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.
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.
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.
