Book review: The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

The Lieutenant is a classic, moving tale of a man discovering his selfhood and destiny through his encounter with another race at the dawn of modernity. It offers nothing less than a new template for Indigenous and non-Indigenous interaction in Australia.

Kate Grenville’s spectacularly successful previous novel, The Secret River, dealt with the involvement of an emancipated convict – a character based on one of her own ancestors – in a ruthless massacre of Indigenous people in early New South Wales.

The Secret River was famously criticised by Inga Clendinnen and other historians for masquerading as history, a charge Grenville strongly refuted. She covers a similar theme in The Lieutenant and here again her modus operandi – combining the fiction writer’s imaginative leap with painstaking historical research – pays off handsomely.

The Lieutenant is loosely based on the life of William Dawes, who was the First Fleet’s astronomer as well as a mathematician and linguist. Centuries ahead of his time, he left notebooks of his stay in New South Wales that paint a beguiling picture of his attempts to communicate with the local Cadigal people and learn the structures and lineaments of their complex language. He seems to have been helped in this by what was, as far as the written account suggests, a non-sexual friendship with a young Indigenous girl, Patyegarang.

*******Plot elements given below*******
Daniel Rooke is a gifted boy from a background of genteel impoverishment in the new scientific age. A talented misfit at the Portsmouth Naval Academy, he is fascinated by the stars, languages and mathematics, and the promise of unknown worlds they seem to offer. He dreams there is a place ‘somewhere in the world, for the person he was’.

When he goes to sea as a marine to fight the American rebels in the War of Independence, Rooke receives a brutal education in the harsh realities of naval life. But his real education begins when he sails to New South Wales as astronomer with the First Fleet, bound for Australia’s east coast where a white convict settlement is to be created.

What pulls Rooke towards New South Wales is a yearning for intellectual adventure, one that he will eventually be able to embrace with his heart as well as his mind. New and familiar shores abound in the novel, presaging and symbolising the lure of the strange and the human instinct for novelty. Portsmouth, Rooke’s childhood home, offers a harbour where he dreams of the unknown and this dream seems to come true when he arrives at the exotic New South Wales coast.

There, in the first days of the young colony, Rooke encounters the local Cadigal people and forms a unique bond with a lively young girl, Tagaran. But relations with the local people and the settlers slowly disintegrate, and Rooke must choose between loyalty to the King and to his own emerging moral and emotional universe.

Rooke is a creature of the enlightenment, a true renaissance man. Yet in his role as lieutenant in the marines he finds himself repeatedly facing a dilemma that is, albeit in much more subtle forms, still inescapable today for some: being caught in a ruthlessly murderous machine that is aimed at material gain and also aided by the science and technology he adores. The horrors of unfettered capitalism interlock with the feudal structure in which Rooke is enmeshed to create an insouciant attitude to human life that renders Rooke himself vulnerable. The evil underbelly of empire is painfully exposed here.
*******Plot elements end*******

This is a work of huge imaginative power and grace. Grenville has a distinctive, authoritative take on the historical novel; rather than overburdening the reader with realms of historical fact, she wears her obviously considerable research extremely lightly. Historical details unfold as they are needed for the momentum of the narrative.

Subtle phrases such as ‘neighbour woman’ and ‘pinny pocket’ and a formality of tone in the dialogue suggest the past, but the language never strains to be authentic for the sake of it. Above all, Grenville wants to humanise her characters.

Nor does she attempt to give a panoramic view. Given that Rooke is part of the historic First Fleet and its first contact with the local people, this must have been a huge temptation. In fact the entire novel is told from Rooke’s viewpoint.

This works partly because, by the time he gets to New South Wales, Rooke is streets ahead of his fellow officers in emotional intelligence. But it’s equally effective when the more sinister machinations of empire are whirring away while Rooke is obliviously scanning the heavens for a comet. His belated understanding of the reality of his position catapults him further into the journey towards selfhood that he has already begun.

In this regard, Grenville’s eye resembles Rooke’s beloved telescope, homing in on the particular. This attention to detail is beautifully contrasted with the infinity of the universe that the night sky represents for Rooke, and that he returns his gaze to again and again, not just for scientific knowledge but for inspiration and reflection.

From Rooke’s perspective, Grenville slyly goes underneath the human skin of history, suggesting the drollery and range of motivations that would have lurked beneath the rituals of daily life. Scenes of the officers at dinner or on expeditions in the surrounding bushland are threaded with the kinds of human responses, sometimes so subtle that they would hardly have been visible, that history alone cannot offer.

Similarly, Grenville imagines how the strange new bushland environment would have affected not just human minds but human bodies: ‘unrelenting newness made for something like blindness. It was as if sight did not function properly in the absence of understanding’.

In these imagined reactions Grenville gives us what the history of public events cannot – the breathing emotions of real bodies, stuck in hierarchies of power and skill, yet displaying their individuality within those constraints. We also get glimpses of, and must imagine from a distance, what it must have been like for the labouring and sometimes raucous prisoners.

A similar distancing occurs in Grenville’s respectful treatment of the Cadigal people. She’s extremely careful not to try to present the narrative from their point of view, but the poise of the novel allows her to act as a kind of silent, benign witness of their complex reactions to this dramatic incursion into their lives.

Like Rooke, she can only guess at what some aspects of their behaviour – so different to Western responses – might have meant, but her guess is underpinned by a deep sense of their humanity. And in the character of Tagaran and the kin who surround her Grenville conveys a strong sense of a vibrant, functional society that is perfectly attuned to its environment.

While Grenville’s research does not draw attention to itself, it’s evident everywhere, from her descriptions of the workings of a musket to her detailed evocations of the ritual of shaving in the new colony. This also extends to the natural environment: you get the impression that she’s walked carefully through the modern incarnations of the various landscapes she describes, trying to imagine how they would have appeared at the time.

Critics have praised Grenville for the quietness of tone she achieves in this novel. There’s an attentiveness that is maintained even throughout scenes involving emblematic and sometimes tragic historical events. For example, the description of first contact between the First Fleet crew and a group of Indigenous men is imbued with a rich and almost sad irony:

The shield was a solid thing … but the ball had gone clean through it and left a ragged hole and a long split top to bottom. The old man picked it up. In his hands it fell into two pieces and he fitted them back together and touched with long fingers at where the ball had burst through the wood.

There’s plenty of drama in the confrontation of two starkly different cultures. But for Grenville, the drama must come from the emotional resonance of the moment, and she must wait, and the reader must wait, for it to reveal itself.

