 64 that the ability of photography to convey meaning comes under question.

Photographic images did become an important part of the rediscovery process, however, because archaeology is by its very nature destructive, and photography could provide images of the site before, during and after excavation. In an interesting juxtaposition, the book shows a painting by Edouard Alexandre Sain called Excavations at Pompeii (1865), with graceful barefooted women carrying away the dirt from the excavation in baskets on their heads. On the next page is a photograph called Pompeii – Recent Excavations (1892–94), in which a number of sullen-looking Neapolitan boys, dressed in rags, carry away baskets of dirt under the watchful eye of an overseer armed with a long cane.

Pompeii has of course been recreated in cinema. One of the earliest of these movies, Luigi Maggi’s 1908 film, Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii (The Last Days of Pompeii), is based on Bulwer-Lytton’s novel and covers the entire plot, against a series of sumptuous backdrops, in a matter of minutes. Even more sumptuous was Rodolfi’s 1913 version of the same story, which lasted more than a hundred minutes and involved hundreds of extras. Christianity does not feature in either of these films. Instead, the morally superior Romans are shown as being undermined by the Oriental duplicity of Arbaces. The theme of morally superior Romans, which appealed to the fascists, is reinforced in the increasingly longer and more lavish films of the 1920s and 30s. They also showed greater historical authenticity than their American counterparts, although by then Hollywood productions were becoming more successful at the box office. Since then, exhibitions about Pompeii have been more successful than films, and are by now so numerous that they require an appendix nine pages long in the book.

The late 20th century saw a new shift in the way the site can be viewed. Thanks to digital reconstructions we can now fly through Pompeii, peering into houses, listening to the splash of the fountains and seeing carts rumbling by. We can even relive the eruption of AD 79 in the sensational 3D video created in Melbourne for the Pompeii exhibition of 2009. Boulders fly past our heads and roofs collapse in front of our eyes as Vesuvius rumbles ever louder in the background. Computer simulations have also found their way into the sites themselves. There is a Museum of Virtual Archaeology at Herculaneum, and at Pompeii no less a guide than Julius Polybius himself, in the form of a hologram, conducting visitors around his house. But although these technologies have been successful in bringing Pompeii into the modern era, they have also been criticised as creating a Pompeii that suits our modern conceptions of what an ancient Roman city was like.

But this is what this book is all about. Pompeii is a mirror and each generation has superimposed its own values and ideas. It is more than an archaeological site – it has been a reflection of the fears, dreams, aspirations and fantasies of artists and writers, and their audiences, for over 250 years. •

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The Americans, a monumental but little-known panoramic collage made by Saul Steinberg for the American Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, is the centrepiece of an exhibition showing at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne until 23 June. Owned by the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, this is the first time it has been exhibited in its entirety since the Fair. (Parts have been shown from time to time, but even the most extensive exhibition in Brussels in 1967 did not show the work complete.) As the catalogue essay by Melissa Renn suggests, its disappearance from view contributed to Steinberg’s omission from the standard histories of postwar art, histories that were being written while The Americans was in storage in Brussels. One could go a step further and speculate that the very path of postwar art, especially that of Pop Art, might have been different had this work been better known.

The project had been an ambitious one from the start. Bernard Rudofsky, the commissioning designer, asked Steinberg to think in terms of a billboard on a highway but also hoped he would come up with something “as monumental and durable” as Guernica. Monumental it certainly was: The Americans is ten times longer than Picasso’s famous Paris World’s Fair painting of 1937. The artist then topped a seemingly impossible comparison by saying it was “a sort of Bayeux tapestry showing Americans in their natural habitat from framehouse to penthouse…”

The Americans is not a mural in the traditional sense of an image painted on a wall. Rather, it was conceived as a mounted panel on a single forty-metre wall. As the plans progressed, however, the mural ended up nearly seventy-five metres long and three metres high, to be mounted on five separate walls, three of them freestanding and hence double-sided, giving eight vast surfaces in all. What Steinberg created for those surfaces shows his inventive virtuosity as a depicter of American types, ages and forms, in images that are sometimes admiring, sometimes amusingly satiric, but always sympathetic: the work is a summation of Steinberg’s observant curiosity about his adopted country. It also makes a substantial contribution to the body of postwar art, in dialogue, as Renn says, with other works of the time: Jackson Pollock’s poured paintings, Claes Oldenburg’s installations, James Rosenquist’s billboard-size works, as well as, given Steinberg’s combination of “artistic spontaneity with de-skilled labor,” the art of both Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

BY THE time he arrived in Brussels in March 1958 Steinberg was already famous, in particular as the artist who had completely changed people’s understanding of how pictures are received and understood. The prime example was The Line (1954), a ten-metre scroll in which a perfectly straight horizontal line seamlessly transforms its meaning over twenty times from left to right: first it is the horizon of the Venetian lagoon, then a railway line over a bridge, then the nick between a building and the pavement as seen from above, then the edge of a balcony, and so on.

Born in 1914, Steinberg was raised in Romania, trained as an architect in Italy, and was hounded from that country in 1941; he became an American citizen in 1943, after which he served out the war in China and Italy with the Office of Strategic Services. On his return to the States he enjoyed early and rapid success – as a boundary-pushing cartoonist at the New Yorker, as an inventive commercial artist, as a muralist (by the mid-fifties he already had five murals to his credit, including the children’s labyrinth for the Tenth Milan Triennial in 1954), and as a sought-after artist in galleries across the country from New York to Los Angeles. In the early 1950s he exhibited in Italy (Galleria l’Obelisco, Rome), Britain (The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London), Brazil (Museu de Arte, São Paulo), and France (Galerie Maeght, Paris). Collections of his works, especially the ground-breaking The Passport, published in 1954, were hailed on both sides of the Atlantic, drawing praise from figures as different as Lionel Trilling, Le Corbusier and E.H. Gombrich, who wrote, in Art and Illusion, “there is no artist alive who knows more about the philosophy of representation.” The mural for the Brussels World’s Fair was to be the crowning achievement of the first half of this stellar career.

