The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

For many years the idea of having convict descendants was something to be ashamed of, but not anymore. ‘A convict in the family’ is now almost a badge of pride, although as the Founders and Survivors project on Van Diemen’s Land convict records has shown, the life histories of people transported to Tasmania were not necessarily the optimistic stories of redemption and upward progress that we might like to imagine. Annette Higgs’ book On a Bright Hillside in Paradise, set in 1874 takes a more clear-eyed view of Tasmanian rural life, where ‘collisions’ with the indigenous people and the ‘convict stain’ were still within living memory. Based on her own family history, this is the story of three generations of the Hatton family, eking out a precarious living on a small land holding on the west coast of Tasmania, in a place rather ironically called ‘Paradise’.

Into this ‘Paradise’ come two Christian Brethren preachers, a trope more familiar in American rural stories than Australian ones, who convert members of the Hatton family to varying degrees, along with many others from the Paradise community, in a mixture of faith, curiosity, lack of other excitement and life disappointment.

The story is told from five different perspectives. It starts with Grandmother Eliza whose convict father married her off to a fellow convict who was violent to her and fathered multiple children upon her. She now sits in the corner of her adult daughter’s house, watching the family, and she is full of stories and secrets from the past. We move to the oldest son, Jack, who is converted by the preachers, and stays on the family farm. Susannah is Eliza’s daughter and Jack’s mother, drained by her many children and too much sadness and death. Her son Jack’s brother Eddie, takes up the story, but he is the one who strikes out on his own, after falling out with his brother. Their sister Echo rounds out the book, sharing her brother Jack’s faith but still close to her brother Eddie.

Not much actually happens in the book. There is an ongoing rivalry with the Dunstan boys; the indigenous Coleman boys hold knowledge of older ways; there is a tragic accident and subsequent guilt; there are births and deaths. Small things are part of big things. The same events are told in each section, adding a little more detail each time, widening out each time and through another perspective to have other significances. These are the stories that are handed on through families, shaping later generations’ sense of family history.

Higgs captured well the sameness and the precariousness of farming life, and the narrowness of vision under the wide expanse of sky, mountain and bush. She has obviously done her research well, and it rings true. I did keep expecting something to happen more suddenly and randomly, but instead this is a slow unspooling of small events into a bigger meaning, with individuals placed against a wider backdrop of ‘history’. It is beautifully written, with a slow, even pace but I found myself anticipating a jolt that never came.

My rating: 7.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

As I was visiting Cambodia, I wanted a short survey history of the country and this book, part of a series of ‘Short History of Asia’ series fitted the bill. John Tully was a professor at Victoria University (now retired), and as well as writing labour history, he also has written on Indo-China generally and Cambodia in particular. It’s a very accessible book, without footnotes but a reading list at the back. It was good start for a reader who wanted the whole sweep of Cambodian history, not just the Pol Pot era which tends to define our idea of Cambodia. He covers 2000 years, from the state of Funan, which predated Angkor right up to 2005, when the book was published.

Chapter 1 ‘The People and their Environment’ starts off with a geographical description of Cambodia, emphasizing its flatness in the middle and the huge Lake Tonlé Sap, the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia, and the Mekong River which breaks up into tributaries at Phnom Penh before flowing into the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.

I found Chapter 2 ‘Cambodia before Angkor’ fascinating. There was settlement of hunter-gatherers from the Stone Age onwards, and the Kymer-Mon people settled around 3000 BCE after migrating from the north. By the first century CE there was the Funan civilization, a literate, Indianized society which relied on the trade routes stretching from Persia to China. It was followed by the rise of Chenla, which may have been two principalities- Chenla-of-the-Land and Chenla-of-the-Water. The people spoke an archaic form of the Cambodian language, and they were the ancestors of the modern Kymers. It was king Jayavarman II who decided to shift his centre of power from the Mekong up to the Siem Reap region north of Lake Tonlé Sap.