Yet this isn’t to suggest that the language is in any way slack – quite the opposite. We are always at the quiet heart of the action, seeing what needs to be shown and nothing else. There is not a superfluous word in the entire book.

In the novel’s mixture of humility and power, Grenville dramatises first contact as never before, conveying the excitement of encountering the other – for both sides. This human reaction to difference so often gets deleted from history, obscured by the economically convenient racism that usually followed initial contact.

Grenville quietly shows non-Indigenous readers the sense of creative opportunity and adventure with which we could be approaching Indigenous cultures. In particular, the emerging friendship between Tagaran and Rooke offers a template for a national conversation that could become a national adventure, and is partly what makes the book such a joy to read. The lively Tagaran herself, as well as the multi-layered relationship that develops between her and Rooke, provides the basis for this template:

It was more than intelligence, though Tagaran’s understanding was like quicksilver. It was more than assertiveness, though he watched her rapping out orders to the other children. It was a quality of fearless engagement with the world.

But the novel also suggests how a focus on economic and technological progress might obscure the primacy of the human story that is the basis of history. Technology certainly has a sacred place for the Westerners in the novel – the daily winding of the timekeeper on Rooke’s Australia-bound ship is nothing less than a religious ritual. However, human relations must also be attended to.

For example, following the First Fleet’s arrival, one of Governor Gilbert’s main priorities is to make contact with the Indigenous people and bring them ‘on side’. The importance of this rapprochement to a new colony with no knowledge of the terrain cannot be overemphasised. Similarly, Grenville’s descriptions of the Cadigal indicate their respect for and attentiveness to human culture and interactions, and how secure in their humanity these people seem to have been.

The book, then, is deeply political but in no way is it politically correct. Nor should it be seen as a substitute for history: hopefully it will send scurrying to the history books those interested readers searching for more background information. What it can do is bring alive to us a sense of the past as being no less visceral, chaotic and productive of human dilemmas than today’s complex world.
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Film review: Capitalism: A Love Story

If their effects weren’t so tragic, the antics of Wall Street and the US Treasury over the last couple of years would belong in a circus.

It was inevitable that sooner or later veteran documentary maker Mike Moore would get stuck into the people who brought us the Global Financial Crisis. In Capitalism: A Love Story he produces his own unique interpretation of what they actually did, and why the whole capitalist bandwagon is, well, stuffed.

Mike Moore’s political documentaries have been lauded for their irony and sense of the absurd, and his critique of the Bush administration, Fahrenheit 9/11, is the highest grossing documentary ever. However, in recent years he’s been criticised for deliberately presenting mistruths, showing baddies out of context, and exaggerating.

But this is Moore’s moment. It’s as if everything he’s been warning the American public about has come to pass. There’s no need to exaggerate or distort. The truth of US capitalism today is that, in its blatant enticement to greed and contempt for the average person, it’s simply unbelievable.

I haven’t checked all the facts Moore presents us with here, and, given his record, it’s likely that this movie contains at least one or two misrepresentations. Still, there’s something very direct about it, as if Moore himself can’t quite believe what he’s seeing.

In the wake of the GFC, more than 15 million Americans are out of work, while a house is foreclosed in the US every 7.5 seconds. Moore sets about finding out how this meltdown came to pass. He recalls a time when capitalism seemed a beneficent system, bestowing prosperity on all and creating a middle class by redistributing the wealth through fair, progressive taxation. He contends that greed – always a vital part of the system – gradually took over and invaded the political process.

For Moore, the rot started with Reaganism, which cut taxes to the rich and deregulated the financial system. The US now resembles the Roman Empire, and the middle class is being destroyed: one of the movie’s beleaguered subjects complains that increasingly there are only the super rich and the very poor, and no-one in between.

We don't just get to smirk at the now-familiar Wall Street villains in this movie. Far more disturbing than their obvious greed is the evidence Moore produces of the contemptuous attitude of a range of rich and powerful companies towards the average employee, citizen and towards democracy in general.

The movie does not stray from the familiar Moore formula – a simplistic but well crafted narrative arc; shots of and interviews with baddies and goodies; punchy popular culture footage to keep the humour and irony humming along; dramatic scenes of average Americans suffering at the hands of the ruthless; and stunts in which Moore confronts the baddies.

Although it isn’t as funny as Fahrenheit 9/11 – Bush, a focus of that film, is a natural buffoon – arguably the formula works even better than usual. Moore’s work is itself propaganda, yet we get plenty of archival footage of pro-capitalist propaganda that beautifully illustrates his point.

As with all good narratives, there’s a dramatic climax. I won’t give it away here, but Moore’s conclusions about the behaviour of Treasury in the wake of the crash are pretty disturbing.

Critics have claimed that Moore’s stunts are now getting hackneyed. In fact, Capitalism: A Love Story has fewer stunts than some of Moore’s other films, and while the ones in this film are fairly low key and not that dramatic, they have a certain moral authority.

As he’s been doing since his first film, Roger and Me, Moore brings some of his personal experience and history into the movie. Roger and Me was an exploration of the economic decline of the town Moore grew up in – Flint, Michigan – following the shift to Mexico of the General Motors plant that was the town’s economic lifeblood. Moore returns to that territory here, bringing his aged father to the industrial dump that was once the thriving plant, and describing the idyllic standard of living his blue-collar family enjoyed in the age of unionism. This personal footage helps brings the larger story of Reaganism alive.

All Moore’s films are aimed at addressing the American public and inciting them to change. Given the enormous power of evangelical Christianity in the US, Moore prudently focuses on the teachings of Jesus, humorously asking whether he would have been a capitalist. A Catholic himself, he tears aside the redneck stereotype of a religion whose radical social justice teachings are little known, interviewing some Catholic priests with startling things to say about capitalism.

Although Moore ultimately concludes that capitalism has failed, predictably he doesn’t offer any detailed options for the future, and many will find his conclusions too simplistic.

Don’t see this film if you want a detailed description of the actual economic crash. Do see it if you want to see some rays of hope amidst the wreckage: retrenched workers fighting back; victims of a mortgage foreclosure refusing to leave; renegade congressmen and women attacking the government’s bailout of the banks; and one amazing congresswoman inciting Americans to civil disobedience.

When it comes to documentaries, many people prefer to wait for the DVD rather than see them at the cinema because they’re not considered cinematic enough. But Capitalism: A Love Story deserves to be seen now because it is cinematic, and because it dramatises the horrors of the economic crash, and because Australians need to be perpetually warned about the dangers of embracing, even more than we already have, US-style capitalism. There but for the grace of God go we. Read more!