It is essential to grasp the titanic scope of The Americans. Each of the eight walls treats a different American subject. California, Florida and Texas begins with an assortment of West Coast fashion types, then passes to a densely compacted block parade of marching Shriners, matrons, blue-collar workers and businessmen both young and middle-aged, and ends with a group of five narcissistic, high-stepping drum majorettes. The Road – East and West (the longest panel, twenty-two metres) is dominated by a monumental three-metre-tall “big strong girl” accompanied by a group of hillbillies, cowboys and railwaymen (extruded Giacometti-like figures – the sculptor was Steinberg’s friend), “Siamese Twins” couples, other urban types, including children, drawn as was Steinberg’s wont in the style of the age depicted, competitive tourist-retirees facing each other, cameras at the ready, with wife-appendages sprouting out of their heads, and “good and bad cowboys.” Downtown – Big City shows city types accompanied by many eerily floating heads of businessmen. Baseball has three players in typical poses and a handful of fans against an empty stadium. Yet another Steinberg “big strong girl” towers over Mainstreet – Small Town, surrounded by a flock of women in headscarves, a torso-woman, a young man in a bomber jacket, and middle-aged men in shirtsleeves or suits and Trilby hats. Cocktail Party, on a black ground, is populated by intimidating uptown harpies and their speech bubbles, proliferating ectoplasms crammed with emphatic nonsense script, each one insinuating itself around the other, a fluid jigsaw puzzle of meaningless talk. Farmers – Middle West is anchored by the repeated motif of the rocking chair on the verandah – the chair and the person sitting on it form a gestalt, and the scene has a sleepy afternoon, small town geniality, about it. Finally, Drugstore – Small Town, spare and minimalist, the most melancholy of all the panels, on a pale grey-green field, shows, to the left, four partly dismembered diners hunched over the counter, and to the right, peeking above the cubicles, eleven heads staring out at the viewer: a badly assembled waitress trips between them.

Such a description can perhaps convey some idea of the range of the mural and the compelling strangeness of the figures, and reproductions of it will certainly accomplish more: but to really understand The Americans, it has to be seen. Up close one notices for the first time the flawless run of crayon lines describing an item of clothing or a facial expression, the sparing use of collage so that bits of wallpaper or the comics section of a newspaper will stand for a shirt pattern or the façade of a building, the heads made from shapes that have either been deftly cut to an outline or improvised from torn scraps of paper and then completed with a few marks to suggest the features. And only a viewing can allow the viewer to appreciate the folding and cutting that has produced so many of the figures. Thus, the husband-and-wife group that Steinberg called “Siamese Twins” is made from a two-and-a-half by one-and-a-half-metre sheet of paper, folded three times down its length, and then cut to produce a perfectly symmetrical husband-and-wife unit – the fold lines, still visible, are intrinsic to the wit. So, too, is the way the children and pet dog of a second couple are produced by cutting appropriate holes out of the parents. These techniques are most triumphantly present in the motor car in The Road, in which the grille is present as both positive and negative space – one half of the grille is what is left after the other half has been cut and folded out.

All these figures were pasted over a series of wonderful background drawings that were drawn in the United States and mailed to Brussels to be photographically enlarged seven weeks before the exhibition opened. The figures, about 130 of them, were created, and mostly devised, in Brussels. That work was conducted full-size, on site, and under trying conditions as to place, because the pavilion was being constructed around Steinberg while he worked, and time, because he left himself barely four weeks to create the figures. He wrote about the process of composition: “materials for the necessarily hasty population of the background with American prototypes and their belongings lay all about in the disorder of exhibits in the making – wrapping paper to circle the globe. Various shades were available, but sun-tan beige was most often suitable. Characteristic positive and negative patterns were improvised and cut or torn on the spot, then glued or stapled to the photographic paper. And at the end of three weeks of feverish assemblage eyes, noses, neckties etc. were drawn directly on the mounted wrapping paper shapes, usually with children’s crayon as the most expedient.”

Even allowing for some exaggeration, this account is exhilarating and not a little alarming: it underscores the precariousness of what Steinberg was doing. The making of The Americans was a race against time done at a feverish place with the ever-present possibility of failure. Steinberg’s account, too, hints at the only underdeveloped aspect of the mural, its too-oblique treatment of race, as it is hard to know whether any of the figures are intended to be African-American. (Steinberg had previously used brown paper to represent blacks.)

“My idea of the artist is the novelist,” Steinberg once rather mysteriously announced. But he often thought of his art in literary terms, going so far as to confess to an old school friend that a “failed writer” lived inside him. “I wanted to become a novelist when I was a teenager,” he said, and in a set of jotted notes, writing as the Romanian he often denied he still was, he emphasised that a key Eastern European characteristic was “the search for motive, like novelists.”

It is in terms of the novelist that one can sum up the effect of the extraordinary figures Steinberg has created. They are Steinberg’s depiction, by turns exuberant, savage and tender, of the American character: a testament to the excess and energy of American individualism and an appreciative critique of the strange shapes which America imposes on the bodies of its citizens, and the facial masks it invites them to put on. The figures celebrate typical characteristics such as conformity and individuality, constraint and freedom. But as the faces especially testify, these people are beings whose individuality is not submerged in their typicality: they have been created with a novelist’s care and respect for the selfhood of the other.

THERE is every sign the mural was recognised for the achievement it surely is. The collector Stanley Marcus told Steinberg it was “just about the greatest thing you have ever done,” and a fellow artist, Leo Lionni, whose own exhibit at the Fair, Unfinished Business, about race and poverty, was shut down because of protests back in the States, said it was “the best thing in Brussels.” In a different but – given that the Fair was a Cultural Cold War battleground – perhaps more telling register, the New York Times asked, “has any government satirized itself as… Steinberg has done with his airy, outrageous mural…?” In that respect alone, The Americans set the tone for the success of the American pavilion, which seduced Europeans with its self-effacing humour, completely eclipsing the earnest propaganda efforts of the Soviets in their pavilion next door.

Nonetheless the mural attracted less attention than it should have done, partly because, huge as it was, it had to contend with the overwhelming variety of displays on offer inside the pavilion – items such as Rudofsky’s tour around the United States in forty-eight objects (Idaho was represented by an irradiated potato, Alaska by a reproduction of the $7 million cheque paid to Russia for its purchase), a complete wall-mounted edition of the hundreds of pages of the Sunday edition of the New York Times, two motion pictures, one by Walt Disney, Circarama U.S.A., and the other a looped series of two- or three-minute vignettes of America by a group of young filmmakers (including a youthful Arthur Penn) projected onto twenty-five screens, the much-criticised “Islands for Living” with a bathroom designed by Rudofsky himself (he left out the plumbing), an early-model IBM computer that answered questions posed by visitors in ten languages, as well as the work of seventeen other artists besides Steinberg. Edward Durell Stone’s pavilion was itself so beautiful that it distracted from what was inside it – it was a mammoth circular structure with curtain walls, a pool in the centre, and a great eye in the roof like a twentieth-century Pantheon.

