Portrait Gallery - Part Two

The 'Australia Now' gallery features those of current importance, figures in leadership, business, sport, science, medicine, literature, performing arts, film arts, and visual arts.



Fred Hollows by Kerrie Lester

Fred Hollows' portrait by Kerrie Lester is a fabulous image of oil on hand-stitched canvas. The bold, cheerful colours and sharp creases befit someone so instrumental in the treatment of eye disease and improvement of sight.

Jane Campion by Peter Brew-Bevan

The photograph of Jane Campion by Peter Brew-Bevan (1969) really stands out as she sits in front of a bookcase, and her image is reflected in a shiny table, looking at us twice over.

Keith Urban by Peter Brew-Bevan



Peter Brew-Bevan is also responsible for the 2007 photograph of Keith Urban. This is another classic, depicting him slouching against the wall, hands in pockets and looking down as though slightly self-conscious by the celebrity side of musicianship.

David Campese II by Paul Newton

In contrast, Paul Newton's portrait of David Campese (2000) is astonishingly direct. Also dressed in casual black shirt and jeans, he leans against a wall with his arms folded. It's a similar pose to the one adopted tby Keith Urban, but he looks straight at the viewer and, although not arrogant, he seems very confident and comfortable.



Neil Armfield by Adam Cullen

 In Adam Cullen's portrait of Neil Armfield (2010) the theatre, film and opera director is rendered in vibrant oils against a sage green canvas. The vivid colours of his bright pink flesh, blue jacket and yellow dog drip down the canvas as though anxious to escape their artistic confines. Although they are both sitting, it is not comfortably.

Angry Anderson by Sally Robinson

Angry Anderson by Sally Robinson (2006) is an intriguing acrylic on canvas. Although wearing a black singlet and covered in tatoos, he is smiling and looks far from angry. His flesh (both the painted/ inked variety and his naked bald pate) is comprised of coloured dots like an example of pointillism or a pixellated version of an identity-supressed subject, while conversely featuring him in microscopic detail.

Robert Drewe (In the Swell) by Nicholas Harding

Robert Drewe in the Swell by Nicholas Harding (2006) is a fantastic work of oil on Belgium linen. The author is painted in slithers of pastel paints like gelato, looking good enough to lick.

Glen McGrath by Sally Robinson

Glen McGrath by Sally Robinson (2003) is made up of stripes and dashes of synthetic polymer paint on canvas conveying an attitude of movement and deceptive motion as he strokes the ball almost imperceptibly with two long fingers.

Cathy Freeman by Kerrie Lester

Cathy Freeman's portrait by Kerrie Lester (1999), rendered in oil on harnd-stitched canvas, is almost naïf art in style with the black outlinesserving to enhance the power and the strength in the long limbs. Smiling and stretching against a chain-link fence, there is a suggestion of explosive speed and wild spirit wild spirit about to be unleashed.

Eddie Mabo by Gordon Bennet

Newspaper print and aboriginal symbols against a skyline of modern buildings make the perfect background for Eddie Mabo's portrait by Gordon Bennet. The passion of the land rights decision with all its inherent shame, hurt and justice is evident in this synthetic polymer paint on canvas.

Senator Neville Bonner by Robert Campbell Junior

Senator Neville Bonner was Australia's first indigenous parliamentary member. In this 1990 portrait by Robert Campbell Junior, he is surrounded by stylistic depictions of animals with the red, black and gold flag of the aboriginal people.



Patrick White by Brett Whitley

The 'star' of the show is a featured exhibition of portraits of author Patrick White by artist Brett Whiteley to coincide with the one-hundredth anniversary of White's birth. There was an artistic and ideological stoush between the pair, which gives this exhibition a particular edge.

Friday Five: Canberra Insights

Since arriving in Canberra, I've spent a lot of time reading leaflets and being a tourist. Among my ramblings I have visited the Botanic Gardens, the National Library of Australia, the Embassy District and the National Portrait Gallery. No doubt over the coming weeks I'll post more information about the above, but in the meantime here are some highlights:

5 Things I've Learned Since Coming to Canberra:

1. Canberra comes from the Aboriginal word 'Kamberra' meaning meeting place
2. Canberra has the lowest unemployment rate and highest average wage in Australia
3. Patrick White is the only Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1973)
4. After the mutiny on the Bounty when Captain Bligh was cast adrift near Tonga with 18 crew members, they travelled 6,000km to Timor - only one man died on the voyage, killed by islanders on Tofoa when they landed looking for water
5. King George III posthumously granted Captain James Cook a coat of arms featuring a globe (the only one to do so) and the motto 'nil intentatum reliquit'; he left nothing unattempted.

Books read in August

The following are short reviews of the books that I read in August. The marks I have given them in the brackets are out of five.

Landings – Jenny Pattrick (3.3)
Having written so successfully about the West Coast mining settlements, Jenny Pattrick turns her hand to the folk up the Whanganui River at the turn of the twentieth century.