Exhibition: The Dwelling

The delicious shiver of anticipation I savoured on the Ghost Train as a ten-year-old at Luna Park came back to me at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s current exhibition for the Melbourne International Arts Festival, The Dwelling.

Disembodied voices, record players that turn themselves on, the sounds of gun shot and the crunch of angry footsteps are just some of the discomforting effects you’ll experience at this exhibition, curated by ACCA’s artistic director Juliana Engberg and organised by Hannah Matthews.

The home in Western culture is supposed to be a place of security and comfort, but crime statistics and the thriller genre suggest otherwise. The ghostly or monstrous can be as frightening as the humans who might want to harm us. The psyche, too, can be a terrifying, unpredictable place to dwell.

The non-living are particularly disturbing because they confound the opposites of presence and absence. If a house is said to be haunted, we talk about the possibility of a 'non-human' presence, but ghosts themselves were once human. Is any place ever really empty? And aren’t we all haunted, in a way, by our immersion in popular culture, our personal and family histories, and our own imaginations? Fairy tales, too, which most of us grow up with, echo the dark themes of sexual taboo and the fear of annihilation that structure the psyche.

These contradictory ideas and questions swirl about the exhibition, which can be enjoyed on both superficial and more profound levels.

Sofia Hulten’s ‘Familiars’ 2007 is a series of DVDs shown on small video screens throughout the exhibition space. They depict humans creating what seem to be ‘ghostly’ or uncanny sabotages of the normal domestic environment. Six glasses balance precariously on a stove top; a stain in a patterned carpet ruins the aesthetics; smoke oozes slowly and evocatively from a wooden chair.

These domestic objects bear the marks of human intervention, perhaps conflating the uncanny with the idea of humans leaving their marks on the material world. There’s also the question of whether conventional ‘scariness’ is compatible with the Western middle class ideal of domesticity, as well as a possible, gentle send-up of a middle class obsession with domestic rituals.

Crime and absence are both explored by Callum Morton in ‘International style’ 1999. Peering inside Morton’s large model of a ghostly white modernist home, with its huge, platform-like verandah and shifting disco-inspired lighting, reveals that it’s populated only by electrical apparatus.

These cords and boxes, themselves betraying human intervention, produce the soundtrack of a happy crowd of partygoers – the house, with its large uncurtained windows, is trapped in a time-warped modernist dream. Surely it must have wanted the lives of its inhabitants to be visible to the outside world in all their post-war consumerist perfection – indeed, the urge to look inside is invited, although it is rebuffed by this familiarly banal technology.

But the modernist dream has a dystopian outcome, dramatised by the disturbing soundtrack (make sure you stick around to the ‘end’). And that in turn evokes a thousand American 50s and 60s B-movies with subtextual critiques of modern life.
Modernism, with its obsession with the future, now becomes a receptacle of past, not-quite-buried societal and economic dreams. There are many different kinds of hauntings going on here.

Finnish filmmaker and artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s ‘The house’ speaks to a very different notion of the dwelling. I first saw this striking video installation at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2004 and I was just as impressed the second time around. The work operates so well on a visceral level that the complicated ideas it deals with seep effortlessly into the unconscious.

The installation plays out on three huge screens adjacent to each other. It appears to represent the testimony of a sufferer of psychosis, and has its basis in interviews Ahtila conducted with female sufferers. The subtitled text, which is a soundtrack rather than being spoken by the central character, offers a first-person account of a young woman whose internal reality is dissolving with terrifying speed. Vivid images of the character in her house, in a peaceful rural setting, map her disintegration.

The house begins as a receptacle of safety and domestic routine but then everyday sounds become disengaged from their sources and the external world begins to invade, such as when a cow casually wanders inside. Eventually, nothing is separate from anything else: ‘The ship you see on the horizon is the same ship as all the other ships, and this ship is full of the refugees who come to every shore’.

The house can be seen as a metaphor for the psyche invaded by mental illness, with its frightening and surreal sensations. This is augmented by the strong colours and clear and arresting images, all somehow heightened by the fact that it’s happening in broad daylight. This same contradictory brightness and the character’s release into flight suggest there are mystical experiences for the sufferer and ultimately a sense of oneness that is liberating. Ahtila’s work goes beyond the experience of mental illness to consider the breakdown of the boundary between the internal and the external in the areas of ideas, representation, and subjectivity.

‘Opera for a small room’ 2005, by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, crystallises and condenses the feeling of uncanny absence that Callum Morton’s work plays with. The ‘opera’ plays out in a life-size wooden structure with several window squares the viewer can peer through. The sense of decay, age and abandonment is powerful: what has this room been, with its dated suitcases, stacks of old records and shaky chandelier?

While there are traces of the loungeroom or even a radio broadcast booth, the room’s suggested past domesticity is subsumed among the clumsy apparatus. Five old record players turn on and off as if by magic to produce a static-y spoken narrative by a disturbed-sounding male against the strains of Puccini. Sudden lighting changes and creepy sound effects unsettle the viewer even as they propel the narrative forward. Surrounded by darkness, we are compelled to attempt to make sense of the mise en scène, the work corralling our own susceptibilities and imaginations.

Domestic horror is suggested by another installation by Cardiff and Bures Miller, ‘Cabin fever’, 2004. Again, the viewer peeks inside a wooden structure, this one smaller and offering only a single view of a diorama: a sparsely wooded foreground fronting a rural cabin with lit windows.

Here, lighting and sound tell a chilling narrative that is always playing both off stage and in our imaginations. Wearing earphones, the viewer is asked to provide much of the imaginative fuel, but braking cars, the sinister crunch of heavy footsteps and the muffled sound of a telephone ringing suggest that some rural version of Raymond Chandler is about to be played out!

An American dystopia appears in a different guise in David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s ‘House II: The Great Artesian Basin Pennsylvania’, 2003. It’s a DVD projection featuring a gothic-looking house that made me think of the famous one in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Water gushes out of this grey, rather ghostly looking double storey and floods the foreground. The blown-up nature of the image made me think of Howard Arkley’s airbrushed effects.

The exhibition also features a video work by David Noonan and Simon Tevaks, and a 1983 hour-long film by Chantal Akerman, The Man with the Valise. I only caught the end of this because it was screening at particular times rather than on an endless loop – contact ACCA for screening times.

The Dwelling is showing at ACCA, 111 Sturt Street Southbank, until 29 November. Read more!

Film review: Mao’s Last Dancer

The ballet pic and the biopic come together in a new Australian film that celebrates a tall poppy that this country can now claim as its own.