A sad story illustrates the missed opportunity that The Americans represented for Steinberg. Shortly after he had seen the mural the French publisher Robert Delpire proposed a publication on the project. Steinberg agreed. Delpire had the panels photographed, chivvied Steinberg into supplying an introduction and captions, produced a dummy, and by mid April 1959 had sent off page proofs to the artist. But Steinberg was bitterly disappointed with the plates. At the very last minute he withdrew his consent and the book never appeared.

This marks the beginning of the disappearance of The Americans. After the fair closed, it was cut into eighty-four vertical panels of about ninety centimetres each and consigned to the storerooms of the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. Although some of the panels were reassembled for the exhibition in 1967, the mural soon fell from public view and, unavailable in reproduction, it was to all intents and purposes forgotten, especially in the United States. Yet it was in these years that the critical canon of postwar art was being formulated, a narrative from which Steinberg was excluded.

The exhibition at the Ludwig is accompanied by a fine catalogue, with text in German and English, edited by the curator, Andreas Prinzing, who also contributes a discussion of the Fair. As well as reproducing all eight panels of The Americans in generous size with a double gatefold spread for The Road, there are reproductions of the more than seventy other drawings and collages of the period, exhibited in side galleries. These put Steinberg’s achievement in the context of his contemporaneous art. As one of the world’s foremost museums of modern art – it has one of the largest collections of Picasso’s works in Europe – the Museum Ludwig, a magnificent building on the Rhine right next to Cologne cathedral, is the ideal place to exhibit the work. The exhibition brightly illuminates the mural’s place within major moments of the art of the 1950s, and must leave every visitor with the feeling that a comprehensive reassessment of Steinberg’s contribution to postwar art is long overdue. •

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For Jessie Traill and Hilda Rix Nicholas, travel became more than a rite of artistic passage: it was a peripatetic urge that shaped their lives. Traill, in particular, never stopped, her name becoming the symbol of her life and journeying. To set off for Central Australia by car in 1928 (when she was forty-seven) was no mean feat, and she continued to make regular trips to England into her eighties. She was so well-known in the village of Alnwick in Northumberland that she was regarded as a local.

Born in 1881 and 1884 respectively, these restless women both lost their fathers in their twenties. In 1906, as the Rix family (sisters Hilda and Elsie, mother Elizabeth and father Henry) were planning their first journey together to London, Henry contracted cardiac problems, and died. Their financial circumstances somewhat reduced, the women set off regardless. In 1907, while Traill was in Rome with her father Hamilton and sister Minna, Hamilton suddenly passed away. Jessie did not return to Australia but instead settled in London, where she studied with the artist and printmaker Frank Brangwyn, and set the course for her career. The loss of the father – which, fortunately for both young artists, did not mean a dire loss of income – triggered the decision to commit themselves to lives as professional artists. Perhaps it also set them free.

Money and fathers played an enormous role in the destiny of women artists in the first half of the twentieth century. If Daddy didn’t want his daughter to study art, there was little chance that she could. For middle-class young ladies, art was regarded as a charming feminine accomplishment, like singing or playing the piano nicely, that could take its place decorating her father’s, and later her husband’s, home. It was virtually impossible, however, for a working-class girl to aspire to the artist’s life, to the long years of study and travel abroad, the relentless round of exhibiting and the cost of renting a studio. If a working-class girl wished to embrace la vie bohème, she could become an artist’s model, but they were considered to be little more than prostitutes.

Though both Traill and Rix Nicholas continued to regard Australia as home, both spent years away, and weathered the first world war (and in Traill’s case, the second) in England. Their paths were almost identical at different points, but there’s no evidence to suggest that the paths of these two very different personalities crossed. Traill was reserved, pious and hardy; Rix Nicholas was bold, bubbly and impetuous. Both lived large lives in terms of travel and ambition, but Traill chose a reclusive domestic life with her sisters – she never married – while Rix Nicholas contrived life as a stage for herself and her work, a place where she could star.

It was an approach that served Rix Nicholas well in Tangier. A European woman artist alone, sketching in the marketplace, was nothing short of astounding to the locals, especially as this was an Islamic society where image-making was forbidden. While that made it difficult for Rix Nicholas to find models, especially among women who were usually veiled, the intrepid artist nevertheless managed to “pot” subjects, even if it meant making composite portraits from several different people. Once the locals caught Rix Nicholas observing them with an eye to sketching, they disappeared into the crowd. But she persisted, smartly moving off if she sensed she was causing offence or irritation. She had her admirers, too, and folk crowded about to watch as she drew, and congratulated her on her efforts. Indeed, the crowds became so enthusiastic that Elsie appointed herself as Hilda’s guardian.

The colour and clarity of Rix Nicholas’s work, the pleasure she takes in sunlight, her palette of delicious blues and whites, her picturesque settings and North African “types” could not be more different from Traill’s sombre, sepia-toned etchings of landscapes natural and built, where a face is rarely glimpsed let alone a personality gauged.

Against type: Jessie Traill’s The Red Light, Harbour Bridge, June 1931. National Gallery of Australia

Traill studied with Frank Brangwyn in order to develop her skills as a printmaker. Until then her work had been mediocre, but the larger-than-life Brangwyn – painter, muralist and designer of interiors and furniture, a man both prodigiously energetic and irascible – inspired her to do better. For her part, Traill seems to have won him over. When, exhausted, he resigned his teaching activities, she continued to work at his home studio.

Brangwyn’s etchings, unusually large for that time, took as their subject architectural forms cast in dramatic shadow. Traill followed suit. The influence of Brangwyn’s style and subject matter, though not his scale, can be seen, for example, in Traill’s many etchings of the Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction. As curator Macushla Robinson has written, Traill “rarely portrayed the interior scenes and still lifes that were considered acceptable subject matter for women at the time.” Against type, Traill favoured big, heavy, “masculine” subjects. But her prints are often so dark, it is hard to make them out. Why the gloom?

