
Who is Taiwanese?
Taiwan’s minority indigenous peoples are being used to refute mainland China’s claims on the island – but what does that mean for their recognition, land rights and identity?October 2011
Arts & Letters
‘Autumn Laing’ by Alex Miller
The Heide mythos, which has grown from the circle that gathered around arts patrons Sunday and John Reed at their home in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, is a tantalising mix of passion, vision, heartbreak, betrayal and great art. Without the art, Heide would be merely a soap opera.
Sunday was the chief engineer of an ambitious plan to invigorate Australian culture – to get it up off its knees where it snivelled before Mother England. Her plan to vivify European modernism here worked and, its proofs are in the careers of Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester and Charles Blackman.
Reed nurtured, inspired and infuriated successive generations of artists and poets from the ’30s to the ’70s. She was sexy, devouring, uncompromising, sentimental and loyal, a princess who threw in her lot with the ratbags and never limped home to Toorak. Sunday learned from being a failure – at trying to be an artist, a good wife and a mother. She understood pain and rejection, and had no qualms about meting them out to others.
Enter Autumn Laing, the eponymous heroine of Alex Miller’s new novel, based on Reed. It’s 1991 and she is 85 years old, living alone at Old Farm amid the ghosts of the past. She’s in a rage fuelled by self-disgust at her frailties, a pesky biographer, an uncomprehending doctor and an impertinent nurse.
Autumn is writing her account of her affair with Pat Donlon and of the damage done to his wife, Edith. It’s a bruisingly moral tale. Edith, the catalyst for Autumn’s memoir, is a figure both wounded and courageous, who is counterpointed with Arthur, Autumn’s husband, an anguished and dignified man. Edith unflinchingly draws boundaries that the other characters are too egocentric or compromised to acknowledge. What price great art? Everyone, it seems, has to pay.
Miller has fun with his cast of characters and humour, while black, ripples through the narrative, leavening Autumn’s more corrosive judgements and insights. Miller engages so fully with his female characters that divisions between the sexes seem to melt away and all stand culpable, vulnerable, human on equal ground. Miller is also adept at taking abstract concepts – about art or society – and securing them in the convincing form of his complex, unpredictable characters and their vivid interior monologues.
Miller cites himself as helpless before Autumn’s demand to take centre stage while the novel he’d planned to write was about Nolan. Sunday/Autumn was an expert at telling creative folk what to do and, in this case, as in many others, she was right. Miller has triumphantly made art from her life.
Like Lovesong, Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell, three of Miller’s finest works, Autumn Laing explores a geography of emotion – an intimate, treacherous, burning zone where redemption is gained through slow and painful self-interrogation.
Who is Taiwanese?
Taiwan’s minority indigenous peoples are being used to refute mainland China’s claims on the island – but what does that mean for their recognition, land rights and identity?Tacita Dean and the poetics of film editing
The MCA’s survey of the British-born artist’s work reveals both the luminosity of analogue film and its precariousnessDavid McBride’s guilty plea and the need for whistleblower reform
The former army lawyer had no choice but to plead guilty, which goes to show how desperately we need better whistleblower protectionsMars attracts
Reviving the Viking mission’s experiments may yet find life as we know it on Mars, but the best outcome would be something truly alienA clear view: Emily Kam Kngwarray at the NGA
A major exhibition of the late Anmatyerr desert painter is welcome, but the influence of the rapacious art market on Aboriginal art is inescapableThe rule of threes: NGV Triennial
The sprawling show’s exploration of technologies and pressing politics takes in artificial intelligence and deep-fake photojournalismAnimal form: Sigrid Nunez
The celebrated American author’s latest book, ‘The Vulnerables’, completes a loose trilogy of hybrid autobiographical and fictional novelsA house provided: Preserving public housing
The architectural practice proving that refurbishing public housing can be less expensive and disruptive than demolition for new projectsRichard Flanagan's ‘Question 7’
A slim volume of big ideas that takes in H.G. Wells, chain reaction, Hiroshima and the author’s near-death experience on the Franklin River‘The Curse’
Nathan Fielder directs and co-stars in an erratic comedy about the performative benevolence of a couple creating a social housing reality TV showM. John Harrison’s ‘Wish I Was Here’
The uncategorisable English author delivers an ‘anti-memoir’ meditating on the profound relationships between memory, imagination and fictionChristos Tsiolkas’s ‘The In-Between’
The latest from the acclaimed Australian author throws scorn at those who claim virtue and the complete control of their desiresTacita Dean and the poetics of film editing
The MCA’s survey of the British-born artist’s work reveals both the luminosity of analogue film and its precariousnessDavid McBride’s guilty plea and the need for whistleblower reform
The former army lawyer had no choice but to plead guilty, which goes to show how desperately we need better whistleblower protectionsKandinsky at AGNSW
The exhibition of the Russian painter’s work at the Art Gallery of NSW provides a fascinating view of 20th-century art’s leap from representation to abstractionThe unsung career of Margret RoadKnight
Little-known outside the Melbourne folk scene for decades, singer Margret RoadKnight’s 60 years of music-making is celebrated in a new compilation