Mao’s Last Dancer combines several classic myths – rags to riches, the blossoming of an amazing talent against great odds, and the quest for love. But the results are ultimately disappointing.

The film is based on the extraordinary autobiography of acclaimed ballet dancer Li Cunxin, who escaped bitter impoverishment in rural China when he was selected to train with Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy during the Cultural Revolution.

Li’s second escape came when, dancing with the Houston Ballet on a cultural exchange, he was offered a contract and made a dramatic defection to the West, causing a diplomatic crisis and media frenzy. Li now lives in Melbourne with his Australian-born wife and family. The book, first released in 2003, has become a worldwide bestseller with more than 400 000 copies sold.

The film brings to life the decades after the fateful day when communist officials arrived at Li's village school in the north-east province of Shandong and made the last-minute choice that would whisk the 11-year-old away from his large, close family to train in Beijing.

It’s almost saved by the strength of the story itself. Li’s tale has a strong emotional trajectory and is spiked with conflict, pathos and triumph. His astonishing career, the drama of his defection and his continuing loyalty to his beloved parents (beautifully played by Joan Chen and Wang Shuang Bao) keep the plot barrelling along. They also allow the audience to engage emotionally with the story.

The intersections of Chinese history with Li's personal story are as disturbing as they are novel. There's an anachronistic element to the early scenes: we see Li's peasant parents toiling in the fields; Li and his six brothers in their tiny, smoky stone hut; and the chilly village schoolroom with its framed picture of Mao in pride of place. These scenes have an air of authenticity, with cinematographer Peter James creating a grainy, washed-out look that suggests a vanished, little-known world.

This atmosphere also prevails in Li’s early life at the Academy, where indoctrination and military-style discipline prevail amid stark interiors. It’s shockingly harsh and militaristic, the emphasis on gymnastic ability and technique rather than artistic expression, with teachers arguing over whether Chinese dancers should learn from Western styles or ignore them.

The stranglehold the Chinese Government had on its citizens is dramatised in appearances from the doctrinaire Madame Mao. And even when the young Li first gets to the US on a cultural exchange he’s subject to the Chinese consulate-general’s warnings about the dangers of Western women.

The film fits neatly into the ballet film genre. The ghost of the great Baryshnikov, who defected from Russia to Canada in 1974 and has supplemented his successful dancing career with acting, is never far away.

Indeed, the dancing in the film is its great strength, with choreography by Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon, former artistic directors of the Sydney Ballet Company. (This goes for the studio scenes as well as the huge set pieces.) Highlights include some extravagant communist kitsch at the Beijing Academy that’s great fun to watch; excerpts from an Australian Ballet production of Swan Lake; and a beautiful dance scene featuring Li and Mary McKendry (Camilla Vergotis) with not a point in sight.

Shot in China, Australia and Houston, Mao’s Last Dancer features, both in major roles and as extras, a huge array of actual dancers. These include Chinese dancers, as well as former and current members of the Australian Ballet and the Sydney Dance Company; watch out for Camilla Vergotis, Madeleine Eastoe and Stephen Heathcote in supporting or cameo performances.

The decision to cast dancers in the lead roles mainly pays off. Three actors play Li at various stages of his life, and given that the youngest is a gymnast and the other two dancers, they deserve congratulations.

First time actor Chi Cao plays the adult Li. He’s a versatile leading man – handsome, lithe, and a superb artist with a strong screen presence. In real life a principal with the Royal Birmingham Ballet, his agile grace ignites the ballet scenes, and when Li fills in at the last moment to play a Don Quixote pas de deux, learning the moves in three hours, it’s an absolute highlight.

Chi succeeds in conveying Li’s culture shock as he arrives in the seemingly decadent West and is confronted with ATMs, blenders, and outrageous sums being spent on clothes. His innocence and naivety in a blossoming relationship with dancer Liz Mackey is delicately handled. But the innocent, bewildered persona becomes laboured after a while, as does the joke of Li’s being lured by the capitalist evils of 1980s Houston.

Unfortunately dancer and actor Amanda Schull, who plays Liz – a pivotal role – isn’t quite up to scratch, and she's out of her depth in the scenes that require heavy emotion.

But the acting is not the main problem here. A major issue is that there’s rarely enough complexity to distinguish the characters from the generic. For example, veteran Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood does his best in the role of Ben Stevenson, artistic director of the Houston Ballet and a vital mentor for Li; his ease and gracefulness make you believe he’s a born ballet teacher. But there’s simply no depth to the role, nothing to distinguish him from a thousand dedicated teachers.

This may or may not be a result of the film's origins. Without having read the book, I can’t comment on whether or not it is limited in its ability to convey the complexities of the main players, including Li himself. But the film at least fails to bring the characters fully to life.

Thematically it also lacks originality. The narrative of an individual striving tirelessly for artistic excellence is now hackneyed, and it demanded a more original treatment here. The young Li supplements his luck and talent with a penchant for gruelling practice – we see him toiling after hours in the studio to perfect his split jumps, and hopping up stairs with sandbags around his ankles to strengthen his muscles.

Of course it’s interesting to contemplate how the real-life Li has combined the discipline and technique he learned in China with the artistic freedom and idea of individual achievement that the West must have offered him. But in many ways this is simply a rehashing of the tale in which the individual fulfils the American Dream. Indeed, the film sometimes resembles a propaganda piece for Western values and the freedom and opportunities of the American way of life.

There’s no doubt Mao’s Last Dancer comes to us from a prize-winning team. Producer Jane Scott was behind the award-winning Shine and director Bruce Beresford has achieved international fame with films such as Black Robe and Paradise Road. The screenplay is by the venerable Jan Sardi, who wrote the screenplay of Shine.

But although it offers constant drama and some suspense, ‘light entertainment’ is perhaps the best description of Mao’s Last Dancer. With more sophisticated characterisation and exploration of its themes it could have been much more.

A last note: veteran Australian actor Penne Hackforth-Jones plays a supporting role as Cynthia Dodds and it’s inexplicable that she’s not in the cast list on the film’s official website.

Verdict: dramatic, visually strong at times, but ultimately undemanding

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Book review: The Danger Game by Kalinda Ashton (Sleepers)

In The Danger Game, first-time novelist Kalinda Ashton provides a critique of postmodern society that is bruising, sophisticated and trenchant.

In its strong engagement with the politics of disadvantage, the novel might be offering itself as the fictional complement to The Land of Plenty by Mark Davis, a recent plea for the transformation of Australia’s stymied body politic.

