1. 1HERSA1 0035
The Sydney Morning Herald JANUARY 12-13, 2013 SPECTRUM 35
Diverse ... (clockwise from main) a
kapa (bark cloth), made by Hawaiian
Maile Andrade, 2009; a tortoise-
shell mask from the Torres Strait
Islands, collected in the late
19th century; Maori sculptor Tene
Waitere’s wood-carved faces.
ing of ancient female figures.
Between these extremes are images
as diverse as an early 19th-century
figure from Vanuatu painted in Reck-
itt’s Blue (now in the Louvre), a
17th-century engraving of Fletcher
Christian’s Tongan club,tourists with
painted faces while on ‘‘cannibal
tours’’, the famous double figure that
was thrown into Lake Sentani for
protection against a government
ban, then dredged up in 1929 and
sold to the French dealer Jacques
Viot, and a graphic portrait of Bob
Marley on a bus shelter.
In this history, influence, like the
tides of the ocean, runs in more
than one direction, and we come to
understand the paradox of art prac-
tices whose lines of development
extend back over centuries, yet are
always contemporary in the sense
of being of their time – fluid and
adaptive as they accommodate and
interpret waves of change and
exchange that began long before
any European ship arrived.
If all this sounds diverse and
complex, it is. And yet Art in
Oceania opens with disarming
ease. As a book it is a beautiful
object, curated as if for an exhibi-
tion, its complexity resolved by
design. The historical essays are
rather like canoe paths and naviga-
tional routes across a great ocean.
Scattered among them are islands
made up of the images, and also of
‘‘voices’’ and ‘‘features’’ identified
by separately coloured pages. You’ll
come across, for instance, a two-
page feature on Gauguin’s ‘‘house
of pleasure’’ where the door was
framed by carved wooden panels
that are now in the Musee d’Orsay,
and where he suffered miserably at
the end of his life despite the fishing
pole (sketched into his diagram)
that was lowered from the back to
retrieve absinthe bottles cooling in
the well.
Pages later you’ll hear the voice of
artist Dan Taulapapa McMullin say
that though he, too, can be seduced
by Gauguin, he takes him with a
‘‘twist of lime’’.
Among the earliest voices is a
chant addressed to the sea – ‘‘O viol-
ent sea, milk sea, mad sea/Deliri-
ous, numbing sea’’ – beseeching it
to protect its island people. This
was collected by a Hawaiian scholar
and published in 1869. Today a
Hawaiian rapper cries for the squat-
ters on the beach, ‘‘fishing from our
own waters’’. Just try and run us over
with your damn bulldozer. And
Hau’ofa reminds the people of the
islands as they migrate across the
world that ‘‘the ocean in us’’ will dry
up if not fed by the contemplation
of a history that, here, is represen-
ted through the prism of art.
Art in Oceania: A New History may
seem an extravagance. But if you
consider that these days even the
best of novels can be ill designed,
printed on cheap paper and still cost
$30,itcouldberegardedasabargain.
Drusilla Modjeska’s latest book is
The Mountain (Vintage).
Alleviating the
beasts’ burden
Review by Angela Young
Animal rights
THE 2013 VOICELESS
ANTHOLOGY
Selected by
J.M. Coetzee, et al
Allen & Unwin, 240pp,
$22.99
T
he task of selecting the stories
and essays for this anthology
about human-animal
relations could not have been an
easy one. The Nobel-prize winning
author J.M. Coetzee, along with a
former director of the Sydney
Writers’ Festival, Wendy Were, the
Herald literary editor, Susan
Wyndham, and the founder of the
organisation sponsoring this new
writing prize, Ondine Sherman, had
to choose the best entries to reflect
what the thinktank Voiceless strives
towards: promoting respect,
compassion and understanding of
those creatures devoid of any voice
in our human-dominated world.
The resulting collection is
impressively varied and, I was
pleasantly surprised to find, not
bursting at the seams with emotive
language and horrific tales of gore –
as this field can be.
Leading us gently into the arena,
Meera Atkinson’s Confessions of a
Vegetarian is a well-structured
account of the ethical dilemmas
faced by many animal lovers
struggling to make the whole
sacrifice. Still wearing leather shoes
and eating dairy products are just
two of the flaws she acknowledges
make her a hypocrite. Her concise
argument is a measured one,
making use of reason and research.
Contrasting beautifully with
Atkinson’s straightforward
approach, They Are Not Voiceless is a
group effort from the Bawaka
country indigenous community,
with much to teach whitefellas
about how nature should be treated.
The lyrical, intimate, interactive
style of the prose is a pleasure to
read, with the additional charm of
offering an insight into a much-
ignored way of living and hunting.
As in several of the pieces, former
journalist, author and farmer Anne
Coombs extols the necessity of
animals for consumption,
suggesting that cruelty is the
unacceptable factor. Citing the likes
of renowned ethicist Peter Singer
and US ‘‘farmer guru’’ Joel Salatin,
she constructs a sensible argument
– nothing to anger the vegetarians
too much. With a profligation of
adjectival prose, Darren Chard’s The
Horses is a sinister tale. Though not
to my taste, it is nevertheless quite
an elegant effort.
Both utterly harrowing, Olga
Kotnowska’s The Other Days and
Jessica Stanley’s Not Long Now
reach in and tug viciously at the
heart strings, placing the kangaroo
in the centre of a desperate,
vulnerable and realistic situation.
These yarns, perhaps more than any
of the others, are sure to strike a
chord with readers.
Once more focusing on the
nation’s most recognisable
marsupial, Kangaroo by barrister
Craig Simpson is a standout piece
of fiction. Albeit simple in form and
style, its dramatic conclusion
resonates loudly.
Particularly effective for the
younger reader, though by no
means solely for that audience, is
Wayne Strudwick’s Caged. Cleverly
using the teen angst of his
protagonist as a vehicle, he
effectively illustrates the horrors
carefully hidden inside the
enormous sheds of factory farms by
those with heavily vested interests.
One can’t help but wish for more
here – a larger collection, perhaps,
and more areas tackled. Butthis
anthology accomplishes the master
stroke of elucidating –
entertainingly, in the main – a
multifaceted message about a
controversial issue, without leaving
the reader utterly depressed,
distressed or, indeed, bored.
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