tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/david-malouf-10564/articlesDavid Malouf – The Conversation2015-05-04T04:09:19Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/381602015-05-04T04:09:19Z2015-05-04T04:09:19ZFly Away Peter on the opera stage is a masterful adaptation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80181/original/image-20150504-23863-116512k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dramatic in its effect, Fly away Peter is a requiem to the fallen and damaged of the first world war. Photo: Zan Wimberley.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sydney Chamber Opera</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>My life is not for anything. My life is – David Malouf, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/615991.Fly_Away_Peter">Fly Away Peter </a>. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Many Australians will have had some contact with David Malouf’s 1982 novella, Fly Away Peter. It is often set as a school text and it remains one of the few Australian novels dealing with the first world war. </p>
<p>After publication, Malouf reflected on Australia’s volunteer army and his reasons for writing Fly Away Peter: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>They were bringing Australia closer to the far side of the earth. By forging an experience that had its roots in both places they were redefining, in their own individual lives, all the terms of relationship between the New World and the Old. Australia would ever after be changed for them, but so would Europe, which could now be demystified. Fly Away Peter was written to give this great subject, in so far as I could manage, a definitive form. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is most appropriate that in the wake of the centenary of the Gallipoli landings, as well as the ongoing first world war commemorations, the novel has reached the operatic stage. The Sydney Chamber Opera’s <a href="http://www.carriageworks.com.au/?page=Event&event=FLY-AWAY-PETER">production of Fly Away Peter</a> opened on the weekend at Sydney’s Carriageworks.</p>
<p>Despite the profound significance of the war to the 20th century, the first world war has relatively few operatic explorations. But two recent operas have changed that: Briton Mark Anthony Turnage’s 2000 adaptation of the surreal and bitter play by Sean O’Casey, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/2002/jul/12/classicalmusicandopera.artsfeatures1">The Silver Tassie</a>, and American Kevin Puts’s <a href="http://silentnightopera.com/">Silent Night </a>(2012), an operatic version of the acclaimed French film, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424205/">Joyeux Noël</a> (2005) – have both enjoyed great success. </p>
<p>Composer Elliott Gyger and librettist Pierce Wilcox have used Malouf’s exploration of dualities as a dominant impulse in their work: the tranquil world of the Queensland bird sanctuary is never really absent from the trenches. </p>
<p>Gyger uses birdsong as a metaphor to contrast the natural world with that of mechanised warfare – these are the birds and the aeroplanes of the novel. He also ingeniously incorporates actual birdcalls, primarily into the violin part, which link the opera’s eight scenes.</p>
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<span class="caption">Fly Away Peter onstage. Photo: Zan Wimberley.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sydney Chamber Opera</span></span>
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<p>The novel has three central characters: Jim Sadler, a young man who is tasked by the land owner, Ashley Crowther, with creating a bird sanctuary in the swamplands on the Queensland coast. Although from different social classes, the men have an almost mystical relationship to the land and particularly to its bird life. </p>
<p>Into this world comes a middle-aged English woman, Imogen Harcourt, a bird photographer, who forms a strong bond with Jim. Many other characters weave in and out of the narrative as it moves from Australia to Europe, and then, finally back to Australia.</p>
<p>The 70-minute opera has only three singers. Jim, the baritone, remains as a single character, but Ashley, the tenor, plays a variety of different roles; most appear for only a brief snatch of music and are gone. </p>
<p>Mezzo Imogen acts as a form of Greek Chorus, being both part of the action, but also, at times, commenting as if from above, incorporating the flight metaphor. Pierce Wilcox’s masterful libretto has as a model David Malouf’s own libretto for Voss, where most of the text is drawn from the novel, but Wilcox refracts his poetic text through repetition and fragmentation.</p>
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<span class="caption">Fly Away Peter onstage. Photo: Zan Wimberley.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sydney Chamber Opera</span></span>
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<p>Elizabeth Gadsby’s set uses a stark, pyramid structure in clay-white as the playing area which director Imara Savage ingeniously fills with “action”. The only props are dark-green plastic buckets, some of which contain the white clay that is used as a symbol of the trenches and is daubed on the three singers as the war progresses, making them appear increasingly ghostly and disembodied. </p>