The Danger Game succeeds in nailing the foreclosing and separating effects of economic rationalism in a far more subtle way than, say, Three Dollars, whose characters were not only helpless victims of the Kennett government but of the novel’s crusading author, Elliot Perlman. The book’s also a welcome change from the relentlessly upper middle class milieus of so many of our beloved baby boomer authors.

At the heart of The Danger Game is a tragedy that explodes into the lives of a struggling family and leaves them stunned and emotionally stunted for years to come.

******Plot elements discussed below******
It’s 1991. Alice Reilly and her younger siblings, twins Louise and Jeremy, live with their parents in a ‘housing commission’ area in a ‘fibro-cement townhouse … with a tacked-on brick porch out the front and a scrap of garden for a backyard’. Alice’s family is rent by conflict between her bitter, alcoholic father and angry, overworked mother. Louise courts danger and seeks to live on the edge while quiet, studious Jeremy is prey to school bullies and seeks solace in the mysteries of science and the natural world.

But Jeremy’s attempt to gain entry to an academic school sets off a series of events that lead to the family home going up in flames. The tragedy that ensues tears this fragile family apart.

Years later, each family member struggles alone with the aftermath of the tragedy. Alice has turned her back on the past by pursuing a teaching career in a struggling secondary college and is now embroiled in a non-committal affair with a married man, Jon. But with a desperate Louise knocking on her door and seeking answers about the past, she’s forced to confront the mystery of what really happened on the night of the fire.
******Plot elements end******

The Danger Game is concerned with the insidious violences of class, in a world in which the very concept is supposedly anachronistic. The novel seeks to reveal the straitened, subtle, myriad effects of poverty and disadvantage on family life. For Ashton, disadvantage hasn’t lessened with the refinement of the welfare state; it’s just as entrenched in 2009 as it was in 1991, when the first part of the novel is set.

It’s no surprise, then, that The Danger Game has been touted as a realist novel. Its purposes certainly fit snugly within the social realist tradition, but it combines this literary style with a good dose of grunge, and its plot structure is anything but remorselessly linear. The reader swings between three points of view: Jeremy in 1991, in the time leading up to the fire; Louise in the present; and Alice in the present.

In each case the reader enters the world of the character and has a sense of looking out from under their skin, of feeling, seeing and experiencing what they do. This is most evident in the sections on Louise; because she’s emotionally on the run, there’s an unending momentum here, a constant sense of both scenery and sensation slipping by:

You walk along the scratchy sand near the sea, the luxurious silence in tree-lined streets that whisper words of money and comfort, then the rubbish-trailed streets where men shuffle into boarding houses and women’s legs are puckered with goose pimples beneath short dresses, their hips swinging as they pace up and down the block.

Ashton has been compared to novelist Christos Tsiolkas, which is understandable given the latter’s recent and stunningly successful exposé of modern relationships, The Slap. Ashton’s detailed evocations of the badlands of Melbourne and Sydney sometimes recall Tsiolkas’s ruthless dissection of inner suburban family life. But she’s a more lyrical writer than Tsiolkas, and her approach to sexuality is more nuanced.

Ashton’s characters spring to life through her unfailing, meticulous observations. Alice, Louise and Jeremy are very real, always earthed, and constantly shadowed by the material detritus that helps delineate them. There is no waftiness here, no sentimentality: at times the realism becomes almost documentary-like, and the novel attains a cinematic brightness, like a series of close-up shots: ‘The waitress thumped two glasses of water onto the table. Her hair, tucked firmly behind her ears, was the colour of muddy honey’; ‘when I started teaching I saw an earnest girl with intricate braids lean over to one of the shy girls who sat next to the door and say, “I’m going to set you on fire” ’.

At some points the clarity of the imagery reminded me of the brilliant Sonya Hartnett, but Ashton is less concerned than Hartnett with the stunning metaphor, instead building up images through accumulations of telling details. The scenes of Alice visiting her near-derelict father are painfully vivid; there’s so much compassionate but unremitting observation here, not just of defeat and marginalisation but of the continuation of some form of order and routine:

… he would have become used to the tiny calculations that made life possible: using teabags twice; checking your change; doing the divisions for the meal, the day, the week. Black and Gold butter, reading the newspaper at the library, the bargain trolleys at the supermarket.

The relationships are also richly imagined and as complex as they are straitened. Alice’s interactions with Louise and with her lover, Jon, are effortlessly naturalistic and full of emotional shorthand. The changes that take place in Alice’s emotional landscape are unanticipated, much like real life; we don’t really know what’s going to happen any more than Alice does, and the ending reveals an unexpected twist.

The persistence of trauma, the way past trauma grasps its victims and plays with them in different ways, is everywhere in this novel. For Ashton, public policies contribute to private traumas in complex ways, and trauma leads to personal dysfunction.

But Ashton wants us to understand that the urge to come to terms with the past is not an indulgent, middle-class illusion. Against a culture of forgetting, she wants to convince us that the past constantly invades the present unless its worst possibilities are faced: ‘the past is gone even while it bites at your skin and bleeds in your eyes’. Louise’s frantic attempts to find the truth seem to arise from a sudden realisation that her very existence in the future may depend on it.

But if, for the working class at least, the tragedies of the past are entwined with the subtle workings of capitalism, their social and economic underpinnings also bleed into the present. Alice has tried to let the past go and become middle class, but her unsatisfactory relationship with Jon, and a crisis that erupts at her college, force her to admit that she’s been stymied both emotionally and professionally:

I had learned to read clever books and wear smart clothes and argue about Freud with a man who already had a wife. Now I was hopeless at reaching the students I taught, distanced by my authority and their willingness to see through my forced optimism.

It’s a strength of the novel that none of the characters has a shred of self-pity, despite the poverty and discord they’ve experienced (although there’s plenty of self-sabotage going on). So while the story is a damning critique of social injustice, the characters never lose their agency.

My main beef with the novel is that it sometimes overdoes the attention to detail. Ashton occasionally relies too much on her talent for intricate observation and needs to make the odd sweeping Garner-esque statement. At one point I got a bit bored with the characters’ relentless focus on what had actually occurred on the night of the fire, for example.

And the plot moved too slowly at times: some sections were too long and seemed to be mainly there as set-ups for later sections. For example, the crisis at Alice’s school results in the involvement of the teacher’s union. The delineation of the crisis and the likely outcomes, told through a conversation between Alice and the union representative, is simply too detailed for the average reader, and the novel veers too close to trying to educate readers about the intricacies of union politics. These problems could have been fixed with a ruthless structural edit.

