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Absolutely Revolting

November 2007, no. 296

Welcome to the November 2007 issue of Australian Book Review.

Patricia Fullerton reviews George W. Lambert Retrospective: Heroes & icons by Anne Gray
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Contents Category: Art
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Article Title: White gloves and gladioli
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When George Lambert returned to Sydney in 1921, he was celebrated as the most successful Australian painter of his time. With his cosmopolitan charm and forceful personality, he was in demand both socially and as a leader in contemporary art circles. For the previous two decades in London, he had exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and the Chelsea Arts Club, rubbing shoulders with prominent British artists including William Orpen, Augustus John and William Nicholson, whose linear style and subject matter were not dissimilar to his own.
Book 1 Title: George W. Lambert Retrospective
Book 1 Subtitle: Heroes & icons
Book Author: Anne Gray
Book 1 Biblio: NGA, $79 hb, 212 pp, 9780642541277
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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When George Lambert returned to Sydney in 1921, he was celebrated as the most successful Australian painter of his time. With his cosmopolitan charm and forceful personality, he was in demand both socially and as a leader in contemporary art circles. For the previous two decades in London, he had exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and the Chelsea Arts Club, rubbing shoulders with prominent British artists including William Orpen, Augustus John and William Nicholson, whose linear style and subject matter were not dissimilar to his own.

Read more: Patricia Fullerton reviews 'George W. Lambert Retrospective: Heroes & icons' by Anne Gray

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Margaret Simons reviews The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer by Paul Barry and Who Killed Channel 9? The death of Kerry Packer’s mighty TV dream machine by Gerald Stone
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Contents Category: Media
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Until recently, more Australians got their news and information from Channel Nine than from any other single source. For nearly thirty years, what Gerald Stone describes as ‘Kerry Packer’s mighty tv dream machine’ was the dominant force in Australian media and popular culture. Channel Nine was, as its promos used to say, ‘The One’.
Book 1 Title: The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer
Book Author: Paul Barry
Book 1 Biblio: Bantam, $34.95 pb, 616 pp
Book 2 Title: Who Killed Channel 9?
Book 2 Subtitle: The death of Kerry Packer’s mighty TV dream machine
Book 2 Author: Gerald Stone
Book 2 Biblio: Pan Macmillan, $45 hb, 292 pp
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Until recently, more Australians got their news and information from Channel Nine than from any other single source. For nearly thirty years, what Gerald Stone describes as ‘Kerry Packer’s mighty tv dream machine’ was the dominant force in Australian media and popular culture. Channel Nine was, as its promos used to say, ‘The One’.

Kerry Packer, for all his many faults, was an instinctive television man, who understood what Australians wanted to watch because he shared their tastes, liking nothing better after a hard day bawling out his employees than to sit down in front of Charlie’s Angels. Packer wanted to win the ratings game for the sake of winning, and he cared about content for its own sake – or at least for the prestige and power that it brought him. In his wake, though, came the money-men, the lawyers and Packer’s son, James. It is they who Packer thought ‘stuffed the place up’, according to Stone, and brought the network to its knees.

Read more: Margaret Simons reviews 'The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer' by Paul Barry and 'Who Killed Channel...

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John Button reviews Courage: Eight portraits by Gordon Brown
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Contents Category: Biography
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It is usually sports fans and politicians who are uncharitably accused of being biased. The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, is literally one-eyed. He was blinded in both eyes in his youth as a result of an accident playing rugby. Part of the treatment for his blindness required him to lie still in a darkened room for six months. It half worked, and he recovered his sight in one eye. Asked about this experience some years later, Brown said that he had felt ashamed, lying there doing nothing, when the only thing he had wrong with him was that he had lost his sight. This sounds Scottish Presbyterian (which he was) and stoical, which he must be to have survived eleven years as heir apparent to the ebullient Tony Blair. Brown and his predecessor are very different kinds of men. The Conservative MP Boris Johnson captured some of these differences in an article in the Spectator, in which he referred to Blair’s humour and ‘passion with a sense of optimism’. With the arrival of Gordon Brown, ‘a gloomy Scotch mist has descended on Westminster’.
Book 1 Title: Courage
Book 1 Subtitle: Eight portraits
Book Author: Gordon Brown
Book 1 Biblio: Bloomsbury, $49.95 hb, 274 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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It is usually sports fans and politicians who are uncharitably accused of being biased. The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, is literally one-eyed. He was blinded in both eyes in his youth as a result of an accident playing rugby. Part of the treatment for his blindness required him to lie still in a darkened room for six months. It half worked, and he recovered his sight in one eye. Asked about this experience some years later, Brown said that he had felt ashamed, lying there doing nothing, when the only thing he had wrong with him was that he had lost his sight. This sounds Scottish Presbyterian (which he was) and stoical, which he must be to have survived eleven years as heir apparent to the ebullient Tony Blair. Brown and his predecessor are very different kinds of men. The Conservative MP Boris Johnson captured some of these differences in an article in the Spectator, in which he referred to Blair’s humour and ‘passion with a sense of optimism’. With the arrival of Gordon Brown, ‘a gloomy Scotch mist has descended on Westminster’.

