Gallery Notes.

Art is a strange posing of discoveries, a display of what was no more than possible. For it is the task of the creative artist to come up with ideas which are ours, but which we haven't thought yet. In some cases, it is also the artist's role to slice Australia open and show it bizarrely different, quite new in its antiquity. Half a century ago, Sidney Nolan did just this with his desert paintings and those of drought animal carcasses. I recall seeing some of these at the Peter Bray Gallery in 1953 and being bewildered by their aridity: a cruel dryness which made the familiar Ned Kelly paintings seem quite pastoral. Nor could I get a grip on his 'Durack Range', which the NGV had bought three years earlier. Its lack of human signs affronted my responses. The furthest our littoral imaginations had gone toward what used to be called the 'Dead Heart' was then to be found in Russell Drysdale's inland New South Wales, Hans Heysen's Flinders Ranges, and Albert Namatjira's delicately picturesque MacDonnells. Nolan's own vision was vastly different: different and vast. It offered new meanings and posed big new questions.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

Memories of Vin Buckley, Spelt from Sibyl’s Golden Leaves [poem]

Tribute poem for Vincent Buckle

Poems

The right life I am my beloveds and my beloved is mine Angles of repose This morning Migration In a sea fog Penguins For comrades in solitary confinement Greater flamingoes snipe Oystercatcher One sooty falcon Lesser kestrel Two ravens The nest in tatters That pair of pigeons Over a cup of tea And gathering of swallows twitter The speech of birds Early morning May Bird brigade

Paddy's Pictures. "Patrick White, Painter Manqué: Paintings, Painters and the Their Influence on his Writing" by Helen Verity Hewitt. [review]

The latest interpretation of Patrick White's work comes from Helen Verity Hewitt, who builds convincingly on her assumption that '[i]n his writing White is constantly attuned to the possibility of borrowing from the visual arts'. Starting out from a suasive account of how Klee and the cubists played their part in the middle section of "The Aunt's Story", Hewitt describes the likeliest filiations from White's fascination with paintings to his building of fiction. Book by book, she moves through White's career, from the early days of Roy de Maistre's influence in London down to the exuberant "The Twyborn Affair", a favourite of Wallace-Crabbe's. Fortunately, or perhaps wisely, she does not touch on "Memoirs of Many in One", nor on the memoir that has become so widely known as "Claws in the Arse".Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

No Free Ride. "The Bright Shapes and the True Names: A Memoir" by Patrick McCaughey. [review]

"The Bright Shapes and the True Names" is an autobiography-to-date by a man of many parts, a natural extrovert who has directed three major art galleries, as well as having been a youthful Monash professor. As the title, drawn from his admired teacher Vincent Buckley, indicates, he has sustained much interest in poetry and drama as well. On both sides of the Pacific, his life so far has been a colourful one, his stutter imitated in a thousand conversations. But he has always had to be on his guard against becoming merely what Yeats called ‘a smiling public man’.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

Here Be Mermaids. [poem]

PoemAustralia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

In the Grip of It All. [poem]

PoemAustralia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori