June 2015

From the Committee Annual general meeting This will be held on 13 July at 10.30am upstairs in the library, followed by a Committee Meeting. You are all very welcome to attend.

Film fundraiser We held a successful film fundraiser last month. The movie was Testament of Youth. Even though it was 7pm in winter, over seventy people braved the cold and we raised $775.

We need your help! Again, there is a critical Armidale Council meeting which will be held on Monday 29 June in the Council Chambers. We hope you could arrive at approximately 5pm to 5.15pm so we have a large crowd outside...it will look impressive and show excellent community support for our new library.The Council will be deciding on the Rescission motion that was put forward by a group of Councillors to block the decision by a majority of Councillors at their Library Committee meeting to apply for the next Federal Grant. The application must be in by the end of July. While this Rescission motion is in place until this meeting on 29th June, there can be no work done to prepare an application for the Federal Grant. If we can show huge community support for a new Library, we may influence one or more Councillors to vote against the rescission motion.We hope to see you outside Council Chambers at 5 to 5.15pm on Monday 29 June to join us in showing community support for a new Library. If Council refuses to apply for this

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funding the probability of building a new library will be greatly reduced if not eliminated altogether.There is no need to stay for the entire meeting we just need an initial show of support.

Book review

The Bush Don Watson

Don Watson’s book The bush was Book of the Year in the NSW Premier’s Literary awards for 2015. This book deals with the Australian bush in all its aspects, and is a blend of science, research, history, family memories, anecdotes and politics, all beautifully rendered in elegant prose. Watson takes us on a journey encompassing Australia’s climate, the bush prior to white settlement, the use and misuse of the land by farmers and settlers over the years, the divide between the country and the city, the effect of settlement on the aboriginal population and how the concept of the bush shapes the legend of the Australian character.

Watson commences his story with his grandparents’ struggle to make a living on the land. He evokes memories of his grandmother sweeping dirt from the verandah, of the meat safe, the outdoor lavatory and the slap of the wire screen door. Following on, is a series of loosely connected essays of the tragedies, triumphs and follies concerning the bush.

This is not a book to be read continuously from cover to cover but one to be savoured over time. It is an excellent history, sweeping in scope, and never tending to sentimentality. The book informs and fascinates and all is told in flawless poetic language. I read the book in association with another book but was often unable to put it down at the end of a section. It is eminently readable and highly recommended.

Marnie French.

New in the Library

We begin June’s selection of new items by highlighting an interesting range of travel guides: Bradt started in a similar way and at a similar time to Lonely Planet (intrepid young couple writes up an absorbing 1970s adventure), but whereas our homegrown publishers have retreated to the ease of mainstream destinations, Bradt continues to explore the really exotic, bizarre and dangerous locations still available in our world. Even armchair travel to Nagorno Karabagh is absorbing; we also have their guides to Albania, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Gabon, the Gambia, Macedonia, Mongolia, Montenegro, North Korea, Palestine, Sao Tome and Principe, and Madagascar. Daniel Tudor also takes the road less travelled so that we are more informed and less prejudiced about North Korea confidential: private markets, fashion trends, prison camps, dissenters and defectors. Annett Klingner travels more as the traditional tourist and thankfully only lists 111 places in Rome that you must not miss: so much less intimidating than titles like 1001 foods you must taste before you die.

Ole Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbaek, scientist and chef respectively, have combined their Danish talents to explore Umami: unlocking the secrets of the fifth taste, a complex savory impression that is not sweet, salty, sour or bitter. Marcia Reiss explores the history and variety of the Apple, another lovely volume in Reaktion Books’ Botanical series (we also have Oak, Yew and Bamboo). Nick Balla

and Cortney Burns explain their Bar Tartine techniques and recipes, revealing Hungarian, Japanese and Tibetan influences on the amazing experimental San Francisco restaurant scene.