Perhaps the answer lies in the status of her chosen medium. At the Art Gallery of NSW’s recent exhibition of key works by the brilliant and influential American photographer Alfred Steiglitz, I was surprised to find that many of the prints were tiny and dark. In fact, all I could see when I gazed at them was my own reflection. These were Steiglitz’s original prints; in reproduction, they are bigger, clearer and more commanding. Like Traill’s prints, they come from a period when photography and printmaking were regarded as secondary art forms, inferior to the great art of painting. Both media sought to emulate painting’s effects – especially “painterly” effects, such as shadow – in an effort to gain credibility as the equal of painting, and both “went dark” as a result. Traill’s darkness is used to effect in her architectural studies – the buildings loom, and even threaten – but it is in her studies of nature that the perpetual twilight is truly haunting.

These are handsome books. Stars in the River is beautifully produced and printed on luscious creamy paper. From Roger Butler’s introduction, we learn that this project has been a long labour of love. Butler has made an enormous contribution to Australian printmaking as a curator at the National Gallery of Australia, and before that, when he ran a private gallery in the 1970s. He was the first to promote many women printmakers, including Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor, who have gone on to become legends of Australian art and whose prints gain high prices at auction.

Moroccan Idyll is also a lovely object. The designers have opted for a small paperback format, comparable in size to a paperback novel, and have illustrated it richly with paintings, drawings, photographs and letters. While comparing Rix Nicholas’s work with that of Matisse may not do the former any favours, including Matisse’s masterpieces in the book creates a texture redolent of North African colours, space and light. •

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His long collaboration with Roald Dahl is a story in itself, beginning with the picture book The Enormous Crocodile (1978), but really taking off with Blake’s illustrations for The BFG (1982). The fusion of these two talents produced, as one critic has said, “a kind of alchemy.” It says everything about the pairing that when Penguin Books bought out the rights to Dahl’s work and wanted to reissue his novels for children in a uniform edition they asked Blake to redraw all the illustrations, not just for the six he had already done, but also for the six that had previously been illustrated by other artists. (The only Dahl book Penguin didn’t give to Blake was The Minpins, with drawings by Patrick Benson.)

Then there are over thirty-five books by Blake himself, a list that includes Angelo (1970), Mister Magnolia (1980), Clown (1995), Angel Pavement (2005) and, most recently, Daddy Lost His Head (2009). Not to be forgotten are the many commissioned works that Blake drew for publishing houses, such as the series of drawings in the 1960s for the Penguin Classics edition (1962) of the novels of Evelyn Waugh. Journeyman work it might be, but for many readers the definitive image of Brideshead Revisited is Blake’s impromptu line drawing of Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte and Aloysius (Sebastian’s teddy bear), relaxing with cigarettes and a bottle of Château Peyraguey, as depicted on the cover of the Penguin edition – a drawing that wrought its magic long before anyone associated the scene with Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews.

Monster and the Toy Sale is a typical and low-key example of what a book illustrated by Blake might offer. Monster takes the little boy out on his bicycle – the child has a seat on the crossbar – to a toyshop sale “to buy something special.” Unfortunately, Monster’s services are required by other people – he directs the traffic when the traffic lights fail, he reunites a tearful lost child with his parents, he acts as an information desk for other visitors to the toyshop sale. The boy and Monster are far too busy to buy anything: they leave the shop empty-handed and disappointed. But on the way home they come across a man selling balloons on the street and they buy one. “Everything came out fine.”

Such a story – with its clear moral certainties, its anti-materialism, its belief in selflessness – is a hymn to goodness. The illustrations and their broad palette pictorialise the theme. The Monster, a lavender-blue gangly figure with huge hands and feet, a snout-like, featureless face, twice as tall as the adults, is not threatening but is still a force to be reckoned with. Physically all-powerful, his strength is important but not paramount. Instead his influence is moral, empathetic and protective. He is a friend, a super-parent, an extension of something within the child. The little boy is a personification of innocence.

THE creator of this world is a short, stocky, articulate, round-faced, balding man who plods around in white gym shoes. Roald Dahl has left us with a memorable image: “Here’s old Quent – he’s going out to dinner in his plimsolls.” No one else ever called him “Quent,” Blake says, but he concedes the plimsolls. His gestures are precise, his manner is mild and amiable, his self-possession unflappable. He was born in deep suburban Sidcup in 1932 of middle-class parents. He had a good schooling at the local grammar school, where the husband of his Latin teacher, Alf Jackson, himself a painter and cartoonist, spotted his talent as an artist, and another, Stanley Simmonds, “a proper painter,” encouraged him. He was old enough to experience the second world war as a real event in his life (he was evacuated to the West Country). He did his National Service in the early 1950s, and in 1953 went up to Cambridge to read English at Downing College, where his tutor was F.R. Leavis, a man he found to be baffling, inhibiting and “not a good teacher.”

He was then getting work published in Punch, an activity that seemed “unsavoury” in the face of Leavisian high-mindedness. Still, he liked and valued Cambridge: “I thought if I went to art school I would never go to university, whereas if I did go to university I would still have the option of doing art.” After Cambridge, he undertook part-time study at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, then trained as a teacher at the University of London, and ended up teaching at the Royal College of Art, where he eventually became the head of the illustration department (1978–86). He had published in Punch as early as 1949, but from the 1960s onwards published more and more work as an illustrator. Tom Maschler, at Jonathan Cape, emerges as a key figure, for it was Maschler who fostered Blake’s career and introduced him to the writers with whom he enjoyed such long and fruitful collaborations.

Thirty years ago, in a series of events that sum up the stability at the heart of Blake’s private world, he found a studio he liked in a mansion block in Earls Court where his old teacher Stanley Simmonds already had a flat. He then took a flat himself in the same building, where he could live with John Yeoman, a school friend with whom he had been at Downing. He and Yeoman, who wrote the text for Blake’s first book, still live in that flat, and Blake continues to draw and paint in the same studio.

Blake also spends three months a year in his house in southwest France, near the ocean, but like Edward Ardizzone, a forerunner who drew a very different version of Britain, he is attracted by the shabby seaside towns of the southeast coast of England. He discloses little about his private life, beyond saying that he has never been married and has no children, though he insists that when he draws he tries to identify with the children who will be his readers, “rather than look on them as a benevolent adult.”