Chapter 3 goes through the shift to Angkor, and the monumental legacy at Angkor Wat. He discusses how the temples were built, and the sheer manpower that it must have taken to construct them. He goes on to discuss what we know about the common people of Angkor from the inscriptions on the monuments, which detail punishments and provide information about the social structure, clothing and slavery. I thought that he did a really good job here in making Angkor a living, vibrant, populated culture, something which can be forgotten when you’re looking at ruins. He enters into the debate over water, and the contribution of ecological factors to the decision to move back to the Mekong quatre-bras region, although as he points out Angkor Wat was not abandoned as such. He emphasizes the arrival of Teravada Buddhism, displacing the earlier Sivaism and Mahayana Buddhism.

Chapter 4 ‘From Angkor’s End to the French Protectorate’ sees 1431, and the Siamese sacking and burning of Angkor, as a turning point. The Siamese in Thailand to the west (The Tiger) and the Vietnamese to the east (the Crocodile) both threatened to absorb the weakened kingdom completely. By the late 18th century, a Dark Age had descended on the country. The time of grand monument building was over. The road and canal system fell into disrepair, and village life predominated. Siam and Vietnam didn’t want to confront each other directly, so they used Cambodia as a buffer. Although there was a period of relative peace under King Ang Duang who set up his palace at Udong, increasing rivalry between the French (who had colonies in Vietnam) and the British (who had influence in Thailand) saw Duang’s oldest son, Prince Norodom, turn to the French for support in 1863.

The French protectorate lasted between 1863 and 1953 (Chapter 5). The treaty signed by Prince Norodom on 11 August 1863 gave France the right to station warships at the Quatre Bras (Phnom Penh), gave privileges to the Catholic Church, and granted free trade to the French throughout the region. The French embarked on a program of reform including the creation of private property in land, the abolition of slavery, cuts to royal spending, and legal and administrative restructure. I hadn’t really thought about the implications of the fall of France to Germany in 1940. The French Indochina Governor-General Admiral Jean Decoux supported Vichy and set up concentration camps, introduced the fascist salute and the goose-step and ritualized chanting of Petain’s name. He readily agreed to Japanese requests to station troops throughout IndoChina. Norodom Sihanouk came to the throne in 1941 as a baby-faced 19 year old. After the war, France granted some autonomy to Cambodia, but still maintained control over the military and foreign relations, finance and communications. There were elections and the start of political parties, and a constitution was ratified in May 1947. There was a coup in 1952, probably fomented by Sihanouk – Tully really doesn’t like Sihanouk- who assumed power directly and dissolved the democratically elected government.

Chapter 6 ‘Sihanouk, Star of the Cambodian Stage 1953-1970’ looks at Sihanouk more closely. Sihanouk likened Cambodia to an ant under the feet of two fighting elephants- the U.S. and the Soviet Union. He maintained neutrality- or perhaps it was more a matter of playing on both sides- and needed to maintain his own position at home while preserving the integrity of his borders. In 1955 he abdicated in favour of his father, and became more directly involved in politics. He introduced the idea of the Sangkum, a merger of political parties, into a one-party state which set the tone for politics for the next 15 years (and perhaps is still visible in Cambodia’s politics today too). When his father died, he allowed himself to be ‘persuaded’ to become head of state, introducing a form of ‘totalitarian democracy’. He spent heavily on education and health, introduced a series of 5-year plans and state construction. Although he tried to repress the Cambodian communists, his foreign policy moved sharply to the Left, moving away from U.S. support and towards China and Russia.

A brief five years as a republic, in Ch. 7 ‘The Doomed Republic 1970-1975’ saw a coup against Sihanouk, probably tacitly supported by the CIA. Sihanouk joined hands with his former Kymer Rouge enemies to removed the ‘usurpers’. Prime Minister Lon Nol was crooked and second-rate, but he served at various times as both prime minister and president (and later Field Marshall as well). By this time, Nixon had initiated an invasion under Operation Shoemaker, which included massive bombing, napalm and atrocities against civilians particularly (but not exclusively) by Vietnamese troops. Fighting continued, and the Kymers Rouges (Tully uses both in the plural) guerillas took Phnom Penh.