Experimental book display and distribution is presented in Alex Johnson’s Improbable libraries, an around-the-world photographic study of the way books are made available to people. Andreas Wagner explores other improbabilities in Arrival of the fittest: the hidden mechanism of evolution, suggesting that new molecules and mechanisms acting in a non-random way drive adaptations. Bob Mankoff has improbably adapted to his long-time job as cartoon editor of the New Yorker magazine, and now tells his story in How about never – is never good for you?

More improbability from America - which scenario is more likely to be believed: Thomas Geoghegan’s Only one thing can save us: why America needs a new kind of labor movement or Darryl Cunningham’s graphic retelling of Ayn Rand’s arc of life in Supercrash: how to hijack the global economy? The shadows of 2008 also fall over Ian Klaus’ Forging capitalism: rogues, swindlers, frauds and the rise of modern finance, suggesting with nineteenth century examples that it was ever thus.

For more ethical explanations, we can turn to philosophers like Stewart Sutherland (Greed: from Gordon Gekko to David Hume), anarchist anthropologists like David Graeber (The utopia of rules: on technology, stupidity and the secret joys of bureaucracy) and even cultural critics like David Bromwich (Moral imagination: essays).

More concrete concerns are addressed in A singular vision: Harry Seidler (Helen O’Neill), a work on nineteenth-century British architect Richard Norman Shaw (Andrew Saint) and a book by Simon Swynfen Jervis and Dudley Dodd about a sixteenth-century cupboard: Roman splendor English arcadia: the English taste for pietre dure and the Sixtus cabinet at Stourhead.

Organic concerns are represented by The ash tree (Oliver Rackham), Trees, woods and forests: a social and cultural history (Charles Watkins) and While wandering: a walking companion. Then the sciences get guernseys with Thomas Curtright’s A concise

treatise on quantum mechanics in phase space and Steven Weinberg’s To explain the world: the discovery of modern science.

Pictures of the past include Twelve voices from Greece and Rome: ancient ideas for modern times (Christopher Pelling), Love songs: the hidden history (Ted Gioia), The Oxford handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean, Before orientalism: Asian peoples and cultures in European travel writing 1245-1510 (Kim Phillips), and Phantom terror: political paranoia and the creation of the modern state 1789-1848 (Adam Zamoyski).

Chris Bryant brings us a second volume of Britain’s Parliament: the biography; Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds paints a picture of one of that Parliament’s chief twentieth-century actors and the father of the National Health Service in Nye: the political life of Aneurin Bevan; and Walter Runciman opines that things are Very different, but much the same: the evolution of English society since 1714.

To these we can add, in apparently random order, Maira Kalman’s My favorite things (from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum collections); an issue of Granta Magazine devoted to India: another way of seeing; John Hooper on The Italians through time and space; Sofka Zinovieff exploring British eccentricity at its most, in The mad boy, Lord Berners, my grandmother and me; the poetry of John Burnside (All one breath); Averil Cameron’s reflections on ancient Byzantine matters; Anna Nyburg’s study of how exile and displacement can unexpectedly lead to everyone’s cultural enrichment in Émigrés: the transformation of art publishing in Britain; and a glorious reprint of John Berger’s 1967 work A fortunate man: the story of a country doctor in the Forest of Dean who lived selflessly among the community he served.

Now for a musical interlude before some notable new fiction books are introduced. Branford Marsalis takes his saxophone to San Francisco for the solo recording of In my solitude: live at Grace Cathedral. Mark Knopfler’s been around a while, too: his Tracker tracks are all self-composed. You may have heard Mario Biondi’s rich voice in the closing credits song from the Roman years of Inspector Rex:

If I see problems I look in your eyesWho likes to know that I'm on your sideVillains and thieves they better bewareInto the plans I'll throw a big scare

My name is RexI'm best friends with the peopleRex, I'm going out on a struggleGive the command, I'm off to the chaseRam, jam, solve the case

My name is Rex

I come from ViennaI transferred to RomeEternal city and now I'm at homeClimate is different, problem the sameCatching the bad guys, a part of my fame

Rex, I'm best friends with the peopleRex, I'm going out on a struggleGive the command, I'm off to the chaseRam, jam, solve the caseMy name is RexMy name is RexMy name is... Rex

Now we have two CDs of his vocal stylings for your pleasure: Due and Sun.

