“Autumn Laing” – an appreciation
Seldom, I suspect, has an Australian novel met with the rapturous critical acclaim showered on Autumn Laing, Alex Miller’s latest and seemingly greatest offering. When it appeared late last year there were accolades aplenty: ‘a novel of bravura intensity and insight,’ …. ‘inhabited by characters whose reality challenges our own.’ …. ‘a novel in which facts are forever being bent to the service of ideas,’ …. ‘a...
Read MoreNolan’s Covers
Abstract: During his lifetime, Sidney Nolan prepared artwork used on the covers of at least 80 books – this large number reflecting the importance of literature for Nolan. This piece does not examine the influence of literature on Nolan’s life and work in any detail, but rather gathers together in one location, illustrations of the many books for which Nolan either designed covers or which were designed using his works, commencing with his first cover in 1943 for Max Harris’...
Read MoreNolan’s “Mrs Fraser”: Reconstruction and Deconstruction
Abstract: Sidney Nolan’s painting Mrs Fraser has long been regarded as emblematic of his animosity towards Sunday Reed. Painted on Fraser Island only months after he left Heide never to return, the work has inflamed viewers for more than 60 years. Nolan’s time at Heide and Eliza Fraser’s rescue from ‘savages’ a century earlier are so well known as to demand little retelling. Nolan lived in a ménage à trois at Heide with Sunday and John Reed and departed in...
Read MoreEliza’s landfall
Abstract: Both Sidney Nolan and Sunday Reed are associated with Eliza Fraser – he through his paintings, and she through his linking of her and Eliza in the theme of betrayal. The essay Threads and the paper Mrs Fraser: Reconstruction and Deconstruction both examine this relationship. This article provides a more detailed account of Eliza Fraser’s time on Fraser Island and her rescue, and examines in detail the role of the two convicts John Graham and David...
Read MoreThreads
‘I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own.’ Montaigne. This present essay traces the threads that bind the lives of six figures from Australia’s past: Eliza Fraser, David Bracewell and Ludwig Leichhardt in the nineteenth century, and Sunday Reed, Sidney Nolan and Patrick White in the twentieth; who if not all national icons, have nevertheless left their mark in legend, culture, art and literature. They make an unlikely sextet: the earlier trio steeped in adventure, one willingly, the others less so, all treading new paths across a hostile land; the later trio steeped in art and literature, each in their own way also treading new paths across the artistic landscape of that same continent.
Read MoreSidney Nolan – an overview
Sidney Nolan is one of the best known Australian artists, and needs no introduction. Creator of the iconic Ned Kelly helmet emblem, for sixty years his paintings and his life have been scrutinised, sanitised, scarified and sensationalised in countless monographs, biographies, catalogue essays and weekend magazines. From the artistic truancies of his St Kilda ‘kitsch heaven’ and the lyrical palettes of his Heide years with their magical Kellys; through his central Australian landscapes, his...
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