Then followed ‘Pol Pot’s Savage Utopia’ between 1975-1979 (Chapter 8). What I like about Tully’s book is that this four-year period, which so dominates our perception of Cambodia, is just part -albeit a horrific one- of Cambodia’s history. By highlighting the war and disruption prior to 1975, Tully goes some way to explaining why the Kymers Rouges were able to take power: the society and economy had been traumatized by five years of war. Prince Sihanouk became the figurehead of the new regime, although it was made clear to him that he was only a figurehead. The chapter is only 30 pages in length, but Tully captures well the madness and cruelty of the regime. The irony is that it was Vietnam, the traditional enemy, that put an end to ‘Democratic Kampuchea’, rescuing Cambodia from the nightmare.

Chapter 9 ‘Painful Transition: The People’s Republic of Kampuchea’ looks at politics since 1979. Here Sihanouk’s fear of being an ant under elephant feet was realized. The West had such a fear of Vietnam and China, that they continued to recognize the Pol Pot government despite knowledge of what had occurred during their regime. Over time, attitudes towards China thawed, and Vietnam was no longer seen as an expansionary communist regime. How slippery is Sihanouk! Now that Pol Pot was no longer embraced by the West, he started distancing himself from him. We see in this chapter the increasing presence of Hun Sen.

The final chapter ‘Towards an Uncertain Future’ starts with the 1993 elections, overseen by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia. Sihanouk tried to put himself as the head of a coalition government, acting of president of a council of ministers and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. However, he had to settle for returning to the throne as King Sihanouk, playing a ceremonial role in a regime dominated by Hun Sen, who had emerged as the undisputed strongman.. At the time of writing (2005) 50% of Cambodia’s budget came from overseas aid, corruption was rife, there was an AIDS/HIV pandemic, and a burgeoning ecological crisis. Although wanting to avoid being a Cassandra or an oracle, his conclusion was not particularly hopeful:

Looking back over the past quarter of a century (let alone the earlier Dark Age that beset Cambodia in the first half of the 19th century) it is difficult to imagine that anything worse could befall the Khmers. Cambodia has staggered from crisis to crisis since 1970 and in the absence of a developed civil society there is little check on the arrogance of government and the corruption of the administration. With entrenched rulers primarily interested in their own power and wealth, there seems little prospect of change in the future.

End of chapter 10 – (e-book)

I found this book really useful. It gave me the wide span of history that I wanted, and it was pitched at the right level for someone unfamiliar with the history. It had maps, and a list of acronyms, and it managed the balance between international and internal politics, and the day-to-day experience.

My rating: 8.5

Sourced from: purchased e-book

This unsettling novel is based on a true story. Set in Stockholm in 1930, Lina Dahlstrom is dying of tuberculosis and despite her sister’s misgivings, is drawn into the sphere of an eccentric doctor, Carl Dance, who claims that he can cure her. When she dies, his obsession with her grows stronger, and he embarks on a repugnant and criminal scheme to keep her as his own for ever.

I knew, from reviews that I had read of the book, that it was based on a true story, although there is only a single phrase “based on true events” on the back cover. I do wonder how that shaped my response to the novel, because its plot line is so visceral and distasteful that I would have otherwise put it aside as a form of torture porn. The knowledge it was “based on true events” meant that the plot could not be dismissed so neatly.

The story is told in four narratives, each roughly approximate in length, that move the story along chronologically. Part I is told by Greta, a young tobacco factory worker, who is frantic to get medical assistance for her sister Lina, who is floating through tuberculosis, rather indifferent to her fate – apparently one of the emotional manifestations of tuberculosis. With few resources, Greta urges her sister to accept the offer of help by Dr. Dance, even though she feels uneasy around him. Part II is told by Dr Dance as he becomes increasingly unhinged in his obsession with Greta’s corpse, and it is here that my scoffing at the implausability needs to be tempered by my remembrance that there is a kernel of truth here. I think that this is probably the most disturbing, and the best written part of the book. Part III is told by Lina’s corpse – hard narrative trick to speak on behalf of a corpse, but others have done it too- as the sheer perversion of Dr Dance’s actions are perpetrated on her. Pericic gives her a wry humour that is not apparent in the first section, through her sister’s eyes, but perhaps a sensibility that is more 21st century than 20th century. The final Part IV is told from the perspective of Dance’s wife Doris, as she is pressured both by Dance and his friends, into maintaining a veneer of support for Dance when he appears in court. Indirectly, we see another side of Dance here, as he wheedles and manipulates Doris, who is another of his victims.