She begins by describing the people who live there; the Maori families and farmers; the Chinese market gardener trying to eek a living from the soil; the people trying to make a profit from the timber industry; the former convicts escaping their past life; the nuns who run their peaceful convent; the hoteliers at Pipiriki and the day trippers in search of refined serenity. There are good folk and there are hell-raisers and their stories proceed to interconnect like the tributaries of the mighty river.

Each chapter begins with an advertisement or an article from the paper, extolling the virtues of the land available to buy, the houseboat, the homestead and the river itself, described as New Zealand’s Rhine. There are also admonishments against the evils of drink and the infiltration of the Chinese. These are swiftly followed by the author’s own descriptive prose which brings the river of a hundred years ago to life. One of the big issues is the dichotomy between progress and preserving the rights of the people who have lived on this land for all their lives.

Jenny Pattrick gives each character a voice, and writes their passages in different tones and tenses. She makes the issues personal, fleshing out the dry bones of history and writing a novel with characters it is easy to care about.

My Name is Will – Jess Winfield (4)
Jess Winfield is one of the founding members of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, so he knows his stuff. Quotes and allusions scattered throughout the novel will have Shakespearean fans acknowledging them with a wry smile, while there is nothing to trouble the serious scholar. The subtitle is ‘A novel of sex, drugs, and Shakespeare’, and this is one book you most certainly can judge by the cover.

Willie Shakespeare Greenberg, an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz attempts to write a thesis about Shakespeare and the fact that he was a Catholic. The only problem is that he hasn’t done any research, and when his father threatens to cut him off, he becomes a drug runner to earn some funds, delivering an enormous magic mushroom to a mysterious buyer. Meanwhile William Shakespeare, playwright extraordinaire, is struggling to avoid religious persecution while holding down his job as a schoolteacher in Stratford-upon-Avon.

As Willie begins to investigate the religious persecution of the times, it is clear that this was a deadly serious matter. The Shakespearean sections are an intriguing interpretation, including Shakespeare hiding in a priest hole, attending a secret Catholic mass with his parents, and being tortured on the rack. There are some macabre descriptions of priests being hanged, drawn and quartered, which prevent the novel from being all beer and skittles.

In one chapter, the hero becomes them both, drifting in and out of a drug-induced hallucination. Never mind that this is a bad plot ploy – like stepping out of a shower and waking from a Dallas dream – it has taken Willie nearly all novel to work out the parallels that were blatant to us from the beginning. The ‘drugs equals forbidden religion’ line has many flaws, namely that the fear of being discovered as a practicing Catholic can hardly equate to using drugs, although this is the author’s premise.

Eventually Willie decides that he is most impressed by “the timelessness of the characters. The diversity. They’re so recognisable, even to a modern reader. It’s almost as if he was the very first writer to think like a human being.” This becomes the premises of his thesis, although it is far from a new idea. If he is to be forgiven for his unoriginality, it is because he puns in sixteenth century English better than anyone since the great man himself.

On the whole this is a fun romp through Shakespearean England and 1980s undergraduate California that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Voss – Patrick White (4)
This is a wonderfully colourful novel about the death of one era and the dawning of another; when men set off to explore and adventure and women stayed behind to await the triumphant homecoming. Voss leads a troop of disparate men with assorted aims on an expedition across the centre of Australia. Laura Trevelyan is forced to remain behind in Sydney and endure, but Patrick White has brought a strength and dignity to Laura that raises the novel to new heights. She scares men by being intelligent and telling them exactly what she is thinking when they ask.

The men are forced to work together to attempt to survive against the cruelty of nature. The class divisions fall away and the new nation is built on money and beauty. In this land, there is a chance for equality as everything is distilled to its essence in the crucible of the Australian outback. The aborigines are silent spectators of their attempts to conquer rather than co-exist.

The language is beautiful with descriptions that seem reminiscent of George Eliot or Jane Austen; both imperious and sly. Told with wit and humour, it brings humanity to a barren landscape with an ever-present reminder that we are merely passing through.

Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4.5)

The half a yellow sun of the title refers to the Biafran flag, established to represent the new country of Black Africa, a splinter group of Nigeria. The deadly struggle that ensues has repurcussions for the protaganists of this novel.

There is Olanna, a young woman married to Odenigbo, a revolutionary and intellectual. Her twin sister, Kainene, is bitter and cynical and living with a white man, Richard. There are tensions between the sisters, exaccerbated by their partners, but their differences fade into insignificance against the background of history.

Some beautifully poetic passages clash with gruesome depictions of massacres and the politics of idealism contrast with the horrors of civil war. The spectre of colonialism hangs over the novel and the reader is forced to take a stand only to be told that their opinion does not matter unless they are personally involved.

Sibling rivalry, female liberation and coming of age - through Odenigbo's houseboy - are crammed into this novel which strives to tell a story. It is not until the end that we know who's story it is and who is telling it. It is character-driven enough that we do not feel as though we are being preached at, or given a history lecture.

Not all change is good and not all war is civil. There are so many unanswered questions in this complete but oddly unfinished story, that it feels as though the next chapter is still being written.