“Doing art” – the unpretentious phrase conveys something essential about him and the period in which he flourished, the postwar Britain of the end of the class system (according to the plan, at any rate), the rise of the welfare state, streamed free education, Swinging London, Mini-Minors, Habitat furnishings and airy renovated Victorian terraces, the discovery of Greece, France and Italy, and a new democratised aesthetic sensibility that sought out well-drawn, offbeat, mildly non-conformist books for children, books that celebrated unconventionality and impulsiveness. His popularity derives from an artistic vision that chimed in with (and no doubt shaped) the spirit of the age for middle-class Britain in the years between Harold Macmillan and the election of Margaret Thatcher. Goodbye to all that.

Quentin Blake: Beyond the Page is a chronicle of the latest phase of Blake’s career, from 2000 to the present day. It is generously furnished with over 300 illustrations, nearly all of them in colour. It is well-designed and beautifully, not to say sumptuously, produced. Partly a résumé of developments in Blake’s career, it has a narrative of sorts, recounting how his drawings have managed to get off the page and find new homes in a series of public venues, a development that Blake values and draws strength from.

Beginning with an invitation from Michael Wilson in 2001 to draw on the walls of the National Gallery (of which Wilson was then Director of Exhibitions), the book shows how Blake’s work began to appear on a wide range of public surfaces: stamps, posters, wallpaper, fabrics, walls, theatre foyers, a development site opposite King’s Cross, library buses in Africa, a psychiatric-care centre, an aged-care centre, a hospital for children in France, a maternity hospital, also in France. Blake offers a commentary which gives a sense of how the appearance of his art in public spaces has exhilarated him and given him a new sense of purpose. Equally interesting are his comments on the technical aspects of enlarging his drawings to the huge sizes needed – in one case the figures had to be as high as a five-storey building.

Blake has confessed that he can’t really draw cars or buildings, that unlike (say) Ronald Searle, with whom comparison is inevitable, he has only a minimal interest in place. Searle’s Paris, for instance, is the kind of thing that is either beyond Blake or doesn’t interest him much. What he draws best is “movement, gesture and atmosphere.” His pictorial world is defined by three things: a freely developed line, the recursion to a certain pose, and an anti-Newtonian attitude to gravity.

The line is scratchy, uninhibited and unpremeditated – improvised, ecstatic, free, anarchic, even manic. It owes much to André François, an indebtedness that Blake has freely acknowledged, saying how taken he was by the way François’s painterly, “not respectful” drawings seemed “improvised on the page.” One might think that such a line is sufficient, it is so alive, but when Blake applies colour – his characteristic vibrant, irregular, watery palette of pinks, blues, yellows, reds, greens, and grey washes, as he has done to the previously black-and-white George’s Marvellous Medicine – it is not merely an addition, but the opening up of a new expressive dimension. The elements of the most characteristic pose in Blake’s work are found in his drawings of Mister Magnolia. Extravagantly dressed, he adopts a bold, upright, self-assertive stance, his feet at ballet position three, arms outstretched, fingers spread wide, meeting the world head-on. Such figures in the Blake universe tend to behave as though the laws of gravity do not apply to them. They climb up high, upon boxes, flowers, trees or buildings, they rollerskate, perform acrobatics, swing on trapezes, dance on tightrope wires. They fly and show no fear of falling. And there is the smile – Mister Magnolia wears a huge grin that loops all the way around his face.

Blake has been accused of being “too cheerful,” and although he could point, with reason, to his illustrations for Voltaire’s Candide or the drawings he did for Michael Rosen’s Sad Book about the early death of a son, the charge is not without foundation. He concedes that his work has no dark side, no “hidden Gothic archive.” But “cheerful” is the wrong word. Blake’s work is innocent.

FOR an earlier Blake, whom Leavis thought one of the most important English poets, innocence and experience were the “two contrary states of the human soul,” and both were necessary, for “without contraries there is no progression.” If there is a case “against” Quentin Blake it might be framed in this way: that he tries to proceed equipped with only one half of the dialectic, to produce the single-handed handclap. One response might be to say that in Quentin Blake’s art innocence is supplemented by something else: energy. Indeed, his drawings, with their cast of gravity-defying figures, exemplify the Blakean principle of “energy,” which, being “from the body” rather than the mind, is “Eternal Delight.”

“Eternal Delight” – “joyfulness” – might explain why it is so moving to find such drawings in modern sites of medical suffering like clinics. Such a place is a psychiatric facility, the Gordon Mental Health Centre for Adults in Vincent Square, London. Blake’s drawings show fully clothed people – old men and women, mainly – swimming under water in the company of schools of fish. Blake cannot explain their origins, still less what the drawings mean, and he calls their creation “illustration pulled inside out.” They are strange and unaccountable but uplifting.

Even more moving are his drawings for the Hôpital Armand-Trousseau in Paris. This is a hospital for children of all ages, including the poorest immigrants from North Africa, who suffer from both physical and psychological ills. Blake’s wonderful murals show children of all sizes and colours, ascending ladders, stepping confidently across wooden bridges with no handrails, leaping from heights to be caught in blankets held out by doctors and parents, consulting physicians perilously, but safely, high in the branches of trees: “in varying states of optimism or” – Blake realistically adds – “despair.”

Drawings like these show the world through the eyes of innocence, a world that is both self-sufficient and self-sustaining, which, one hopes, can return to the suffering children a small but plausible utopianism in a situation of distress and danger. What is good about them is that they can have no conceivable design upon anyone – they cannot be charged with trying to cheer anyone up, for instance, least of all the patients. Their virtue lies in the absence of motive beyond a confidence that such drawings can be made to work in such a setting. But perhaps an additional reason why Blake values as much as he does these works in places of suffering and pain for the old, the sick, the mad, is that those places supply in a happenstance and unexpected way – not as part of a “project,” with the attendant self-serving personal motivations – the missing, complementary half of the Blakean dialectic. •