Despite my criticisms this is a strong, vivid, fully realised tale that deserves to be read for its own sake, and not for what Ashton might be capable of in the future, as is the case for many first novels. Although we can expect to hear more from her, with The Danger Game Ashton has already achieved much.

This book is only the third novel to be published by Sleepers, an independent publishing company that thrives on hard work, dedication and grants from the Australia Council. (Its last foray, Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam, has just won the Age Book of the Year Award, a huge coup.)

Sleepers deserves congratulations for nurturing the literary culture of Australia, and indeed Melbourne, and for bringing us talented first-time novelists such as Ashton who might otherwise be overlooked in the current economic climate. Read more!

Film review: Balibo, directed by Robert Connolly

The film reviewed below is based on actual events, events that have been germinal to Australian politics and Australia’s relationships with its Asian neighbours.

For this reason and because of my own interest in the story, I’ve claimed ‘blogger’s privilege’ for this entry and the review is unashamedly partisan – it should really be seen as a combination of review and comment. Because of the importance of the events dealt with in the film I’ve also included far more plot and factual background than I normally would in a review. Apologies if too much is given away.

In October 1975, in the last weeks of the reformist Whitlam government, five young Australia-based newsmen went missing in the garrison town of Balibo in what was then known as Portuguese Timor.

With the Portuguese colonialists gone, this tiny country was trying to build an independent government through its Fretilin forces. But the world powers had other plans – a looming invasion by Indonesia that had been sanctioned by the USA and the UK and encouraged by Whitlam himself.

And while refugees and journalists were starting to flee the fighting in fear of their lives, the five journos and cameramen – Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham and Tony Stewart from Channel Seven, and Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie from Channel Nine – were determined to discover the truth, and to send images of the invasion out to the world.

The Balibo Five were executed by the Indonesian military soon after filming the advance of the infantry troops into Balibo. They died because they were journalists relaying vital information. And in December, as the Indonesians swarmed the capital, Dili, an Australian freelance journalist who set out to discover the truth of their disappearance, Roger East, was also brutally killed.

The ghastly fate of the Balibo Five has been a national wound for the past 34 years, with the Australian Government remorselessly covering up its knowledge of the way they died to maintain its friendship with Indonesia. Balibo, directed by Robert Connolly (The Bank, Three Dollars) vividly dramatises the chain of events that led to their untimely deaths, while also shedding light on the death of the lesser-known East. But it does much more than that.

Balibo is a political thriller that unfolds in a semi-documentary style. Almost two hours long, it nevertheless moves at a brisk, efficient, near-perfect pace. The masterful hand of playwright David Williamson, who cowrote the script along with Connolly, is evident, but Connolly and Williamson parted ways when it became clear to the director that the Timorese, and not just the fate of the Balibo Five, needed to be the focus of the film.

This emphasis comes through in the film’s structure, which comprises two framing devices, one within the other. The first is an encounter between the nine-year-old Juliana Da Costa, a fictional composite of the hundreds of witnesses to the bloodthirsty invasion of Dili in December 1975, and veteran journo Roger East. Juliana meets and befriends East in the weeks after his arrival in Dili, and later witnesses his bloody execution on Dili Wharf. (Anamaria Barreto is an understated stand-out in this role.) The film opens with the adult Da Costa relating this traumatic event to the Timor-Leste Commission for Truth and Reconciliation.

Cut to shots of Roger East in 1975, before his trip to Timor, in a cushy public relations job in Darwin. A young José Ramos-Horta, a Fretilin leader, insistently offers him a job as head of a Timorese official news agency, to bring the truth of the struggle to the world. East finds out about the five missing newsmen and the impending Indonesian invasion, and he’s sold.

Another cut, to a few weeks earlier and the chaotic summoning of the five newsmen to an exciting assignment in Timor that will make their careers. As East and Horta travel south-west to Balibo through the Timorese mountains to find out the fate of the newsmen, this second set of flashbacks dramatise the newsmen’s doomed journey to the invading army and the emotional heart of Timor.

The odyssey of the newsmen and their unhappy end is signalled by grainy colour footage and camera angles reminiscent of aged television footage from the period. This has the obvious advantage of clearly signalling the flashback scenes, but it’s also a tribute to the journos and cameramen, their dedication to their vocation, their determination to get the story out no matter what. And it deftly turns these often torturous scenes into ‘news’ that should have been shown but wasn’t, ‘news’ that was covered up for too long.

Much of the main action of the film was shot in Timor-Leste, which adds further to the documentary feel. It’s especially poignant and powerful that the murder of the Five was largely shot at the small house, dubbed the Australia House, in which they were killed.

The character of Horta, a firebrand with brains, pervades the film. Looking like an Asian Che Guevara, Oscar Isaac gives Horta a combination of sexiness, impish charm and iron-willed certainty about his cause and the rights of his people.

Horta’s freshness and optimism are a counter to the jadedness of Anthony LaPaglia’s Roger East. LaPaglia, who specialises in world-weary characters, plays the 52-year-old East in a way that is predictably satisfying. His East is driven by a stubborn, obsessive determination, and a commitment to the truth that eventually becomes all-encompassing.

As East and Horta journey south-west to Balibo on foot in a quest to discover the truth about the newsmen’s disappearance, East becomes a stand-in for the white members of the audience and a symbol of an older, now wiser Australia, led by the Timorese in a discovery of this tiny country, so geographically close to us and so unforgivably forgotten. Horta, in turn, becomes a symbol for all countries trying to emerge from a colonial past.

The film’s own neocolonial urges are beautifully dramatised and countered by a fight between East and Horta in a swimming pool at an abandoned mission school. As they tussle in the water, Horta’s viewpoint – that the pending massacres of Timorese are what matters now – literally tussles with the film’s own urge to tell us the story of the Balibo Five while keeping the suffering of the Timorese as exotic background.

This anti-imperialist turn is repeated throughout the film. As East journeys further into the Timorese hinterland and confronts the ruthless military incursions already taking place, his awakening is reflected in the growing understanding of the five newsmen, just weeks earlier, of the rightness of the Fretilin struggle and the shocking indifference of the world.

The film continues to enact its own encounter with Timorese culture and aspirations. From the start it’s Timorese songs we hear on the soundtrack, political and military anthems that are sometimes sung by children. These are seamlessly combined with an original score by Australian Lisa Gerrard, as well as additional music by Marcello De Francisci and Sam Petty.