<p>These buckets are configured in different arrangements; the final stunning stage picture suggests the rows of crosses of European war cemeteries, and, as Ashley sings out the names of the men who have died, also evokes the countless names on war memorials all over the world. </p>
<p>There are wonderfully lithe physical and vocal performances from an excellent triumvirate of singers. </p>
<p>Mitch Riley, as the central figure of Jim Saddler, has the most commanding physical presence – tall and balletic, he sings with firm line and a highly nuanced and varied tonal palette, effectively suggesting Jim’s humanity and vulnerability.</p>
<p>Jessica Asodi has a warm, multi-hued and well-projected voice, which adds real depth and substance to the interwoven ensembles. Her final moment as Imogen, who is left to mourn the death of Jim, is particularly affecting. </p>
<p>Brenton Spiteri effortlessly portrays a range of characters; perhaps the strongest vocal performance, he has a tenor voice of substance and clarity, and projects the text with crisp articulation. Gyger’s challenging vocal writing is grateful to sing, and these young singers bring out the beauty of the score with energetic aplomb.</p>
<p>Jack Symons leads a virtuosic ensemble with sensitivity and complete control of a score of great rhythmic and tonal complexity. Triumphantly overcoming potential balance issues – having the musicians on the same level as the singers presents challenges – the musical texture from the players provides an enveloping, but transparent and kaleidoscopic range of colour with individual instrumental clarity. </p>
<p>The ensemble with the singers was impressive, not easy with your back to the stage! The frequent interweaving of the voices, particularly of the tenor and baritone, bring to mind similar moments of pathos in Britten’s War Requiem. While dramatic in its effect, Fly away Peter is a requiem to the fallen and damaged of the war.</p>
<p>Gyger writes in the program notes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s taken me until age 46 to write my first opera, but in many respects it feels like a homecoming: as the child of opera-mad parents, and a regular opera-goer throughout my childhood and teenage years, it was always going to catch up with me eventually … And the audience? Quite frankly, I don’t know whether the public is interested in what I’ve got to say. My job is to say it as powerfully and as distinctively as I can. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Gyger has done full justice to the novel: it’s hard to imagine a more gripping music theatre performance this year. See it!</p>
<p><br>
<em>Fly Away Peter <a href="http://www.carriageworks.com.au/?page=Event&event=FLY-AWAY-PETER">is at Sydney’s Carriageworks</a> until May 9.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38160/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Halliwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>One of the few Australian novels dealing with the first world war, David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter, has been adapted for the opera stage – and the Sydney Chamber Opera’s production is a great success.Michael Halliwell, Associate Professor of Vocal Studies and Opera, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/381592015-04-30T20:48:02Z2015-04-30T20:48:02ZFly Away Peter: when Australian literature goes to the opera<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78867/original/image-20150422-23594-yxbbqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An opera based on David Malouf's Fly Away Peter opens in Sydney this weekend. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Carriageworks/Toby Burrows</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>David Malouf, writing about his libretto for the 1986 opera adaptation of Patrick White’s novel Voss, observed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No libretto can reproduce the novel from which it is drawn. A novel, especially a great one, is itself: unique, irreplaceable. The best a libretto can do is reproduce the experience of the book in a new and radically different form, allowing the form itself to determine what the experience will be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course this is true, but the role of the librettist in opera is an undervalued one, and Malouf has “form” on both sides of the equation – as an outstanding librettist and as a novelist whose work has been turned into a libretto. </p>
<p>Sydney Chamber Opera’s production of Malouf’s 1982 novel <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/615991.Fly_Away_Peter">Fly Away Peter</a> opens this weekend.</p>
<p>Just as in the adaptation of fiction into film, so too there is a “fidelity” debate around the losses a work of fiction is perceived to sustain when it is turned into an opera. </p>
<p>Those two art forms, fiction and opera, would seem distant, but in some ways opera is closer to fiction that it is to its more obvious cousin, spoken drama. The orchestra in opera functions as a form of omniscient narrator, capable of providing the audience with information about and insight into a character that is not possible in drama. This sense of interiority is as essential a component of opera as it is in fiction.</p>
