The gaze of dogs who don’t understand and who don’t know that they might be right not to understand.

—Italo Calvino

A few days ago, while I was out strolling harmlessly near home, a savagely snarling cattle-dog sprang at my hand. His mistress had him on a short, stout lead, and no harm was done.

When my wife and I married eleven years ago, the priest who celebrated our nuptial mass caused scandal by requesting (it being a Mass celebrated according to the 1962 Missal) that communicants knelt and received the host on the tongue. Benedict XVI’s insistence on the same at the recent World Youth Day Mass is, therefore, a subtle but significant shift.

The biggest enemy of truth isn’t the lie, it’s the myth!

—The West Wing

The writing of Tasmania’s history has now deteriorated into a formula not dissimilar to Midsomer Murders. Scholarship has been replaced by scriptwriters locked into the same old cast of characters, the same old set-piece plots, the same old locations and the same old ideology-driven notions of an island steeped in murder, massacres and genocide. Indeed the latest three episodes of Midsomer Murders almost sum up the present academic mindset on Tasmanian history—Episode 57, A Picture of Innocence; Episode 55, The Axeman Cometh; Episode 56, Death and Dust.

To be conceited is permissible only for personages with a substantial amount of truth behind their conceits, and Robert Murray Helpmann (born in 1909 with just one final n, to which he added a second one around 1933, presumably to suggest a touch of internationality) is unquestionably one of them. This book about this distinguished multi-artist born in Mount Gambier traces his phenomenal rise on various steps of the cultural ladder. It outlines these steps pragmatically after the comprehensive research which gained Anna Bemrose her PhD in 2003.

Following the recent screening of Keating! The Musical on ABC2, David Barnett wondered in the Canberra Times at the production’s sheer “malevolence, and the hatred from which it arises”. The eponymous hero of the show is portrayed as a wronged and tragic figure who saved Australia from an evil gnome called Bob Hawke. Now, in the Keating version of history as brought to us by David Love, we go one better. Here the principal anti-hero to emerge is not Bob Hawke (who in Love’s book is made to disappear pretty much altogether), but Bernie Fraser, the former Treasury official who Keating appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank.

Davenport Jones, an expert on twentieth-century art, who made his debut in Ian Callinan’s novel The Missing Masterpiece, reappears in this new novel, once again to be battered about by the rapacity and philistinism of the art world as well as the ambitions of a number of assertive women.

A normally businesslike acquaintance asked about my topic [Brideshead Revisited]; in return I asked whether she had read the novel. Uneasy silence followed. Then, with unbusinesslike shyness she replied: “Thirty-seven times. I was an alcoholic, and I feel so close to Sebastian that I can’t stop reading the book.”

In Buenos Aires the Crime Museum has a room of glass boxes of decapitated heads preserved in formalin. And dotted around the globe are other museums whose musty rooms hold jar after jar of miniature horrors: body parts of forgotten races, condemned characters and unrecognisable organs.

Hirst’s is an unusual case in that his art’s origins lie properly in the left-wing anti-art movements of the late 1960s yet his art has largely been embraced by private buyers, at least, by those plying trades among the less acceptable faces of capitalism, such as money traders and ad-men.

It is a matter for extreme regret that nothing good or positive came out of the controversy arising from the recent publication of a photograph of a nude thirteen-year-old girl by Bill Henson. The Australian art world missed a golden opportunity to explain to an obviously compliant public what art is and how it can be distinguished from pornography.