The camera embraces the beauty of the Timorese countryside, with sweeping scenes of picturesque mountain vistas and coastlines sometimes marred by Indonesian violence. More importantly, it uses close-ups to dramatise the humanity of the Timorese people – of women mourning as they bury the massacred; faces marred by shock and terror as the Indonesians swoop on Dili; Timorese children in wrapt silence as elders tell ancient creation stories. Connolly’s commitment to consulting with the Timorese and using Timorese actors, including as extras in the crowd scenes, pays off handsomely here.

In fact, one of my fears about the film before seeing it – which is not to do with the story itself but its representation – was that it would wallow in national congratulation of our eternal mythic figure, the larrikin. Thankfully it doesn’t. Of course, the larrikin turns up in the characters of the Balibo Five, despite the fact that only two were Australian; it’s impossible not to be charmed by the equal ability of these twenty-somethings to have a beer, muck around with the local kids, and thoughtlessly put themselves in harm’s way to get their story.

Yet rather than the larrikin ideal taking over, the newsmen’s casual but committed approach brings into full relief the tragedy of the slow death of journalism in Australia since the 1970s. Although there’s a joke between the journos about the relevance of Channel 9 – as early as 1975! – it’s simply impossible to estimate the loss of news values on commercial television between then and now.

The scene of the journalists’ unfortunate deaths is full of tension and sadness. It’s extremely moving, but to those who have known the story for years it might also be cathartic. I don’t mean this in any trivial way; knowing something evil has happened is very different from seeing the reality of it fully re-enacted in front of your eyes. This is the beauty of film: it brings significant stories into the public realm, and makes them part of the national story. Like psychotherapy, a re-enactment such as this can help to heal what has become a hidden national trauma for Australia.

There’s not a false beat in the film. The slow burn of the invasion, with the re-creation of warships lurking silently on the coastline, is chilling and the eruptions of planned violence and organised cruelty don’t spare the viewer.

One drawback of the documentary style, though, is that we don’t actually get to know the main characters very well. So even though the deaths of the six newsmen are shocking and confronting, we know next to nothing about their families and loved ones, the wider webs of their lives. This lessens the overall emotional impact of the film somewhat, although not the urgency of the story.

For it’s a classic tale that’s being played out here: the narrow practice of Realpolitik, which considers a country’s strategic interests only, pitted against the Western ideal of human rights. The idea of Timor-Leste as a new and emerging future nation also pulses through the film, giving a sense of hope that only the most idealistic participants of the time could have felt; the young Horta shows a touching prescience when he decides to go into exile to advocate for his young country.

The narrative arc of the film, and therefore the factual information at the end, is concerned with Timor’s eventual achievement of independence, so it can only hint at the horrific events that followed for years afterwards. Some reviewers have also rightfully complained about the film’s lack of information about the collusion of the Australian Government with Indonesia, a significant omission given the likely ignorance of an international audience about Australia’s role.

What the Australian Government ended up sanctioning was not only a military invasion but the brutal subjugation of a people. It’s estimated that about 200,000 Timorese people died in the three years following the invasion, and there was widespread, officially sanctioned rape, including that of young girls; sadistic torture and killing methods; attempted genocide through interbreeding; imprisonment, starvation and disease; and chemical destruction of forests, crops and livestock.

It’s important to note that despite the documentary feel, many scenes in the film are reconstructions that did not occur literally but represent a larger truth. The Balibo in Depth website has excellent information about the ways in which the actual events and the action of the film variously match and diverge.

At the heart of this film is a searing question about the moral basis of Australian democracy, and in particular the credentials of two leaders – Whitlam and Fraser – whom history has lauded for their common interest in social justice. The film ultimately questions the biggest myth of all – that Australia is a land that worships the fair go and champions the underdog –and exposes it as a load of old bulldust.

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Exhibition: Presentation/representation: photography from Germany, Monash Gallery of Art

Specker, Heidi
D’Elsi – Elsi 1, 2007
85 x 56 cm
Pigment Print
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany, 2007
Courtesy Fiedler Contemporary, Köln
Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany, 2007

If you missed the recent Andreas Gursky exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, don’t despair. Now’s your chance to look at what the next generation of German photographers are up to – and it’s well worth a trip along the hilly, gumtree-lined streets of Mount Waverley.

Presentation/representation: photography from Germany, at the Monash Gallery of Art, showcases the work of ten leading contemporary German photographers. They’re part of the generation that followed Gursky and his fellow practitioners Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer, who were taught by Bernd Becher at the famous Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. This exhibition has been curated by Thomas Weski, who also curated the Gursky survey at the NGV.

Technological developments such as digital processing and CGI threaten to destroy the concept of photography as a separate category of artistic practice. They’ve also helped to kill the notion that its role is to provide an authentic, neutral record of ‘real life’. Some artists, of course, combine photography with other media to produce work that is totally uninterested in the idea of an ‘original’.

The work of these younger artists suggests that such changes have only served to expand the category of photography, enabling them, as Weski puts it, to ‘explore its limits, or try out new possibilities of artistic creation’. These photographers have by and large embraced the new technologies, accepting that the photographic image is always a construct, thereby blurring the distinctions between photography and other more obviously artificial art forms.

Although it’s impossible to isolate an underlying theme in these ten disparate artists, there is often a willingness to embrace the realities of modern urban life without unnecessarily uglifying or abjecting them.

It’s pleasantly surprising to find that this kind of survey is still able to offer an experience of visual discovery, a certain delight in the novelty of unfamiliar if sometimes mundane worlds beyond the tourist trail, not necessarily in Germany. Surely this was one of the aims of Wiebke Loeper in her series An die Schwestern des Carl Möglin (To the sisters of Carl Möglin).

This series is a fictional response to ancestors of Loeper’s who migrated to Melbourne from their home town of Wismar in former East Germany in the nineteenth century. The two sisters kept in touch with their Wismar relatives by sending back descriptive letters and gifts from their new home, artefacts that have been largely preserved in Wismar, a town that has suffered economically since the reunification of Germany.

Loeper’s visual response, a series of colour photographs depicting modern Wismar, is accompanied by a poignant letter that offers these works as gifts to the sisters and inform them of the fortunes of their home town, which ‘has not prospered’. Loeper seems determined to preserve some documentary function for photography, even if she does not believe that objective reality is possible or even desirable. Her pictures also acknowledge intergenerational debts and communication, as well as the idea of change, itself in some ways under threat in a world increasingly stuck in an eternal present.

Medium, then, becomes not something to be commented on for its own sake but a means to preserve links with the past, to acknowledge its humanity and our debt to it, and to stress the continuity between past struggles and those that continue. The pictures depict street and suburban scenes often devoid of people, with flashes of colour that signal a necessary optimism in the face of economic decline.

