Canberra has the highest book purchasing and reading per head of population in the country, so it seems counter-productive that a search of the Canberra Times book section already only brings up reviews sourced from Sydney and Melbourne. We recognise the challenges confronting the newspaper industry, but we also want to emphasise that the digital era provides opportunities which are currently not being recognised in local content, advertising, and bookshop sales.

We would argue that the reading publics of Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney are sufficiently different that online literary diversity should be promoted by Fairfax, rather than the opposite trend. The lack of public dialogue within the Fairfax papers on this issue to date, despite numerous submissions, is also a matter of regret, especially given that the need for public debate is so often espoused by those organs.

Jaki Arthur, Joel Becker, Alison Broinowski, David Brooks, Alexa Burnell, Tracey Cheetham et al.

The great silence

Dear Editor,

It is tiresome for authors to carp about reviews, so, with trepidation, I raise ABR’s stylish appraisal of Dial M for Murdoch, about the misbehaviour of Rupert Murdoch’s journalists, which I wrote with the British MP Tom Watson. While praising a ‘complicated, gripping, and deeply shocking story’, your reviewer found our prose inelegant (July–August 2012). I hope that Anne Chisholm’s misgivings will not dissuade readers from taking up a tale which has been described elsewhere as ‘compelling’ and ‘unputdownable’.

I make this point because Dial M for Murdoch, somewhat predictably, has not been reviewed – or indeed mentioned – by any of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, which control seventy per cent of Australia’s newspaper market readership.

Australian Book Review has my gratitude.

Martin Hickman, London, UK

Lauding or filleting

Dear Editor,

When I saw who had reviewed Michael Mann’s book about climate change and his own part in it I was initially dismayed, then I shrugged. What could you do? David Karoly is, as he says, a mate of Mann’s, so of course he will laud the author, and he does – though there’s very little about the book itself in the review (July–August 2012). Why not send it to Ian Plimer, twice a winner of the Eureka Prize for Science, and noted sceptic? Well, he would fillet it, and the author too. Where could you find someone who is even-handed enough to present the virtues and flaws of the book? And why it is important enough to review? I don’t know the answer to that one.

I once debated climate change with David Karoly in Melbourne. He was courteous: ‘I agree with a lot of what Professor Aitkin had to say,’ he began (I gave the first address). He then said nothing whatever about the point of agreement or of disagreement. This review presents Karoly’s view of the world of climate change, with no suggestion that there are any serious problems with it. I disagree with much of it, and comment only that, having told us how important peer review is, Professor Karoly did not realise that within weeks of writing his review, a paper of which he was co-author, having passed peer review, was rapidly withdrawn by the journal because of the flaws in its underlying methodology – flaws perceived quickly by Steve McIntyre, one of the blogosphere sceptics whom Karoly dismisses as a ‘confusionist’ having ‘no scientific expertise’.

Perhaps, when you get a book like this one, you might consider asking two opposed experts to review it. The field really is a contentious one.

Don Aitkin, Yarralumla, ACT

Simon Pierse replies to Sarah Scott

Dear Editor,

I write in response to Sarah Scott’s review of my book Australian Art and Artists in London 1950–1965: An Antipodean Summer (July–August 2012). Dr Scott and I have been working in the same field of art history for more than a decade, so it has always puzzled me why she has never acknowledged my research before, despite a conference that we both attended in Cardiff in 2004, followed by several articles and book chapters that I published in Australia and Britain, which she cannot have failed to notice. When I found out about the full extent of Scott’s PhD research in late 2006, I tracked down her thesis and read it. It turned out that we had been working quite independently on the same archival material. Setback though this was (to both of us), I took the trouble to acknowledge Scott’s thesis and subsequent publications in footnotes and the bibliography of my book, even though she denied me this simple academic courtesy in her own published work.

Dr Scott remains a somewhat elusive figure to me, although I have heard that she has a contract to write a book not dissimilar to the one I have recently published, except that it will explore the period after 1965 during which Aboriginal art began to feature more prominently in exhibitions of Australian art overseas. It will be a different book from the one I wrote, since, as is obvious from my book’s title, I set out to explore the reception of Australian art in Britain from a United Kingdom/Commonwealth point of view during a fifteen-year period of transition following World War II. The book is part of Ashgate’s ‘British Art, Global Contexts’ series, and its publication was made possible by an author’s grant awarded to me by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. I hope this information serves to put Scott’s review in better context.

However, the main reason for writing is to draw attention to the factual errors that Scott’s review contains. Of the eighty illustrations in my book, she chooses to focus on one (Fig. 3.2) that she describes as a ‘photograph of two Aboriginal girls presenting Queen Elizabeth with a gift during her 1953 [sic] visit to Australia’. Scott asserts that I see the image ‘as evidence of the optimism surrounding “a young and prosperous Commonwealth”’. The date is of course wrong, but what concerns me more is the misrepresentation of what I am supposed to have written, since I make no comment on this photograph and these words do not appear anywhere in my book. Since this phantom phrase appears in quotation marks, I can only conclude that it is either, at best, a careless misreading or, at worst, a deliberate skewing of my text by Dr Scott.

The image in my book serves to illustrate the 1954 Australian tour and appears alongside two short paragraphs describing the Australian federal government immigration policy, the Bring out a Briton scheme, and the White Australia policy. It is patronising for Dr Scott to assume I would not be aware of the element of irony inherent in the image I so carefully selected. If you look carefully between the royal couple, you can see the face of an Aboriginal woman smiling in the background. It certainly would be a shocking indictment if these girls were ‘members of the Stolen Generations’, as Scott suggests, but in the absence of any real evidence either to prove or refute this, I leave it for the individual to decide. You can access this image (A1773, RV1116) on the NAA website.

Simon Pierse, Aberystwyth University, UK

Corrections

Two errors crept into our Art issue (July–August 2012). In our brief notice on Roar Re-viewed: 30 Years On (Macmillan), we attributed the authorship to ‘Denis Morgan’. That should be ‘Denise Morgan’. Eileen Chanin, in her review of Ken Whisson: As If, attributed the book’s Introduction to Elizabeth Anne Macgregor, director of the MCA. The latter in fact co-wrote the Introduction with Jason Smith, director of the Heide Museum of Modern Art.

CONTENTS: SEPTEMBER 2012