Read more: John Button reviews 'Courage: Eight portraits' by Gordon Brown

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Daniel Thomas reviews Australian Pastoral: The making of a white landscape by Jeannette Hoorn
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First impressions are unfavourable. The cover is ugly, and too cute: human-headed sheep, male and female, wait motionless for a drought to end while wearing prime ministerial bush-visit hats. We have read Frank Campbell’s rebuke in the Australian: the author Jeanette Hoorn did not know a fox’s tail from a dingo’s. Inside, however, there is a cheering profusion of illustrations, placed in unusually reader-friendly closeness to the relevant discussion, and they include a feast of the best Australian paintings. There are some interesting sources in English eighteenth-century art and, much less familiar, some parallels in German fascist art.
Book 1 Title: Australian Pastoral
Book 1 Subtitle: The making of a white landscape
Book Author: Jeannette Hoorn
Book 1 Biblio: Fremantle Press, $29.95 pb, 304 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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First impressions are unfavourable. The cover is ugly, and too cute: human-headed sheep, male and female, wait motionless for a drought to end while wearing prime ministerial bush-visit hats. We have read Frank Campbell’s rebuke in the Australian: the author Jeanette Hoorn did not know a fox’s tail from a dingo’s. Inside, however, there is a cheering profusion of illustrations, placed in unusually reader-friendly closeness to the relevant discussion, and they include a feast of the best Australian paintings. There are some interesting sources in English eighteenth-century art and, much less familiar, some parallels in German fascist art. The latter accompany Hoorn’s discussion of work by Hans Heysen – and Nora Heysen, whose River Murray Madonnas are barely pastoral but help create a small presence for women artists. The other women are another excellent Third Reich-style painter, Freda Robertshaw, plus indigenous artists Julie Dowling and Emily Kngwarreye. Also very agreeable are Hoorn’s frequent expressions of delight in this or that ‘wonderful’ painting. Alongside her enthusiastic responses to aesthetic force are her bracing disapprovals. Benjamin Duterrau’s The Conciliation (1840), of dispossessed Tasmanian Aborigines, is ‘abominable’, ‘a cruel joke’.

Read more: Daniel Thomas reviews 'Australian Pastoral: The making of a white landscape' by Jeannette Hoorn

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Rose Lucas reviews Event by Judith Bishop
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Contents Category: Poetry
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In her other life, Judith Bishop works as a linguist. A passionate concern with the intricacies of language, with the visceral effect of words on the tongue, aurally, and as they are knitted and unravelled on the page is manifest in her first collection of poems, Event. These poems are deeply immersed both in a complex observation of, and engagement with, the natural world, in particular with the ways in which poetic language can intervene in the world of perception, experience and desire. ‘You have to lean and listen for the heart / behind the shining paint’, Bishop writes in ‘Still Life with Cockles and Shells’, which won the 2006 ABR Poetry Prize and which Dorothy Porter included in The Best Australian Poems 2006. Like the beautiful illusions of the still-life painting, Bishop’s poetry creates an aesthetic surface which mimics the stasis of death and also harbours the ‘flutter in its flank’, the pulse of possibility visible to the attentive reader–observer. Look closely, her poetry exhorts, yield to the currents of language and image, become witness to death and life in intimate and endlessly renewing ‘events’ of struggle and embrace.
Book 1 Title: Event
Book Author: Judith Bishop
Book 1 Biblio: Salt Publishing, $24.95 pb, 84 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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In her other life, Judith Bishop works as a linguist. A passionate concern with the intricacies of language, with the visceral effect of words on the tongue, aurally, and as they are knitted and unravelled on the page is manifest in her first collection of poems, Event. These poems are deeply immersed both in a complex observation of, and engagement with, the natural world, in particular with the ways in which poetic language can intervene in the world of perception, experience and desire. ‘You have to lean and listen for the heart / behind the shining paint’, Bishop writes in ‘Still Life with Cockles and Shells’, which won the 2006 ABR Poetry Prize and which Dorothy Porter included in The Best Australian Poems 2006. Like the beautiful illusions of the still-life painting, Bishop’s poetry creates an aesthetic surface which mimics the stasis of death and also harbours the ‘flutter in its flank’, the pulse of possibility visible to the attentive reader–observer. Look closely, her poetry exhorts, yield to the currents of language and image, become witness to death and life in intimate and endlessly renewing ‘events’ of struggle and embrace.

Read more: Rose Lucas reviews 'Event' by Judith Bishop

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