<p>So have there been many successful operatic adaptations of Australian fiction into opera? </p>
<p>Malouf’s adapation of White’s 1957 novel <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/411496.Voss">Voss</a>, with music by Richard Meale, set the bar very high. Hailed at its premiere in 1986 as the “Great Australian Opera”, it has overshadowed many subsequent works. </p>
<p>The fluid sense of time and space in the novel translated well into opera with its similar spatiotemporal qualities. The dreams and visions in which many of the events in the novel occur are represented very effectively in the opera. Meale and Malouf engaged critically with aspects of the novel, but within the prism of the 80s rather than the 50s. </p>
<p>There was an impetus before 2010 to have a new production coinciding with the centenary of the birth of Patrick White, but unfortunately nothing eventuated; however, Victoria Opera’s artistic director Richard Mills recently <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/19/new-opera-in-australia-its-not-over-til-senator-brandis-sings">mentioned</a> the possibility of a new production.</p>
<p>On a much smaller scale was Jonathan Mills’s 1996 version of the Barbara Bayton short story <a href="http://resources.mhs.vic.edu.au/creating/downloads/ChosenVessel.pdf">The Chosen Vessel</a> (1896), which became <a href="http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/work/mills-jonathan-ghost-wife">The Ghost Wife</a> with libretto by the poet Dorothy Porter. </p>
<p>Baynton’s bleak story, debunking the dominant male myth of the noble bushman, was translated into a confronting music theatre work which depicted the growing terror of “The Woman” – given a mesmerising incarnation by Dimity Shepherd – threatened by “The Swagman; decidedly not the jolly figure from Waltzing Matilda. This work, after performances in Melbourne and Sydney, had a well-regarded run in London. </p>
<p>Also on a small scale was Andrew Schultz’s <a href="http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/work/schultz-andrew-children-s-bach">2008 version</a> of Helen Garner’s short novel, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634140.The_Children_s_Bach?from_search=true&search_version=legacy">The Children’s Bach</a> (1986). A poetic and elusive work, it translated very effectively into a lightly-scored and evocative chamber opera which took the central metaphor of the fugue from the novel. </p>
<p>This became a meditation on the messiness and complexity of human relationships, one given a sense of structure by music.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, as possibly Australia’s most celebrated living writer, only one work of Peter Carey’s has been adapted, the 1981 novel <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/111101.Bliss">Bliss</a>. It received an overwhelmingly positive reaction when premiered in Sydney in 2010, with a similarly positive reception in Melbourne, Edinburgh, and then in a new production in Hamburg, conducted by one of the instigators and great supporters of the work, Simone Young. </p>
<p>Like Voss, it was one of the very few Australian operas to be broadcast on television. </p>
<p>If anyone might be said to rival Carey in the "Great Writer” stakes in Australia, then it is Tim Winton. The <a href="http://www.victorianopera.com.au/what-s-on/past-productions/riders/">operatic version</a> of his Booker-shortlisted novel <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/343883.The_Riders">The Riders </a>(1994), by Iain Grandage and Alison Croggon, enjoyed a very positive reception in Melbourne in 2014 and last week won <a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/arts/melbourne-theatre-company-dominates-green-room-awards-but-not-for-theatre/story-fni0fcgk-1227312347021">a Green Room award</a>. </p>
<p>Winton’s novel, with its absent central character of Jennifer, presents challenges to adapters, but Grandage’s eclectic score, interspersed with a variety of bird calls, captured the musical soundscapes of the frantic journey through Europe by Scully and his daughter Billie in search of Jennifer. </p>
<p>She, in the opera, accompanies them throughout, as a strong vocal and musical force, if not as a real physical presence. </p>
<p>So we return to David Malouf and his early novel, Fly Away Peter. The operatic version by the Sydney Chamber Opera is being premiered within a week of the centenary commemoration of Gallipoli. </p>
<p>A standard school text, the novel is a lyrical evocation of south east Queensland on the eve of the war, and later shifts to the full horror of the trenches. Composer Elliott Gyger, and librettist Pierce Wilcox, have transformed the set pieces of the novel into eight scenes which have the three singers playing a panoply of different characters. The premiere is eagerly anticipated. </p>
<p>Rather than overwhelming operatic adaptors, these works of fiction have inspired a creative and innovative response from a range of composers writing in a variety of musical idioms. One hopes there are more on the way.</p>
<p><br>
<em>Sydney Chamber Opera’s production of Fly Away Peter opens on May 2. Details <a href="http://sydneychamberopera.com/?p=1521">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38159/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Halliwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Sydney Chamber Opera’s production of David Malouf’s 1982 novel Fly Away Peter opens this weekend. It’s not the first opera adaptation of Australian literature – and there are reasons to hope it’s not the last.Michael Halliwell, Associate Professor of Vocal Studies and Opera, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/282012014-07-15T04:09:27Z2014-07-15T04:09:27ZThe case for David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/53611/original/6xm9h5gm-1405055879.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">David Malouf's Imaginary Life plays out in the hillsides of the Black Sea. What's so Australian about that?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hans Juul Hansen</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>… further from the far, safe place where I began, the green lands of my father’s farm, further from the last inhabited outpost of the known world, further from speech even, into the sighing grasslands that are silence … (David Malouf, An Imaginary Life).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>David Malouf’s <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/david-malouf/an-imaginary-life-9780099273844.aspx">An Imaginary Life</a> is not set in Australia and has no Australian characters. It is set at the edge of the Roman Empire, in the first century AD. Australia as “Australia” would not exist for almost 2,000 years. This lack of identifiably Australian components is probably why An Imaginary Life is rarely mentioned as a great Australian book that deserves more attention. </p>
<p>An Imaginary Life is exceptionally well written, rich in poetry and evocative detail. It is a work reminiscent of the writings of a mountain hermit or nature mystic – but that’s not why I selected it as the one Australian book that deserves more attention. I selected it because its central themes resonate with ongoing debates about what it means to be Australian.</p>
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<span class="caption">David Malouf, An Imaginary Life.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Random House</span></span>
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<h2>What kind of Australian literature is this?</h2>
<p>At first glance, Malouf’s second novel does not look like an Australian story at all. </p>
<p>It doesn’t strongly feature the Australian landscape or sense of place, nor does it offer us characters of the type we have come to expect of typically Australian writing. There are no larrikins, no diggers, no Aussie battlers, and no tough yet world-wise women with hearts of gold. </p>
<p>To me, though, it reflects a significant aspect of the Australian story – a sense of exile. </p>
<p>An Imaginary Life tells the story of <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/436057/Ovid">Ovid</a>, the most famous and most irreverent poet of imperial Rome. Ovid’s irreverence leads to his banishment to an isolated village on the shores of the Black Sea in current day Romania, a place occupying the literal edge of the Roman Empire. </p>
<p>Exiled to the limit of the known world, Ovid is cut off from his own culture, even from his language. Slowly, the poet learns to depend on and respect those around him, those he once saw as unsophisticated barbarians because of their inability to speak Latin, their poverty, and their closeness to nature. Ovid sees nature as something somehow frightening, wild, unless it is cultivated, transformed and made productive by human hands.</p>
<h2>An encounter with a wild boy</h2>
<p>His worldview is challenged when he encounters an untamed boy who has lived out in the wilderness with wild creatures. Ovid captures and tries to “civilise” the boy – but this backfires on the poet in unexpected ways. By observing the wild boy, and then following him into the wilderness, Ovid realises Rome is not the whole world, and not even the centre of it.</p>
<p>Ovid’s predicament should be familiar to many Australians. Like the poet, many of us are acquainted with the feeling of being at the edge of things, on the wild borders of regions and empires to which we do not quite belong, or do not belong any more. </p>
<p>For the first century or so after colonisation, Australia was on the periphery of the British Empire. Then, from the second world war to the 1990s, we understood ourselves to be on the outer limits of the USA’s sphere of influence. Now we see ourselves as on the edge of the Asian region, but not really part of it. We seem to always be a part of something and yet apart from it. </p>
<p>When non-Indigenous Australians think about the history of their belonging to this place, they inevitably come to a moment of arrival; either recent or generations back, either as free migrants, refugees or exiled convicts. They also come to a moment of departure from somewhere else, the places where their ancestors, or they themselves, once belonged. </p>
<p>Indigenous Australians also know exile. European colonisation dispossessed them of their country. Over the decades that followed, many of them were forcibly moved to missions in places as foreign to them as the Old World. There is in Indigenous communities a deep yearning and mourning for lost places; places locked behind gates and fences, places buried beneath cities and suburbs, roads and farms.</p>