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The vehicle’s back door has been flung open to reveal footage of the pair shot front-on, the flipside of the reel in the cab. Together, the films play on a continuous loop, as if to suggest both the repetitiveness of their lives and the durability of the older woman as she struggles to support herself, her grandson and who knows how many others. Trappings of itinerant remote community life are scattered about the van: a string bag, oil paints, a crocheted rug for a seat cover, country and western CDs and cassettes. Canvases are draped over its sides, as if for sale. A pair of large panels in styles using ceremonial body-paint markings made familiar by Atnwengerrp painter M. Pwerle features on one side. On the other is a series of naïf-style pictures revealing scenes from community life: some idyllic, some not so, including one of a community with signs warning “no grog, no pornography, no wepons [sic]... no jobs” – an ironic twist on signs mandated by the NT Intervention – and one with what look like black tombstones labelled with different types of grog looming out of an orange and purple landscape. All the while, the Green Bush program from an Aboriginal community radio station plays on an old ghetto blaster in the background, providing the film’s narrative arc: You’re listening to the Green Bush radio [show]. If you’ve got a message you’d like to send out to friends and family in prison…

The program’s prison audience offers a portent of a possible future for the boy, if he follows the all-too familiar rite-of-passage for many Aboriginal male youths into custody. The radio grabs are from Thornton’s earlier short film, Green Bush (2005), based on his experiences as the DJ on an Aboriginal community radio station, communicating through song selections between those on the inside and the outside. They recall the opening scenes from his feature, Samson and Delilah (2009), in which the young male protagonist wakes up and sniffs petrol listening to the same program. This reference might seem too negative an omen for the young man, but shoved behind the van’s windscreen are two newspaper articles that suggest alternative paths for him: a good news story about the local land council’s ranger programs alongside a tabloid one about the incarceration of youths at risk.

The survivalist grandmother who holds her family together and the potentially at-risk young man are familiar types from Aboriginal community life. In a recent radio interview on Awaye!, Thornton expressed concerns about the potential disintegration of community life with the passing of the current generation of grannies, especially given their dual role as repositories of culture and nurturers of a generation whose parents are often absent because of addiction or incarceration. This tension is present in the emblems of ongoing attachment to country and culture, alongside those of basic survival, that deck the installation: a red palm print, an Aboriginal flag sticker, the canvases on the van’s sides, the ininti-seed necklaces hanging from the rear vision mirrors, and Mother Courage herself, using a traditional creative practice to survive. Nevertheless, there’s a grimness about her assertion of cultural identity that recalls Delilah’s fate when she returns to live on country as the teenage partner of a sniffer in a wheelchair.

Some of Thornton’s work has been criticised for its focus on contemporary social dysfunction. Samson and Delilah, for example, portrayed two teenagers’ experiences of rejection and isolation in a remote community and in Alice Springs through a series of events that are perhaps unlikely within the timeframe in which they occur. This compression of incidents from Aboriginal everyday life also features in Green Bush, and Thornton has explained in interviews that all the material in his films is drawn from his own experience. While his films are ostensibly realistic, their dense and highly emblematic use of everyday objects and incidents prefaces an understandable transition from film-making to art installation. Thornton debuted his first installation, Stranded, at the Adelaide film festival in 2011, and elsewhere he has commented on the appeal of the relative immediacy of an art installation project compared to the often expensive and lengthy process of film-making.

It is as if through his recent creative works Thornton seeks to expand his former role in Aboriginal community radio by exposing national and international audiences to central Australian Aboriginal life events they are otherwise unlikely to encounter. At the same time, these experiences – the haircutting episode and the return to country on the outstation in Samson and Delilah, for example – are often presented without much explanation. Much extra-textual material (in a brochure, on a plaque) accompanies the ACMI installation, providing back-story details not apparent in the work. There, we learn that Mother Courage left her community after its art centre closed down for lack of funding, and because of pressures accompanying the Intervention and increases in the price of fuel, power and water.

The end of the installation’s film coincides with Green Bush’s final announcement: And that’s it for the Green Bush tonight. There’s also another night and another night. Because when you think about it, you mob, you’ve been a captive audience for a long time. But who exactly is the captive audience? Mother Courage is potentially as enigmatic for the gallery visitor as the sight of Aboriginal ladies dot-painting canvases on public lawns is for tourists in Alice Springs. The pair in the van exude a strong sense of self-containment as they sit focused intently on the canvas. Very little is said, apart from the woman’s instructions to her grandson, and when the two of them occasionally look up, it’s not to make eye contact with the viewer or the cinematographer but as if to observe some activity outside the frame.

Mother Courage evokes both the immediacy and proximity, and the distance and impenetrability, of remote Aboriginal experience for the non-Aboriginal urban viewer. It also contrasts the basic circumstances of many Aboriginal creative producers with the largesse of the international art world, on whose gallery walls some of their artworks hang.

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AN EXHIBITION showing at Somerset House in London and the Pulitzer Fountain in New York features the heads of the twelve animals that make up the Chinese zodiac. They are replicas of statues destroyed by Western troops when they sacked the Yuanmingyuan – the old summer palace in Beijing – as they marched into the Chinese capital at the end of the Second Opium War. To most Chinese, the Yuanmingyuan, which is still preserved in its ruined state, is a vivid symbol of China’s past humiliation by foreign powers.

For a Chinese artist to recreate these statues and install them in a building redolent of the heyday of the British Empire might seem like a bold patriotic gesture, something the government in Beijing would be quick to praise. Yet there were no Chinese officials making speeches at the openings of Ai Weiwei’s shows in London and New York in April. In fact the artist was detained by police at Beijing airport at the beginning of April and officials say only that he is under investigation for alleged “economic crimes.”

Ai Weiwei achieved worldwide fame as the “artistic consultant” to the stunning Bird’s Nest stadium built for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. But the big, burly, bearded artist, who lived for many years in New York, has always been an iconoclast, willing not only to mock Western cultural arrogance but also to smash Chinese cultural relics – including vases dating from the Han dynasty 2000 years ago – as part of his conceptual art pieces. In recent years he has criticised official corruption and, increasingly, China’s entire political system. Nevertheless, his arrest came as a shock to many of the country’s artists and intellectuals, and has been seen as further evidence that the Chinese government is taking an increasingly hard line towards its critics.

Moving against Ai sends a strong statement partly because of his family’s close connections with China’s Communist elite, which many had believed rendered him untouchable. His father, Ai Qing, was a prominent left-wing poet and intellectual of the 1930s who became an early supporter of the Communist Party. Although he was purged by Chairman Mao in the 1950s and spent years in internal exile in the countryside, he was rehabilitated and returned to prominence after the Cultural Revolution.