Apparently ‘Exquisite Corpse’ is a form of drawing game- something that I only learned when looking up reviews of the book. It’s where players each draw a part of an animal on a sheet of paper, unaware of what the other players have drawn beforehand, leading to the creation of a weird, implausible monster-animal. In a way, the four part structure of the book replicates that, with each of the narrators unaware of what the others have said before them. It’s an interesting approach, but one that I don’t think Pericic carried off particularly successfully. Greta and Lina were both working-class girls, but I couldn’t hear their voices. Dance, although his actual profession is opaque in the book, is American and obviously possessed of a strong self-belief, but that does not come through particularly clearly. His wife Doris was presumably of a ‘better’ class and education than Greta and Lina, but that was not apparent.

I must admit, though, that despite the stomach-churning nature of the subject matter, I was drawn in by the book through a mixture of prurience and fascination. It reminded me a bit of Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl both in its time and setting, and also as a glimpse of something intimate that is so dissonant with the surrounding world.

My rating: 7.5 (hard to say)

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library, and read because I was fascinated by some reviews.

In Australia, we’ve recently witnessed the unveiling of the official portrait of a former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, ten years after he quit Parliament. It’s certainly ‘different’- almost reminiscent of a Graeme Base picture book illustration with lots of small symbolic details and, yes, a cat. It must be odd, having your portrait painted- especially an official one, which is going to represent you for posterity.

Art historian Julie Cotter’s book Portraits Destroyed looks at the official portrait, or representation, and its reception (generally negative) from either the sitter him/herself or their family, or by later generations. I was not surprised that she has worked on documentaries on Australian art previously, because this book and its chapter structure would lend itself very easily to a documentary series. I can already see her wandering around an art gallery as host.

She starts by considering Winston Churchill, whose now-destroyed portrait is represented on the front cover of the book. I only remember Winston Churchill as a fat, jowly old man and that’s very much the way that artist Graham Sutherland depicted him in 1954. It was unveiled by Churchill himself at Westminster Hall on 30 November 1954, on the occasion of his 80th birthday where he announced it “a remarkable example of modern art” (an ambiguous description, given that Churchill himself was a landscape artist of a very un-modern type).

He would have expected a portrait of a face that flickered with his life: a face that reflected the tumult, the devastation, the glorious victories, the might of the British Empire that the twentieth century had experienced. He would have wanted us to recognize ourselves in his portrait- to hear his speeches to the masses to keep fighting, to remain strong and unite against Hitler, to remember where we were when armistice was declared, to mourn those we had lost. He was his own muse, absorbed by his achievements

Instead, he was faced with the image of himself as a ‘down-and-out drunk who has been picked up out of the gutter in the Strand’ he concluded to his private secretary Anthony Montague Browne.

p. 37

After its unveiling, the portrait was never seen again. It was said that, after his death in 1965, his wife Clementine had burned it herself. This wasn’t strictly true: it was too big for her to take into the garden to set alight to it, and instead Churchill’s next private secretary, Grace Hablin, arranged for her brother to help her move it to his house, where it was burned.

It is fitting that the chapter about Churchill should be followed by a chapter about Hitler, given that they were arch-enemies. In this case, she hones in on an oil portrait painted by Dresden-born contemporary artist Gerhard Richter in 1962, who drew his portrait from an image showing Hitler at Nuremberg in 1934, “in a moment of strangulated shouting, hysterically commanding, his face elongated and distorted” with his right arm across his body (p. 44, 45) It was exhibited for the first and last time in 1964, and then Richter (who had since defected from East Germany) destroyed it himself, probably by cutting it to pieces. Richter himself had joined the obligatory Hitler Youth, and his schoolteacher father Horst, was drafted into the military in 1939. When he returned, he was a broken man, unable to teach because of his Nazi associations. Richter’s uncles were killed, his mentally ill aunt was killed under the Nazi’s T4 program of large-scale euthanasia. Cotter suggests that Richter’s destruction of his own work allowed “the release of a stultifying hatred”, but could also have been because of concern about the work’s impact in 1962, when Nazi ideology still circulated.

