Endlessly Seeking Gordon

by John Izzard

Gordon Barton: Australia’s Maverick Entrepreneur,

by Sam Everingham;

Allen & Unwin, 2009, $35.

Sam Everingham’s book on the life of Gordon Barton is a uniquely bi-polar sort of romp through the life and times of what the author well describes as “Australia’s maverick entrepreneur”. It’s bi-polar in the sense that the reader is never quite sure which side of Barton’s brain (or personality) is being discussed, examined, exposed or on-sold.

Is it the young Gordon Barton, bent on impregnating as many of the female members of the Sydney Push as he can; the dedicated anti-Vietnam War activist; the asset stripper who was happy to use interest rates of 20 to 25 per cent (up to 70 per cent annually) from the suburban loan-sharking company DAC to finance corporate takeovers; or is it the Sydney-based businessman with a wonderful feel for social justice, fun and media adoration?

Overloading the Story

by Robert Murray

Overloading Australia—How Governments and the Media Dither and Deny on Population,

by Mark O’Connor and William J. Lines;

Envirobooks, 2008, $19.95.

It’s really an old-fashioned pamphlet grown obese, I thought as I read this important but somewhat misguided little book on one of the great issues of our age—the impact on the globe of an enormous human population of big consumers.

Environmental debates—for and against—seem to be ideally made for pamphleteering, with so many matters too complicated for even Quadrant articles, but not worth an expensive, time-consuming book. Pamphlets could also accommodate the typical range from the cranky to the seriously scientific.

To Be Called by Your Name

by Lee Shrubb

Alva’s Boy: An Unsentimental Memoir,

by Alan Collins;

Hybrid Publishers, 2008, $29.95.

Ever since people have been able to write their memoirs, many have set to. Some have been quite shattering—even world-changing—many more have been fascinating, tender, funny, brave, eye-opening or eye-glazing. Here we are at eye-opening Alva’s Boy. It has an added piquancy in that it is local in both time and place: and it happens that I have a good deal in common with Alan: he was born in 1928 and I in 1929, and I, like him, arrived at Bondi Beach Public School in 1938; and while he lived at 48 Francis Street, I lived in the parallel one behind his at 47 Sir Thomas Mitchell Road. And much else we shared, between reading The Saint and Phantom comics, frequenting local penny libraries and being Jewish.

Lake Pedder Protagonist

by Giles Auty

Pedder: The Story. The Paintings,

by Max Angus;

Lake Pedder Restoration Committee, 2008, $70.

Max Angus’s moving narrative sets before us a gentle and dignified man’s understanding of what was once an intensely inflammatory issue: the flooding of Lake Pedder in the cause of a hydro-electric power scheme. Lake Pedder was the jewel in the crown of Tasmania’s formerly untarnished south-western wilderness area.

If subsequent conservationists were even half as reasonable as the author and illustrator of this slender but beautiful book their causes would be served much better.

Angus chronicles what he sees as the tragic flooding of an area of outstanding natural beauty in the early 1970s in the light of his impassioned association with Lake Pedder which began in 1953. Unlike many who support so-called green issues today, Angus does not automatically characterise his opponents as either villains or vandals. What the book concludes, in fact, is that the flooding of the lake was ultimately unnecessary and that the famous, shallow, sand-fringed site could and should be restored one day to its former glory.

The Rhythm of the Brush

by Olivier Burckhardt

Chinese Calligraphy,

Ouyang Zhongshi and Wen C. Fong, editors;

Yale University Press, 2008, US$75.

The pervasiveness and fondness for the written word among the Chinese is legion, yet only in the last few decades has Chinese calligraphy begun to be appreciated as an art form in the West. Even such an eminent sinologist as Karlgren wrote in 1923 that “the brush has debased Chinese script”. This is in sharp contrast to the prevailing Eastern view that it is by the brush that the script has been exalted into the purest of art forms.

Of the several factors that kept so many for so long blind to the inherent aesthetic force of the squiggles of ink applied with brush onto paper or silk, the lack of a comparable art form in the West is largely to blame. The choice of the word calligraphy to translate the Chinese term shufa was also unfortunate, given that the Western word is by and large associated with a decorative craft rather than the visual arts, and etymologically derives from “beautiful writing”. The Chinese practice of shufa (handwriting mode) is by no means bound to a stylised handwriting or lettering, nor is it a mere slave to beauty.

Not until the advent of modern abstract art, which came to prominence via such artists as Kandinsky, did the West begin to have a comparable form in the visual arts that was not shackled to external representation but focused simply on the idea of point and line; perhaps it is only through an appreciation of abstract art that the West could begin to fathom the 3000-year-old Chinese tradition of wielding the brush to form the dots and strokes that make up Chinese writing.