Ai Weiwei’s international profile over recent years was also thought to give him some insulation. Not only did he have major shows, such as his recent Sunflower Seeds installation at London’s Tate Modern, but he also appeared on learned panels, and received honorary doctorates and visiting professorships from Western universities.

At a time when the Chinese government is obsessed with improving its international image and promoting what it likes to call its “soft power” – spending billions on founding Confucius Institutes to teach Chinese language and culture, and expanding its media into the global, English-language market in an attempt to counter foreign media coverage – surely it wouldn’t want to score a massive own goal by arresting Ai?

But there’s evidence that at least some of those calling the shots in China today are scarcely concerned about their country’s international image. Over recent years, China’s internal security establishment seems to have gained growing influence over policy. It’s a trend that has been evident since the 2008 Olympics, when security was so tight that many felt the atmosphere of the games suffered. Fears of social unrest as China’s economy slowed, albeit fairly briefly, following the financial crisis of 2008 might also have boosted the security establishment; and official paranoia grew when a group of intellectuals, led by the dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, attempted to found a pro-democracy movement called Charter 08. The 2010 World Expo in Shanghai was also notable for the large numbers of military police who not only marched around the Expo site but were also stationed in pairs at every entrance to every subway station in the city for the entire six months of the event.

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo in late 2010 seemed to heighten Beijing’s anxieties. The government, grown used to the international community soft-pedalling human rights as it sought Beijing’s financial assistance to shore up its ailing economies, was shocked by what it saw as the most overt foreign attempt to interfere in its domestic affairs for many years. The outbreak of revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, followed by calls, mainly from abroad, for similar protests in China, fuelled its insecurity and led to the strikingly tough line the Chinese authorities took on foreign journalists who tried to report from the locations that had been designated for these “Jasmine protests.”

Journalists who reminded the government of the rules it introduced before the Olympics, which give foreign media the right to report from anywhere in the country, were told by a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry that they should “not use the law as a shield.” It was a revealing quote – and very much in keeping with the crackdown on lawyers in recent years.

As usual in China, there are contradictory signs as well. Some of the country’s more liberal media organisations have recently made bold criticisms of corruption, and even the official People’s Daily recently quoted Voltaire on the importance of freedom of speech. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao also continues to emphasise the need for “independent thinking” and political reform – though Chinese media were at one point told not to report his comments. It’s all prompted speculation about high-level political splits, as different factions jostle for influence ahead of the retirement of Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao in 2012–13.

Chinese politics is often characterised as being made up of periods of either hot or cold winds, which bring greater openness or greater conservatism respectively. It may be that we’re at the start of a long cold front. •

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TASMANIA has long been stereotyped as the land that time forgot. Provincial and punitive (cue: criminalising gays, bashing greenies, the prose of Richard Flanagan) and poor to boot (cue: psychological and practical dependence on the twinned purses of Centrelink and Canberra). Naturally and often sublimely beautiful, of course – all that stunning World Heritage wilderness, all those photogenic mountains and forests and lakes – and lately delivering a picnic basketful of brie, bubbles and blueberries to visiting gourmands. But ultimately still culturally backward (cue: sound of banjos twanging, champion axes swinging, with blokey white-singlet costume). That prejudice has long tentacles – on a recent working visit to Paris, I was smirkingly introduced as “a Tasmanian intellectual.” I laughed. So did everyone else.

Did the carapace of that caricature start cracking last weekend?

It started with a bang on Friday night – or four o’clock in the afternoon, to be exact – with the invitation-only party to open the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, followed by a weekend of musical playtime welcoming the wider public. Designed by Melbourne architect Nonda Katsalidis, MONA perches on the bank of the Derwent River in Hobart’s traditionally unfashionable and down-at-heel northern suburbs, near the original home of its (lately) mega-wealthy owner and bankroller, Tasmanian gambler David Walsh.

Everyone arrived unfashionably on time. Most zoomed in on a fast ferry from Hobart’s waterfront, taking in the passing views of a zinc works, a catamaran factory and random McMansions on the banks of the river’s opposite shore. There were 1500 VIP party people in total. The guest list was strongly Tasmanian, complemented by a heavy-hitting offshore arts industry and media contingent, plus an eclectic selection of old and new “friends of David.” Despite hysterical build-up rumours, these did not visibly include David Bowie or Mick Jagger, which was somehow reassuring. Walsh himself reputedly made a mid-party announcement over MONA’s public address system. No one heard it over the hubbub. Once we reached MONA’s dark and cavernous interior, the sensation was overwhelming. But first we passed a small mountain of Bruny Island oysters on ice, heaped on a tennis court plonked on a rooftop evoking Melbourne’s Federation Square (except with real water views), then entered a mirrored portal and sank three storeys via a tubular glass lift with wraparound staircase.

Party central was a vast space running off the Void bar, which welcomes descending visitors with Walsh’s Moorilla wine, Moo Brew boutique beer and rosemary and elderflower martinis. The bar is flanked by the spectacular raw sandstone wall of the original cutting, which I saw one talented twenty-something pianist licking at around five o’clock. Guests jostled near tables heaving with food; behind was a cinerarium by New Zealand artist Julia De Ville showcasing Walsh’s late father’s ashes in something resembling a noir Fabergé Easter egg. Chunks of gamey terrine, displayed with a still life of freshly killed, unskun rabbit and deer (Walsh is a dedicated vegetarian); bamboo boatloads of sushi from Masaaki of Geeveston (that’s forestry industry heartland); piles of the greenest salad I’ve ever tasted – an impossible medley of broad beans, zucchini flowers, lime, apple tarragon, basil oil and pistachio macaroon; real caviar accompanying great vodka, served with a flourish rarely seen outside Moscow; a ziggurat of perfect Tasmanian stone fruit; and another, sweeter pile of what looked like dismembered wedding croquenbush. All this led inexorably to another bar, framed by the seductive, watery swish of Julius Popp’s Bit.Fall. Wow, it googled in my face in dripping diamonds, then wild, then wtf?!… or was I hallucinating?

Probably not, as the Void hadn’t yet sprung into full gleaming green absinthe action. Yet possibly so, because I’d just taken my first full gulp of the just-hung offerings in MONANISMS, the opening exhibition comprising some 460 of Walsh’s favourite works from his larger collection.

