A Flanagan miscellany

Richard Flanagan is an important novelist by any standards but he is particularly significant in his home state of Tasmania. While I was in Hobart before tackling the Three Capes Walk recently I spent a morning in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG). The exhibition in the largest of its spaces was inspired by five of Flanagan’s novels while the more traditional art upstairs has close links to one of them. Let’s start downstairs.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

‘Written in Wood’ is a series of finely carved benches by Kevin Perkins, master woodworker and a longtime friend of the novelist. His responses to five of Flanagan’s novels were all beautiful but The Sound of One Hand Clapping particularly caught my attention.

carved wooden bench seat
Kevin Perkins: The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Gould’s Book of Fish

Many of Flanagan’s novels challenge the reader with bleak settings and grim stories. Gould’s Book of Fish, set in the brutal convict jail of Sarah Island (wikipedia)(my visit), certainly does that.

The Gould of the title is William Buelow Gould, an artist transported from England to Tasmania for theft in 1826 and further punished a few years later by being sent to Sarah Island. During the following twenty years he became one of the most important artists in the colony in spite of being in and out of prison; wikipedia has his whole story. His Book of Fish, watercolours of the largely unkown fish of Macquarie Harbour, is “inscribed on the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register, … the equivalent of a World Heritage listing for historic documentary material,” to quote that wikipedia page.

Many of his works – portraits, landscapes and still lifes – were on display in TMAG but I naturally chose the fish.

oil painting of fish
Gould: Fish on a bench c. 1840

Question 7

Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (2023) is a strange book, as the author warns us in its epigraph. It’s primarily a memoir but it it structured around a historical sequence which links the colonial genocide of Tasmanian aboriginals, HG Wells, the invention of the atom bomb, and slave labour camps in Japan. This sequence twines around his own family history like a complementary strand of DNA: his definite Tasmanian convict ancestry, his probable indigenous ancestry, his father’s wartime incarceration in Japan, and his own upbringing in a respectable, hardworking but desperately poor family.

Alex Preston wrote a such a beautiful, perceptive review of Question 7 for The Guardian that I see no need to say much more.

Books talk to each other, I’m sure, and Question 7, Black Duck (scroll down) and, bizarrely, Babel must have had a good conversation about nineteenth century British colonialism.

Do paintings and sculptures talk to each other as well? If so, this painting by Gleeson would have been quite at home in the Gould-Flanagan-Perkins conversation pit.

disturbingly organic painting
James Gleeson: Nest of premonitions 1987

Dry lands from above

I spent quite a bit of time on Google Maps’ satellite views while I was planning a trip out West, and realised that they reminded me of some abstract art I have seen recently. This led to some not-too-serious but satisfying digital experimentation. Here’s one example.

aerialview of queensland desert

Where to share the results was the next question. In the end I put them on Green Path, my wildlife and environment blog, near reports and photos of the trip. If you like this one, follow this link to find two more.

The Rubaiyat – editions and illustrations

Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was enormously, and deservedly, popular from the 1880s through to at least the 1930s. It is a strange amalgam of mediaeval Arabic and mid-Victorian English poetry, however, not really a translation and never even pretending to be an exact one. Lowell put it rather nicely:

Lowell's epigraph for Harrap's edition of the RubaiyatThe reality is that Fitzgerald selected verses from a collection attributed to Khayyam, translating them very freely and arranging them thematically into a kind of meditation on fate; but many of the verses were later found to have been by other writers of Khayyam’s time or later.

The details are now well known and Wikipedia’s article on the Rubaiyat is uncommonly thorough, so I will leave it at that in favour of sharing some of the artwork in old published editions we have collected over the years.    Continue reading “The Rubaiyat – editions and illustrations”