Alabama Shakes, fronted by the dynamo that is Brittany Howard, have released their new Sound and color. Kelis has tantalisingly moved on from Milkshake to Food. Courtney Barnett records on Surry Hills’ Milk Records, but she’s laid-back enough to confess that Sometimes I sit and think, and sometimes I just sit. Other Australian performers with new issues include Darren Hanlon (the folk-rock of Where did you come from?), Katie Noonan (performing Songs that made me with other great voices, like Deborah Conway on Court and spark, and Renee Geyer doing It’s a man’s man’s man’s world) and the Preatures (with Izzi Manfredi making pop noises on the LP completed in the Doldrum Studios - again in Surry Hills - Blue Planet Eyes).

Forgive me if you’ve read these stories already, but we’ve just noticed a new French detective on the shelves: Bruno, chief of police in St Denis, a small town in the Perigord region, is a creation of Martin Walker. Not only is Walker a successful senior director of the Global Business Policy Council, but his fictional hero is also a paragon of all virtues (“Bruno cooks, he hunts, he builds his own house and grows his own food. He organizes the parades and festivities and fireworks displays and keeps order in his fictional home town of St Denis. A pillar of the local tennis and rugby clubs, he teaches sports to the local schoolchildren. Bruno finds lost dogs, fights fires, registers births and deaths, and enforces the parking regulations. But he maintains a sophisticated intelligence network to outwit the interfering bureaucrats of the European Union in far-off Brussels”.

Andy McNab, too, exhibits the same personal and fictional British heroics, albeit in the military sphere: Fortress is the second in his Tom Buckingham series. Elizabeth Taylor (no, not the actress) was a British novelist and short story writer who died in 1975. Wikipedia tells us that “Kingsley Amis described her as "one of the best English novelists born in this century," Antonia Fraser called her "one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century," and Hilary Mantel said she was "deft, accomplished and somewhat underrated".” New York Review Books have now published, in their Classics series, You'll enjoy it when you get there: the selected

stories of Elizabeth Taylor. Caryl Phillips, in The lost child, combines the narrative voice of a young Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights with a similarly outcast-on-the-moors Monica Johnson from 1960s Britain.

Anne Enright uses her beautiful writing to great effect in rural Ireland’s The green road, which brings four adult children back together: there “each confronts the terrible weight of family ties and the journey that brought them home”. Cesar Aira is a madly experimental and wildly prolific Argentinian writer whose latest work in translation is The musical brain and other stories. Yan Lianke revisits the worst of Chinese Communist excess in The four books. In contrast, Jack Livings’ The dog: stories illuminates the tensions, ironies, and possibilities of life in modern China.

Fierce, dark, confrontational and funny, Eliza Albert’s After birth is written as fiction, but how real can it be? Its dust jacket calls it “a wake-up call to a culture that turns its new mothers into exiles”. And Laila Lalami conveys in The moor’s account the imagined memoirs of a Moroccan slave who accompanied Spanish conquistadores across sixteenth-century North America.

New DVDs include a series of documentaries by Frederick Wiseman, whose work over 47 years has culminated in a most wonderfully calm and reverent treatment of Britain’s National Gallery. We also have Boxing gym (Austin, Texas), Law and order (Kansas City), Zoo (Miami, Florida), Aspen and his first, famous study of a mental institution, Titicut follies (Bridgewater, Massachusetts). Fred Schepisi’s new romantic comedy, Words and pictures, stars Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche. The first season of The Americans introduces us to two KGB spies posing as Americans in suburban Washington, DC in the early 1980s. Set during the Reagan presidency, complexity is added by the couple having two children who know nothing about their parents’ true identity. Now read on….