Wakefield Press

‘As cats are often associated with bookshops, dogs are similarly attracted to art galleries’, according to Steven Miller, head of the research library and archive of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and author of Dogs in Australian Art: A New History in Antipodean Creativity. The beagle on the cover sits attentively, head slightly cocked, as if contemplating art. It is not until you turn the book over that you see what the dog is really looking at. David Welch’s wry painting sets the tone for this quirky and intriguing book.

One section on Australian photography slowly growing on my bookshelves is devoted to anthropological and ethnographic photography. Philip Jones’s latest book, Images of the Interior: Seven Central Australian Photographers, belongs there because of the amount of anthropological material it contains. But it could also take its place among books devoted to vernacular photography, because none of the seven photographers Jones has selected was professionally trained. All were keen amateur photographers who produced substantial bodies of work during the time they lived and worked in Central Australia. The book deals with an epoch of dramatic change, beginning in the 1890s with some of the earliest European photographs of the Centre, and concluding in the 1940s.

On YouTube, the guerrilla fighter Nino Konis Santana is presented Che Guevara style, in fatigues with beret and rifle, against the East Timorese flag. Villagers sing his praises in the local dialect of Lospalos, his remote birthplace. Santana, both a national and a folk hero, holds a revered place in a country which desperately needs unifying symbols. He became the rebels’ operational commander in 1993 after Xanana Gusmão and his deputy were captured, and when Santana died in the mountains in 1998 at the age of thirty-nine, José Ramos-Horta, the rebellion’s voice in exile, declared his death ‘a tragic loss for the People of East Timor’. This was the man journalist Jill Jolliffe set out to find, some four years before his death.

An appropriately elegant publication, Khai Liew is the eleventh in the Wakefield Press series of monographs on South Australian artists, which was initiated by the South Australian Living Artists Festival (SALA) and is assisted by Arts SA.

Dance is an ephemeral art. This is just one reason, among many, why Alan Brissenden and Keith Glennon’s beautifully designed and presented Australia Dances: Creating Australian Dance 1945–1965 is an important contribution to the light industry of dance historiography. Its eye-catching cover, with a Walter Stringer photograph of dancer William Harvey in a soaring leap above an Australian landscape, will attract bookshop browsers. A perusal of its contents will encourage purchase, as a special gift or for one’s personal library.

The front cover of Black Dust Dancing depicts the silhouette of a child playing on swings against the backdrop of a blood-red sky. This image suggests the suspense and dread that is missing from the novel, which is, for the most part, slow and uneventful.

 Dancing, set in a rural South Australian town, opens with young mother Heidi becoming puzzled by her son Zac’s sudden ill health. This malady is eventually attributed to the ‘traces of historic lead’ found in the black dust that blows through the town. Zac’s diagnosis is made by Caro, a local doctor who is having difficulties (albeit of an emotional kind) with her own daughter, and whose own health is threatened by her penchant for cigarettes and alcohol.

Behind Philip Jones’s Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers are many books about the interaction of settlers and indigenes. Writers relevant to this book include the museum curator Aldo Massola (writing in the 1960s and 1970s) and retired archaeologist John Mulvaney (writing in the 1980s and 1990s). Massola brought out objects and archival material from the Museum of Victoria, writing their stories for a tourist or localhistory readership. He was a pioneer whose work is no less valuable for presenting an undifferentiated mix of hearsay, intuition, document, object, science and human observation. Although he rarely named his sources, they exist for most, if not all, of what he said so lightly.

Julie Blyfield is the most recent subject in a series of monographs on South Australian living artists. They are commissioned by the SALA Inc. Board and produced in association with the annual South Australian Living Artists Festival, now in its tenth year. Handsomely produced and elegantly designed, these abundantly illustrated volumes do much to promote the art and artists of South Australia. Not all the artists in the series, which began with Annette Bezor: A Passionate Gaze (2000), are well known in other states. Notable absentees are Fiona Hall and Hossein Valamanesh, both of whom have received major state and national institutional recognition, through solo exhibitions and publications.

Graeme Kinross-Smith, the author of Long Afternoon of the World, is a prolific writer, perhaps best known for his poetry – and it shows. This narrative is infused with the poetry of landscape and the joy of music: ‘Down the rooms of the past I hear music ... Music informs landscapes, the patient streets, the city’s lights spreading across the hills.’ The world of Tim Menzies comes alive on the page, and it is quintessentially Victorian. He recalls the Melbourne of his childhood, ‘shop and vacant block, rare beach, street games, lumbering planes in the sky that sound like the War’; present-day Melbourne, ‘its relentless, tired, opportunist rhythm’, and the family farms in the Mallee and the Wimmera. Most of all, Tim’s mind lingers on the wild coast of western Victoria, where he meditates and writes in an old church. The seascapes, as well as the notion of the healing power of the sea, account for some of the most lyrical passages in Long Afternoon.

Jill Golden’s Inventing Beatrice is a fictionalised account of the life of her mother, Beatrice (or B). This is life writing at its most precarious, right out there on the borderline of ‘fact’ and the ‘inventing’ of the title. Is it a novel or a biography? The media release labels it a novel but concedes that it ‘crosses the genres of biography and autobiography, fiction and non-fiction, speaking in several voices’. What is certain is that the point of view, and of judgment, is constantly shifting as the narrator sets out to unravel the enigma of her mother’s emotional frigidity and to find out the real circumstances of a childhood that, she feels, has destroyed her. Why did B send her three small daughters – the youngest only eight months old – away from home for more than five long years? They spend this time in foster care, then boarding school.