Cirrus@Austlit

'Over the years it has occurred to me to illustrate my books and newspaper columns and for fifty years I have decorated verse or prose or plays with embroideries to try to brighten up the appearance of the ghostly white paper pages, and it has been a real pleasure indeed to offend or amuse readers, who possibly didn’t expect defamation as a drawing and assumed libel had only to do with words.' (Introduction)

'‘No moons, no cows, no trees’, wrote Edwin Tanner of his work in a 1962 statement. ‘Not even a burnt stump or the inevitable parrot.’ This slightly pugnacious rejection of parochialism and the lack of easily recognisable Australian motifs in his art may have something to do with Tanner’s relatively low profile. Critics have also overlooked him: he is absent from Robert Hughes’ and Bernard Smith’s Australian art histories. Tanner was Welsh by birth, arriving in Australia as a young child—accounts differ as to whether he was eight or just three when the family left Wales—but the individuality of his style rests on more than merely this, as Anthony Fitzpatrick’s beautifully curated exhibition at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, held earlier this year, demonstrated.'  (Introduction)

‘When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ Robert Manne was speaking with Geraldine Doogue, on Radio National’s Saturday Extra. Responding to a question about his political journey (and under no illusion that he was quoting Keynes, to whom the line is often misattributed), he was talking in a painful whisper, having recently undergone a laryngectomy. The voice was still recognisably his: to Manne’s relief, a silicone prosthesis has obviated the need for an electrolarynx. And the sentiment was familiar, too. Manne, after all, has always been open about his changes of political allegiance—an openness caught (or trumpeted) in the title of his 2005 collection of essays and articles, Left, Right, Left.' (Introduction)

'For decades now, the temptation for students of the life and career of Alfred Deakin has been to define him as a man of policy and a nation-builder. The policies at issue here are those of old Australian economic interventionism: tariffs and industrial arbitration, and authors either praise or condemn Deakin according to their attitudes towards these institutions. In The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, Judith Brett is less interested in this than previous analysts and for this reason her focus is more on Deakin’s nineteenth century experience than the well-trodden path of post Federation civic construction. Instead, she focuses on the manner in which Deakin constructed himself out of the available materials, and the crucial role that religion played in the life of the country’s most famous liberal. Brett also teases out the ultimate paradox: Deakin’s unconventional personal journey led to an utterly conventional political destination, a fused liberal-conservatism.'  (Introduction)