<h2>Somewhere else</h2>
<p>The somewhere else in our personal histories – those places we lost or left – plays a big part in how we think about ourselves. It produces a sense of national belonging that is never quite secure. </p>
<p>A common response to that insecurity is a kind of aloofness, a standing apart from the rest of the world. We like to single ourselves out, to brandish our physical and cultural distance from other places, our un-belonging as it were, as a mark of uniqueness, and of national identity that distinguishes us from others. </p>
<p>This is also Ovid’s initial response to his exile, to cling firmly to that which makes him different, to refuse to truly belong either to his community of exile or to Rome, which has cast him out.</p>
<p>Another common response to this insecurity, that sense of un-belonging, is to turn to nature, to the environment. </p>
<p>That may be why so much Australian writing has a strong sense of place, and why when we think of important Australian novels they are often ones that feature landscape as a character in its own right. Indigenous Australians have shown other Australians the way in this regard. It is their profound understanding and love of this place that has, over time, transformed the non-Indigenous view of it from something to be feared and tamed, to something to love and protect. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, the landscape is still a contested space: the site of ongoing Indigenous dispossession, the site of mass species extinctions and environmental degradation. When we turn for a sense of belonging to the land, to the country, we are inevitably reminded of our un-belonging, or of our dispossession. </p>
<p>Even so, nature, perhaps because it is undeniably a healing thing, continues to anchor us here, to ground us as “Australians”. For many, contested though it is, the beauty of the land eases that sense of exile, of not quite belonging, whether their families have been here for just a few years or a few thousand years.</p>
<p>For Ovid, it is the same. Slowly he comes to see the wild world as something to embrace, to cling to even, rather than something to fear. Ovid’s great epiphany is that the untamed world is not a hostile place, but a new home where he can be free of the rigid structures of Imperial Rome. By venturing into an even further place, a greater exile, he becomes free.</p>
<h2>The poet in the world</h2>
<p>An Imaginary Life is, in part, about an individual journey from a state of being cut off and apart from the environment – of wishing to tame and exploit nature, of being totally entangled in language and culture – to a state of being in intimate contact with the untrained, wild things of the world. It is also about a poet, in thrall of civilisation, realising that there are other ways to live and experience; ways that are beautiful and fulfilling.</p>
<p>Ovid comes to this realisation by following the example of the wild boy, someone for whom the environment is not something outside of himself but an expression of his own nature. </p>
<p>Those themes – of belonging and exile, of how to relate to the environment and to those who are different to us – are core to the debate about what it means to be Australian today. An Imaginary Life does not provide a workable template for how to navigate the complexity of belonging and un-belonging, nor should it. It’s a novel not a policy document. </p>
<p>It does, however, show us it is possible to imagine ways to do things differently, ways to live differently with each other and with nature. And once imagined, those other ways of living seem all the more possible.</p>
<p><br></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Pema Düddul does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>… further from the far, safe place where I began, the green lands of my father’s farm, further from the last inhabited outpost of the known world, further from speech even, into the sighing grasslands…Pema Düddul, Adjunct Fellow, Southern Cross UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/267942014-05-21T20:20:33Z2014-05-21T20:20:33ZDavid Malouf and Friends explores tricks of memory and place<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49052/original/2dsdsq68-1400632993.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A sense of unease that comes with visiting the past is palpable in several of the works on show.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Anna Carey, Costa Vista 2014, giclée print mounted on aluminium, Museum of Brisbane</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last year I re-read <a href="http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9780143180142/johnno">Johnno</a>, David Malouf’s 1975 novel, with a group of students. I was intrigued to find out how young men and women living in Brisbane today would relate to a novel that has cast such a long shadow over literary accounts of the city. </p>
<p>Week by week, I saw the novel draw the readers in, much as Malouf’s work often pulls us into the texture of an earlier Brisbane: the city brothels, the pubs, the River, the Botanical Gardens, the suburbs.</p>