There’s a single-gabled roof that seems to peer over a high fence onto two empty disabled parking spaces; half-built mass-produced housing; a steep road in a denuded landscape on which cars are parked desultorily; an overly cheery orange door set in the front wall of a terrace house and framed by a wonderful climbing rose. It’s fitting that these photographs are being shown in Melbourne – ‘I am sending you a few pictures and with them come my best wishes’, writes Loeper.

The subject matter of Laurenz Berges’s large, imposing prints, redolent of absence and lost social and work formations, seems allied to that of Tacita Dean, who recently exhibited at ACCA in Melbourne. Like some of Dean’s work, Berges’s pictures show the interiors (and sometimes exteriors) of abandoned, formerly functional buildings – in this case, houses in Etzweiler and Garzweiler, German towns that were depopulated when their major industry, coal strip mining, was shut down.

But Berges, unlike Dean, embraces artificiality: dramatic light and shadow, and what appears to be digital enhancement, give a quasi-beauty to these spaces. For instance, in both versions of ‘Gesolai’, 2001 (there are two works with this title), the flecks of textured wallpaper seem almost painterly. And the soft light in ‘Etzweiler’, 2000 gives even the cigarette butts and pieces of fluff and detritus a degree of order and patterning.

This kind of valorisation of the real – where everyday objects become beautiful because they’re drenched with extra effect – is used to create very different moods in a series that embraces nature, D’Elsi, 2007 by Heidi Specker.

The series, not all of which appears here, comprises a mostly displaced portrait of Elsi, a woman Specker met on a visit to Davos in Switzerland. Specker became fascinated with Elsi and her unconventional lifestyle, and she expresses this fascination through large colour shots of Elsi’s surroundings, the Alpine landscape, and Elsi herself that together form a narrative of her life.

These pictures are very carefully composed, presenting nature in a way that makes no attempt to be ‘natural’, but rather perhaps is an essay on how we see things in new ways when we see them through the eyes of others. There are some truly stunning pictures here – swathes of thickly set pine tree branches with small bright red berries (‘D’Elsi, Pass 4’, 2007); close-ups of brown fungal-looking mushrooms (‘D’Elsi, Mushroom 1’ and ‘D’Elsi, Mushroom 2’, 2007); a close-up shot of carefully stacked logs against a door, the colours and textures warm and solid looking (‘D’Elsi, Hut’, 2007).

The picture of Elsi shows her from a side view, her face invisible behind a curtain of long, dark, shiny hair. She seems elemental – we don’t need to see her face because the other pictures express what she is. There’s an undeniable sexual aspect to these works, not so much indicating individualised desire, but rather suggesting that the force of Elsi gives a heightened meaning and richness to a world that is always inevitably subjective.

The idea of the fetish is not entirely absent but I don’t think that’s the point here. So drenched with hyperreal colour and minute, microscopic detail are these stunning scenes that nature becomes not so much artificial as aesthetically indistinguishable from the constructed world.

That world is very much the focus of Uschi Huber’s series Fronten 2006, a collection of colour prints showing shops in the German town of Cologne that have been boarded up with timber planks in preparation for the annual procession on Carnival Monday. The photographs appear to have been taken in a bright morning light that shows them off to their best effect.

The accompanying text explains that the buildings ‘lose their identities and become simple sculptural forms’. I wasn’t so aware of this initially: the boarding-up process had been done very neatly, but it did not render more than a few the buildings sculptural in my eyes. However, it certainly stripped them of their commercial identities and rendered them strangely anonymous.

Pictures of boarded-up shops in, say, a US downtown might evoke notions of civil unrest or loss of civil space due to economic downturn or the advent of malls. In contrast, these photographs suggest a certain kind of tolerance for the non-commercial and a mode of preparation for the carnivalesque that is not over the top, a kind of accommodation to the civic and possibly non-commercial aspects of life. Perhaps I’m wrong – the procession is obviously boisterous and to some extent lawless – but these works hint at a kind of commerce that does not obliterate, one that can live alongside other aspects of life.

Of course, there is never just one simple theme when a photographer considers ‘urban life’. Take Forward Motion 2005 by Nicola Meitzner, a series of black-and-white shots of the megalopolis of Tokyo, taken in 2005. Shots of the many elements of what might seem a typical urban jungle – layers of electrical cables, rows of parked cars, billboards, vending machines, a monorail, a huge terminal – are interspersed with close-up portraits of four Japanese people, three of whom look young and either optimistic or wistful, and one who shows the early signs of jadedness. The series is perhaps a comment on the complexities of Japanese society and ontology rather than some kind of treatise on urban alienation.

I was struck by how neat, if relatively harsh and uncomfortable, so much of the environment was, as if the famous Japanese love of order and communality overlaid the harshness of late capitalism. The tension between the human scale and the overly large was everywhere but seemed to be held in check. There was little that was obviously traditional about the streetscapes but there was also none of the chaos of a similarly large city such as New York.

The individual portraits seemed a plea against a view of Tokyo that might combine a knowledge of its communal aspects and its hugeness with an underlying racism – ‘they’re all the same’ – although they were also a contrast to the plainness (rather than ugliness) of the environment.

Albrecht Fuchs’s portraits of artists, which move away from this urban theme, are a definite highlight. Although to non-Europeans many, if not all, of these faces may be unfamiliar (I didn’t know any of them) this didn’t diminish their power for me.

These colour portraits, relatively modest in size, have a power that comes from an obsession with composition. The colours of the backgrounds and the subjects’ clothes, the setting, the stance and expression of the subjects – all appear to be ‘just right’, every element in order, as if no other composition would have ‘worked’. And yet the settings (which appear to be the home environments of the subjects) and in many cases the stances are quite informal, as if the photographer wanted such a smooth look as to suggest he himself had been erased.

Yet of course he is everywhere, and in a funny way the portraits represent him, because they depict the artists he most admires. Certainly all the subjects stare quite intently at the viewer, which has the odd effect of giving the portraits a strange kind of uniformity, despite the varied faces, poses and settings. The faces of the subjects also suggest the kind of strong but intangible inner life that makes these photographs so successful.

There is lots more to savour here – among others, the work of Matthias Koch, who offers new perspectives on historically significant sites in Germany (Koch was a guest of the MGA for a short time, during which he conducted artist talks, student tutorials and a workshop and field trip). And Karin Geiger’s large-format photographs offer intriguing scenarios that may or may not be staged, in settings where the urban and the rural meet.

Presentation/representation can be seen at the Monash Gallery of Art, 860 Ferntree Gully Road Wheelers Hill, until 30 August.

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