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September 1984, no. 64

Welcome to the September 1984 issue of Australian Book Review!

Warren Osmond reviews The Boy Adeodatus: The portrait of a lucky young bastard by Bernard Smith
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Contents Category: Biography
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In the penultimate chapter of his memoir, Bernard Smith describes a meeting of the Sydney Teachers College Art Club, an institution he founded and later transformed into the leftist NSW Teachers Federation Art Society. The group was addressed in 1938 by Julian Ashton, then aged eighty-seven and very much the grand old man of Sydney painting and art education. He spoke at great length on the inadequacy of the NSW Education Department’s art teaching practices. Smith adds that Ashton also ‘told his life story (as old men will)’.

Book 1 Title: The Boy Adeodatus
Book 1 Subtitle: The portrait of a lucky young bastard
Book Author: Bernard Smith
Book 1 Biblio: Allen Lane, 302 pp, $19.95
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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In the penultimate chapter of his memoir, Bernard Smith describes a meeting of the Sydney Teachers College Art Club, an institution he founded and later transformed into the leftist NSW Teachers Federation Art Society. The group was addressed in 1938 by Julian Ashton, then aged eighty-seven and very much the grand old man of Sydney painting and art education. He spoke at great length on the inadequacy of the NSW Education Department’s art teaching practices. Smith adds that Ashton also ‘told his life story (as old men will)’.

Read more: Warren Osmond reviews 'The Boy Adeodatus: The portrait of a lucky young bastard' by Bernard Smith

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John Mclaren reviews Just City and the Mirrors: Meanjin Quarterly and the intellectual front, 1940–1965 by Lynne Strahan
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Contents Category: Literary Studies
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For thirty-four years Clem Christesen endured financial stringency, public apathy, political vilification, academic indifference, and institutional hostility in order to provide in the literary journal Meanjin a mirror that would provide for his fellow Australians the image of the just city.

Book 1 Title: Just City and the Mirrors
Book 1 Subtitle: Meanjin Quarterly and the intellectual front, 1940–1965
Book Author: Lynne Strahan
Book 1 Biblio: Oxford University Press, 314 pp, $25 hb
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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For thirty-four years Clem Christesen endured financial stringency, public apathy, political vilification, academic indifference, and institutional hostility in order to provide in the literary journal Meanjin a mirror that would provide for his fellow Australians the image of the just city.

In her history of this endeavour, Lynne Strahan duly honours those who collaborated with Christesen in his self-appointed task and records the dismal tale of those who actively sought to destroy him or who merely, with the virtuous arrogance of the righteous, found good reasons for doing nothing when vigorous action was needed. But the book, quite properly, has one hero, Christesen himself, and one villain, the University of Melbourne.

Read more: John Mclaren reviews 'Just City and the Mirrors: Meanjin Quarterly and the intellectual front,...

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