<p>So it is a delight to see the exhibition <a href="http://www.museumofbrisbane.com.au/whats-on/david-malouf-and-friends/">David Malouf and Friends</a>, showing at the Museum of Brisbane until November, celebrate Malouf’s contribution to Australian culture, in particular his role in capturing indelible images of Brisbane. It coincides with the author’s 80th birthday this year.</p>
<p>The exhibition’s paintings, poetry, sculptures, drawings and a fine large-scale installation explore the world that Malouf captures in prose. I was struck by how these works bring the viewer into the creative spaces that we so often find in Malouf’s writing – under the house, the veranda, the dusty corners of rooms – that are fertile ground for his imagination. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49053/original/tw2wnqwm-1400633140.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49053/original/tw2wnqwm-1400633140.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49053/original/tw2wnqwm-1400633140.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49053/original/tw2wnqwm-1400633140.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49053/original/tw2wnqwm-1400633140.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49053/original/tw2wnqwm-1400633140.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49053/original/tw2wnqwm-1400633140.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49053/original/tw2wnqwm-1400633140.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">David Malouf.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">photo by Conrad Del Villar</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The writer gave us a picture of life in South Brisbane in his memoir <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/david-malouf/12-edmonstone-street-9780099273783.aspx">12 Edmonstone Street</a> (1999). It is somewhat disconcerting to note that the address is now a commercial site. </p>
<p>But if you despair over the loss of Brisbane architectural heritage you can linger over the works in this exhibition: Brisbane-born painter Karla Marchesi’s large painting appropriately titled Thresholds (below) takes you back into the Brisbane of 12 Edmonstone Street, with layers of sub-tropical vegetation and glimpses through the dark undergrowth to timber palings and suggestions of a world beyond.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49057/original/kq3wbpbk-1400633876.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49057/original/kq3wbpbk-1400633876.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49057/original/kq3wbpbk-1400633876.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49057/original/kq3wbpbk-1400633876.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49057/original/kq3wbpbk-1400633876.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49057/original/kq3wbpbk-1400633876.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49057/original/kq3wbpbk-1400633876.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49057/original/kq3wbpbk-1400633876.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Karla Marchesi, Thresholds 2014, oil on composite board panels.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo Laura Jung</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of appealing features of David Malouf and Friends is a written response to each work from Malouf, that is presented adjacent to the work of each artist. He calls Marchesi’s paintings “lushly beautiful” and “perplexing” – which sounds about just right for a Malouf novel. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49196/original/6m7vyxqb-1400721845.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49196/original/6m7vyxqb-1400721845.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49196/original/6m7vyxqb-1400721845.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=825&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49196/original/6m7vyxqb-1400721845.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=825&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49196/original/6m7vyxqb-1400721845.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=825&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49196/original/6m7vyxqb-1400721845.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1036&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49196/original/6m7vyxqb-1400721845.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1036&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49196/original/6m7vyxqb-1400721845.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1036&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bruce Reynolds, Bulimba Hydria 2014, lino and paint on wood panel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo Carl Warner</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a writer, Malouf plays on uncertainty and loss, the tricks of memory and place. Brisbane writer William Hatherell in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Third-Metropolis-Imagining-Literature/dp/0702235431">The Third Metropolis: Imagining Brisbane Through Art and Literature, 1940-1970</a> (2008), argues that Malouf’s work presents two trajectories, the first being nostalgia, and the second a sense of unease that comes with visiting the past. </p>