Chapter 3 ‘Presidents and Dictators’ looks at American presidents: Hayes, Roosevelt -who had two portraits, one he didn’t like by Chartran, and another which he did by John Singer Sargent- and Kennedy; Stalin; Mubarak in Egypt; and Mugabe. Chapter 4 ‘Royalty and Nobility” looks at English and French royal portraits; portraits of Imperial Roman women, especially Agrippina, and the Egyptian portrayals of Queen Hatshepsut. The Medicis used portraiture to express their power during the Renaissance, with an interesting portrait of Bianca Cappello, who bore The Grand Duke of Tuscany an illegitimate son. Then there are the portraits of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I and the absent portraits of Lady Jane Grey. She then moves to the present day with over 150 official portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, including one by Lucien Freud, and the slashed portrait of Lady Diana Spencer which is now one of the National Portrait Gallery’s most popular exhibits.

Chapter 5 ‘Why Not Mao?’ returns to dictators, and I’m a little surprised that she didn’t place this chapter immediately after Chapter 2 which dealt with Hitler. As she points out, without wanting to lessen Hitler’s atrocities in any way, Mao was responsible for 50-80 million deaths if the Great Leap Forward is combined with the Cultural Revolution. Yet the West has not had the same resistance to displaying Mao’s image, and it is ubiquitous in China itself, (albeit, only by official portrait painters),looming over Tienanmen Square. She then explores Andy Warhol’s images of Mao, prompted by reading in Life magazine that Chairman Mao was the most famous person in the world. There has been little concern expressed about Warhol’s images, given the level of antagonism to portraiture of other leaders responsible for deaths on such a massive scale (p. 146)

Ch. 6 ‘Whitewash: Erasing Black History in the West’ examines the fraught issue of art representing black/white history. There was resistance to white artist Dana Schutz’s portrait of Emmett Till, murdered in the American South in 1955, when the rights of white artists to represent black people was brought into question. She explores the representation of Australian indigenous people by William Westall, who accompanied Matthew Flinders in 1801, and Tom Roberts’ representation of nineteenth century indigenous people in the Torres Strait. She discusses Mount Rushmore, U.S. Confederate statues, and John Batman’s statue here in Melbourne, and their removal or disfigurement, before moving on to the desecration of Eddie Mabo’s image on his grave (I did not know about this). Then there is the destruction of a mural representing indigenous political figures on the side of the Uniting Church’s Wayside Chapel in Bondi in 2016.

In her final chapter ‘Artists Destroy and Destroyed’, she looks at the disappearance of Benjamin Duterrau’s group portrait, the 5 metre long The National Picture, painted in 1840, which I had never heard of (I am familiar with his other paintings of Tasmanian indigenous people). She discusses the rivalry between Degas and Manet, and the reuse of canvases by Van Gogh and Picasso. She looks at the politically driven attacks on artwork, like Suffragette Mary Wood’s slashing of a portrait of Henry James by John Singer Sargent, and a similar attack by Anne Hunt on John Everett Millais’ portrait of Thomas Carlyle. Rolf Harris’ portrait of Queen Elizabeth II has disappeared from public view, along with his other portraits. Then we have the Spanish cleaning lady’s attempts to ‘touch up’ Ecce Homo by Martinez in a Spanish church, and the slow drip, drip of the wax portraits of Urs Fischer, created in order to be destroyed.

As you can probably tell, this is a discursive book that takes us to many paintings. Unfortunately, she has a limited of number of portraits included in the book, so you need to rely on her descriptions (I resisted the temptation to Google them). This was not as much of a drawback as you might think, because the book is more about the context and process of creation/destruction of the portrait, rather than the portrait itself. There is enough theorizing in the book to make it more than just a gallery-hop, and you are always aware that she is an academic/historian writing from a theoretical framework and informed knowledge. But thankfully it eschews the insufferable mumbo-jumbo that clags up a lot of writing about art, and is thoroughly readable and enjoyable. Now I just have to wait for the series on the ABC which I am sure will follow.

Rating 8.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library