October 2011

Arts & Letters

‘Autumn Laing’ by Alex Miller

By Janine Burke
'Autumn Laing', By Alex Miller, Allen and Unwin, 464pp; $39.99

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.

From the front page

Members of the Kanakanvu tribe perform at a Saraya harvest festival, Donghua Village, Taiwan.

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?

Image representing a film still of abstract colours

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 precariousness

Image of David McBride

David 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 protections

Illustration by Jeff Fisher

Mars 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 alien

In This Issue

Performance art masterpiece

Mike Parr - ‘Close the Concentration Camps’, 2002

John Bell rehearsing 'King Lear'. Sydney Opera House, 2010. © Greg Wood/AFP

Bowing to the bard

John Bell’s ‘On Shakespeare’

Illustration by Jeff Fisher.

Summit season

Julia Gillard, foreign policy and the summit season

Popular music masterpiece

Sarah Blasko - ‘As Day Follows Night’, 2009


More in Arts & Letters

Emily Kam Kngwarray, Anmatyerr people, not titled [detail], 1981

A 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 inescapable

Image of Agnieszka Pilat with robot dog, in front of painted wall

The rule of threes: NGV Triennial

The sprawling show’s exploration of technologies and pressing politics takes in artificial intelligence and deep-fake photojournalism

Black and white close-up photo of Sigrid Nunez

Animal form: Sigrid Nunez

The celebrated American author’s latest book, ‘The Vulnerables’, completes a loose trilogy of hybrid autobiographical and fictional novels

A public-housing brick three-storey building in Ascot Vale

A house provided: Preserving public housing

The architectural practice proving that refurbishing public housing can be less expensive and disruptive than demolition for new projects


More in Noted

Cover of ‘Question 7’

Richard 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

Scene from ‘The Curse’

‘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 show

Cover of ‘Wish I Was Here’

M. John Harrison’s ‘Wish I Was Here’

The uncategorisable English author delivers an ‘anti-memoir’ meditating on the profound relationships between memory, imagination and fiction

Cover of ‘The In-Between’

Christos 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 desires


Online latest

Image representing a film still of abstract colours

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 precariousness

Image of David McBride

David 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 protections

Installation view of the Kandinsky exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, showing three framed abstract paintings hanging on a wall

Kandinsky 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 abstraction

Image of Margret RoadKnight playing guitar and singing.

The 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