<p>This sense of unease is palpable in several of the works on show. In Queensland artist Anna Carey’s re-working of the beach house Costa Vista (main image). </p>
<p>Brisbane-based artist Bruce Reynolds Bulimba Hydria (pictured), linoleum and paint on wood panel, offers a clever twist on a classical urn, made local by patches of linoleum. The linoleum references so many Queensland timber houses – the type of house on stilts depicted in Sydney-based artist Noel McKenna’s enamel on glass work The Condamine (below).</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49059/original/y222stq9-1400634371.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49059/original/y222stq9-1400634371.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49059/original/y222stq9-1400634371.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49059/original/y222stq9-1400634371.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49059/original/y222stq9-1400634371.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49059/original/y222stq9-1400634371.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49059/original/y222stq9-1400634371.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49059/original/y222stq9-1400634371.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Noel McKenna, The Condamine 2014, enamel on glass.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo Carl Warner</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The exhibition is dominated, spatially at least, by Brisbane artist Camille Serisier’s Swan Song #7 (see below), a large scale work that the viewer can walk through. Here we find images of birds, light and water and a stage in which the visitor can enter and become a performer. </p>
<p>The work is a response to Malouf’s magical <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/david-malouf/fly-away-peter-9780099273820.aspx">Fly Away Peter</a> (1999) and the distinctive blue of a Brisbane sky forms a backdrop to the bird, boat and man who contemplate transformative moments.</p>
<p>French writer Michel de Certeau in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Everyday-Life-Michel-Certeau/dp/0520271459">The Practice of Everyday Life</a> (1984) writes that as we go about our daily lives we inhabit a metaphorical city: one that is very different to the institutionally planned built environment. For de Certeau, as we move through our city spaces the legible order of the planners is displaced by the ambiguity of our own experience. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49056/original/7n7qbnbd-1400633543.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49056/original/7n7qbnbd-1400633543.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49056/original/7n7qbnbd-1400633543.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49056/original/7n7qbnbd-1400633543.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49056/original/7n7qbnbd-1400633543.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49056/original/7n7qbnbd-1400633543.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49056/original/7n7qbnbd-1400633543.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49056/original/7n7qbnbd-1400633543.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Camille Serisier, Swan Song #7, 2014, plywood, pine, paper, acrylic paint.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo Carl Warner</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This sense of alternative histories and instability comes alive in Malouf’s Johnno and, as my student readers pointed out, it is a great novel to read when you are moving away from home, and away from Brisbane, as the author did when he left for Europe as a young man. </p>
<p>But, as Malouf <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/australia-culture-blog/2014/may/12/david-malouf-and-friends-artistic-collaboration-a-brisbane-state-of-mind">told The Guardian</a> recently:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I live in Brisbane in my head an awful lot of the time, and did for many years after I left.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Five Brisbane/ south-east Queensland writers have produced tributes to Malouf in the exhibition catalogue. Trent Dalton, Kristina Olsson, Nathan Shepherdson and Ellen van Neerven write of the impact of Malouf, on Australian writing, on Brisbane, and on their own creative work. The curatorial aim of providing contemporary responses, visual and written, to Malouf’s work has been fulfilled.</p>
<p>It is a nice turn of history for the exhibition to be held in the Museum, on the third floor of the Brisbane City Hall, overlooking the city streets, the river, the houses and the gardens, now inscribed with Malouf’s imagination.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.museumofbrisbane.com.au/whats-on/david-malouf-and-friends/">David Malouf and Friends</a> is at the Museum of Brisbane until November 23.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/26794/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Susan Carson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Last year I re-read Johnno, David Malouf’s 1975 novel, with a group of students. I was intrigued to find out how young men and women living in Brisbane today would relate to a novel that has cast such…Susan Carson, Senior Lecturer, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.