MONA’s worth double the airfare, from anywhere, just to see Sidney Nolan’s massive Australian modernist masterwork Snake unleashed as intended, even if your taste doesn’t extend to Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s stinking Cloaca Professional, specially commissioned for MONA. A collapsed Catholic, Walsh prides himself on his iconoclasm. “David hopes to shock and offend,” pronounces a fact sheet, and confronting reactions to sex and death are a famous focus for this maverick collector. Ponder the opening definition of MONANISMS: monanism [moh-nuh-niz-uhm] – noun. obsessive activity characterised by an inability to discriminate between normative public behaviour and displays of immorality and alternating self-loathing and egoism. a behavioural disorder which, when observed by a representative member of a population (esp. Australian) elicits the epithet “wanker.” Origin: 2010; by prothesis from onanism. There are no wall labels, no “artwank” (MONA’s term, again) experts telling you what to think about any of it… but you can press O on a real iPod, featuring MONA’s smart-spinning “+ X” logo and pink/black branding, for randomly generated infoblurbs, many written by Walsh, then email them to yourself – obsessively, and indiscriminately, if you wish; museum entry is free, including the toys. And the catalogue can be purchased online; $130 with postage. Its heavy, black-spun pages open with a gratifying crackle. After reading it you may wish to genuflect.

It’s probably anti-MONAtical to classify the talent, but the premiere exhibition features duly controversial Young British Artists like Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst and Jenny Saville, along with Europeans Charles Sandison, Toby Ziegler, Marina Abramovic, Christian Boltanski, Anselm Kiefer and Wassily Kandinsky, North Americans including Jenny Holzer, Balint Zsako, Jennifer West, Gregory Green, Andres Serrano, Takeshi Murata and Gregory Barsamian. Australians Vernon Ah Kee, Howard Arkley, Polly Borland, Fiona Hall, Brett Whiteley and Ah Xian make this first cut too. So do a handful of interesting contemporary Tasmanian works – you can sit on Hobart designer Pippa Dickson’s aluminium bench (A Fleeting) Encounter, for example, while you watch Cloaca Professional churn and disgorge fresh excrement. As notable are the imaginative presentations of Walsh’s extremely old artworks – ancient coins, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, African and some pre-Columbian artefacts and curiosities – pinned like insects, dreamily drowned, spookily suspended. These works formed the core of the collection in Walsh’s earlier onsite Moorilla Museum of Antiquities, established in 1999. “David jokingly says nobody came,” says another MONA fact sheet, “so he decided to expand.” Which might be the understatement of Tasmania’s twenty-first century, I realised, as I emerged from underground at eight o’clock to a hazy view of Mount Wellington in the distance, then a more-pumped-than-espresso pyrotechnics display by France’s Group F.

“Nothing succeeds like excess,” quipped Oscar Wilde. “Let them eat cake,” Marie Antoinette almost certainly did not. Does that approach sum up MONA? “I happened to make some money,” Walsh recently told the ABC’s Arts Online. “I felt some guilt, some desire to do something with it,” he continued, “You know, get myself off my bum.” And he truly has. MONA is as wild as a rainforest, elegant and gratifyingly unboxable. It’s a brand spanking new potential pillar of civil society. It’s the agora Tasmania needed to have. But is that enough to take us to a tipping point, where the freer-wheeling, open-thinking style that MONA represents isn’t just a hideaway from more dour realities – the equivalent of slinking into a porn store or a nightclub called Luvvieland? How typical was the reaction of Renate from nearby Rosetta, who told the Mercury newspaper she found MONA “moving and emotional – I cried. You have to check your attitude at the door, open your heart and your mind and you’ll be moved.” Outside MONA’s walls of wonderment, what are the real options for a still substantially undereducated and underemployed Tasmanian population, many hammered hard (existentially as much as economically) by a decline in legacy industries including forestry – still waiting for then-premier David Bartlett’s undeniably attractive food bowl and NBN visions to translate into pay cheques?

“Wow!!!” typed Tasmania’s personable then-deputy premier, treasurer and arts minister Lara Giddings into Facebook the morning after the opening – was she also channelling Bit.Fall? – “Mona is world class brilliance here in Hobart.” Like, like, like.

“Not all of the art works will be to everyone's taste, but then David Walsh would be disappointed if they were,” she continued. In hindsight this was a prudent qualification, given the overwhelming family-values flavour of Bartlett’s departure as premier just one day later, and subsequent attention on Giddings’s own unmarried, childless condition when she succeeded him. (For the record, that ground is surprisingly safe. Adults who look parental are warned about child-sensitive material on entry, and the five-year-old boy I accompanied to MONA later that weekend really loved Erwin Wurm’s shining red Fat Car, James Angus’s Truck Corridor and hitting the O).

“Thank you David for a great night,” Giddings went on. She meant Walsh, not Bartlett, although fair-minded Tasmanians would agree the two men have shared important future-seeking qualities, and the Bartletts certainly fronted and frocked up at the MONA party for their last big gig as Tasmania’s First Couple. Then Giddings signed off with this – “And more importantly for investing in Tasmania in this way.”

How that unusually high-stakes dice roll may pay off, and the role our new premier may play in the next chapter of Tasmania’s story, remains to be seen. •

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IT’S RELATIVELY easy to accept the fundamentals of evolutionary science when it seeks to describe changes in physical features through the processes of natural selection. But it becomes harder when evolutionary pyschologists argue that our ways of thinking, use of language and even creating and appreciating art also evolved during the time of our Pleistocene ancestors. In 1994, Stephen Pinker was praised and attacked for his book The Language Instinct. Now, a philosopher of art from the University of Canterbury, Denis Dutton, has “reverse engineered” his analyses of our artistic creativity and cultural behaviours in the twenty-first century to argue that humans evolved an aesthetic urge from the dawn of the species. The inevitable fierce debate has erupted again both within the evolutionary science community and across the science–religion fault lines. Via Skype from his home in Christchurch, New Zealand, Professor Dutton tells about the thrust of his new book, The Art Instinct.

Listen here

Denis Dutton’s personal site

The Art Instinct site

Arts and Letters Daily edited by Denis Dutton

Podcast theme created by Ivan Clarke, Pang Productions.

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