Category Archives: Books

The Lake Where Cultures Meet

Posted on May 12, 2013 by

A desert lake.  Paruku.  Lake Gregory. This is the place where the ancestral hero, Kiki, came down from the east, a falling star.  Landed in the water and created seeds, grapes, bandicoot, and blue-tongued lizard. This is the place where … Continue reading →

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Living on Country

Posted on May 5, 2013 by

Melissa Lucashenko’s debut novel, Steam Pigs (UQP, 1997) was a multi-award winner, followed up the next year by a young adult story, Killing Darcy.  In 1999 she published Hard Yards, and a second YA novel, Too Flash, appeared in 2002.  … Continue reading →

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Billy Benn’s Hills and Ranges

Posted on April 28, 2013 by

Exploring the work of the first great artist to emerge from Alice Springs’ Mwerre Anthurre Artists’ studio, Billy Benn (IAD Press, 2011), co-authored by Benn and the studio’s former arts coordinator Catherine Peattie, is a shifting, hopscotch analysis of the … Continue reading →

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A Classic Revisited

Posted on March 31, 2013 by

Last May, on our first evening in Seattle for the opening of Ancestral Modern, we stepped out of a taxicab in front of Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan’s loft apartment for the first social evening of the week.  A kindly looking, … Continue reading →

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Great Expectations

Posted on March 17, 2013 by

In June of 2006 I was lucky to be in Paris for the opening ceremonies of the Musée du quai Branly and the celebrations surrounding the unveiling of the Australian Indigenous Art Commission (AIAC).  Designs based on the works of … Continue reading →

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Tiwi: Art, History, Culture

Posted on March 10, 2013 by

Among the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, with all the variety of language and culture they encompass, the Tiwi still stand apart.  Their language is an isolate, unrelated to those of the mainland.  Despite being among the first people to come … Continue reading →

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A World of Pain

Posted on February 17, 2013 by

I’ve loved mystery and crime novels since I was old enough to pull the Agatha Christie paperbacks from my mother’s bookshelves and lose myself in their exotic worlds of country homes and criminal passions.  My tastes have changed (I’d like … Continue reading →

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Larrakirtj: Encyclopedia of the Yolngu

Posted on February 10, 2013 by

On our first trip to Australia in 1990, still largely ignorant of Aboriginal art (despite the trip being inspired in large part by the Dreamings exhibition seen at the Asia Society in New York CIty two years earlier), we hit … Continue reading →

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Papunya Tula, Alice Springs

Posted on February 3, 2013 by

The catalog for Unique Perspectives: Papunya Tula Artists and the Alice Springs Community (Araluen Arts Centre; Papunya Tula Artists, 2012) is deceptively slim in size, a mere 96 pages that is, however, packed with vivid color and equally vivid memories. … Continue reading →

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Riches of the Canning Stock Route

Posted on January 20, 2013 by

The depth, the wealth, the variety of the material contained in Ngurra Kuju Walyja / One Country One People: stories from the Canning Stock Route (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) are such that I’m almost at a loss to begin describing it all.  A … Continue reading →

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