Bernard Smith gave us Australian art. Before him, the subject was not part of our cultural discourse. We knew and could place the work of Michelangelo and Monet but not that of Eugene von Guérard, Tom Roberts or Grace Cossington Smith. In 1945 Smith’s Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since 1788 was the first book to contextualise Euro-Australian art within European art movements. Based on a series of lectures he had given in Sydney in 1942 for the Teachers’ Federation Art Society and the Contemporary Art Society, it was republished in 1979 with little revision, and reprinted as recently as 1993. It remains an engaging Marxist period piece, of particular interest to art historians but still enjoyable for non-specialists.

Australian Painting 1788–1960 appeared in 1962, a splendid blossoming from those 1942 lectures. Smith was no longer a schoolteacher and occasional surrealist painter. He had spent ten years at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, interrupted by a research fellowship in London and followed by another at the Australian National University, which resulted in his timeless European Vision and the South Pacific (1960). Since 1955 he had been a lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. He knew exactly what Australia needed.

These two novels can be read as intelligent manipulations of the crime genre, exploring the inarticulacies as well as the betrayals, real or imagined that can precipitate acts of violence. Chloe Hooper’s impressive début, A Child’s Book of True Crime, explores, in her words, ‘the twilight space between childhood and adulthood’. The means for interrogating this porous and ambiguous zone include a primary school teacher complicit in her own infantilisation, school children with steadier insights and clarity than their teacher, a faux children’s story narrating the details of a gruesome murder, and adults participating in games of emotional brinkmanship that their children would probably play as variants of ‘chicken’. Regret, by contrast, is more concerned with the isolation that occurs once the growing up ostensibly has occurred. While Chloe Hooper is at the beginning of a career with the potential to produce exceptional work, the experienced Ian Kennedy Smith is the more accomplished storyteller with Regret.

Biography can be difficult to achieve. There is the balance between too much detail, where one can’t see the wood for the family trees, or not enough, which can be disappointing all round. One also bears in mind possible antipathy: Sigmund Freud, who famously began burning his personal papers at twenty-nine, was dismissive of future chroniclers: ‘As for biographers, I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray.’ Consider, then, the work involved in writing a family biography, where the factors of histories, stories, lives, facts, checks, and balances are dauntingly multiplied across generations, within and without direct recollection, and are not always easily resolved.

Such was the task facing Brenda Niall who, by utilising one theme, has succeeded where she might well have come off second-best. Her magnificent survey of the Boyd family starts with a series of questions: Where to begin? How to structure a narrative covering one hundred and fifty years and five generations? Who to include or exclude? Where to stop? Niall, who had a head start with her 1988 biography of the novelist Boyd, Martin, had considered a wider-ranging biography of the others – the painters, potters, architects, musicians, writers, and the other myriad artisans of this astonishingly creative family – but no ideas of how to build their history into anything other than a cluttered, over-detailed book. Then an epiphany: ‘the idea of the family house as a recurring motif in Boyd history.’ This stirred Niall’s memory of a conversation she had in 1976 with the American biographer of Henry James, Leon Edel, who was writing a biography of the Bloomsbury group:

Edel had nine characters moving towards the ‘house’ that was Bloomsbury, and he did not attempt a ‘cradle to grave’ narrative for any one of them. His way of using interlocking chapters rather than strict chronology was a useful example. The Boyd story offered a sequence of family houses, each of which expressed an individual, a way of life, a time and place.

In living there is always
the terror
of being stung