AustLit

'The image is strong and striking. It is of a young woman; her face unsmiling, her gaze proud and ever so lightly mocking — as if she knows that you are ascending the stain to a contemporary art gallery and that you are both wishing to find works there that will confront you with the new and the audacious, while at the same time you are smugly confident that nothing you will see or experience will thrill you or astonish you. 'Astonish me,' Sergei Diaghilev demanded of the young Jean Cocteau. On this day in the European spring of 2019, climbing the steps of the Museum of Contemporary Art in New Zagreb and entering the exhibition space, you start off jaded; but you are astonished; and you are shocked. And you are shamed. The defiant young girl, her image in black and white, across a canvas that is over four metres tall and two metres wide, is staring down at you. Across her image is scrawled an ugly, misspelt graffiti. ' (Introduction)
 

'I remember entering Krakow for the first time, in 1995. I'd arrived at the train station via Paris, Berlin, Prague and Budapest — cities where I'd stayed for various periods, looking for a place to live and write. Back then, you couldn't drop into a destination from space via Google Earth, swivelling a camera to explore streets. There was no Tripadvisor or Airbnb. All I had were a kw descriptive paragraphs in a battered edition of Lonely Planet's Eastern Europe on a Shoestring, printed in black and white on Bible-thin paper. ' (Introduction)
 

'We typically think of the grandest, most impressive parts of European culture in terms of physicality: castles, palaces, libraries, gardens, food, cafes, galleries, museums and monuments. These arc the items we list on itineraries for a trip. ' (Introduction)
 

My desire to live in Rome germinated on a European holiday almost twenty years ago. I exited Trastevere train station, bleary eyed after the long-haul flight, and was instantly revived by the sight of women in tight skins and stilettos zooming past on their Vespas. Men at the local bar made fun of my Italian pronunciation. Come si dice 'tre'? they would tease each time I turned up to buy tram tickets or the paper. How do you say three? Tre, trre, trrrrrre, I'd sputter, trying desperately to roll my 'r's. ' (Introduction)
 

Sandy and Beryl Stone had 'a really lovely night's entertainment One ' Tuesday in Melbourne in the late 1950s — according to Barry Humphries's brilliant 'Sandy Stone' satire of Australian suburban life — when they attended a picture night at the tennis club. 'The newsreel,' Sandy reported, 'had a few shots of some of the poorer type of Italian housing conditions on the Continent and it made Beryl and I realise just how fortunate we were to have the comfort of our own home and all the little amenities round the home that make life easier for the womenfolk, and the menfolk generally, in the home.' (Introduction)
 

'My grandfather was born in a pestilential year. Surviving the influenza pandemic that struck Australia in 1919, pa's mother called him the luckiest baby in town. Great-grandma Frances's own father had died from influenza in an earlier regional outbreak in the foothills of Australia's Snowy Mountains, so she likely felt the threat to her baby especially acutely. But 1919 was something extraordinary, an experience that, much like the war it followed, marked those generations who survived it. Months of border closures, quarantines, hospitals, anxiety, sickness arid death understandably helped 1919 enter Australian popular memory as the year of the 'Spanish flu'. No wonder Frances made sure her son understood his good fortune.' (Introduction) 
 

'It is disturbing and painful to be told that the world that formed you, held you, has now ceased to exist — nonetheless, this experience is not unusual. You may have questioned this world, disapproved of it, held it in contempt — and it is better if you did. Nonetheless, this world is all you knew.' (Introduction)
 

'Vienna's Ringstrasse, built from 1865 on the site of the old city wall, has long been derided for its architecture. Because it is a domain of revivalist styles, including neo-Renaissance, neo-Baroque and neo-Gothic, modernists have been contemptuous. But the Ringstrasse has recently been reappraised, with Australia playing a part. A dinner in Melbourne in 2011 to celebrate the opening of the National Gallery of Victoria's Vienna Art and Design — Australia's first international exhibition focused on Vienna around 1900 — was crucial. At that dinner, one of the exhibition's curators, Christian Witt-Dering, suggested to representatives of the Austrian National Tourist Office that Vienna mark the sesquicentenary of the Ringstrasse in 2015. Witt-Diking proposed that the city celebrate the Ring as one of the world's great boulevards, and so it did, triggering a reappraisal that led Joseph Koerner in Burlington Magazine to declare the Ring 'the world's greatest instance of Historicism in architecture'. (Introduction)
 

'In the middle of the twentieth century. most Australian actors who wished to consider themselves 'legitimate' would still have considered the acquisition of a quasi-British accent an essential ingredient for success—here at home, and as part and parcel of the passport to a career in British stage and film. Chips Rafferty was an exception, and his distinctly Australian argot ensured his roles were limited to Australian characters. Commonwealth ties were still strong back then, and despite the fact of postwar European immigration, which brought so many workers to labour on 'nation-building' projects, Australia's cultural ties were still very much with Britain. The program of the first Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1960 was overwhelmingly British. Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll had been produced in Melbourne in 1955 — and though both were writing earlier, David Williamson's plays only took hold in the 1970s, and those of Jack Davis in the 1980s. It was yet another decade before other Australian voices started to be taken seriously. And as the voices of First Nations people grew louder, so we also started to hear and sec the stories of those who had come from Europe, then Asia-Pacific, India and what's still referred to colonially as the Middle East. ' (Introduction)
 

'I worked as part of an ever-changing small team of lighthouse keepers in 1973, on three uninhabited islands off the West Coast of Scotland. I was twenty years old. I spent a lot of time sitting on rocks in the Atlantic. It was on chore rocks — some of them quite large islands the size of Uluru, others thin strips of lava chords in the Outer Hebrides — that I constructed some kind of worldview. It was neither utopian nor dystopian. Neither north nor south, Old World or New World. just global and local. Full of sentient beings. Let's work together... every boy girl woman and man,' as the Canned Heat lyrics of the day urged. ' (Introduction)
 

'The extent to which the seventeenth-century Dutch 'discovery' of the great southern continent we now call Australia had a cataclysmic impact on European cosmology is open to conjecture. But it is certain that the historical failures by Europeans to 'see' or understand the realities of the Australian land, its people and its creatures — as evidenced throughout history - have continued right up to the present. Despite the inadequacies of European tropes, genres, classification systems and ways of thinking in coming to terms with the challenges of understanding this southern continent, northern hemisphere frameworks of thinking in the sciences and humanities still persist.' (Introduction) 
 

It is not widely known that many Australian colonial natural history collections arc represented in German museums and herbaria, nor that there are initiatives to transform these artefacts of colonial heritage and science back into objects from living cultures with living custodians and their own stories to tell.' (Introduction)
 

'The first question. Why European thinking — again? My exchange with Europe goes back to the beginning: my father fled the country of his birth — the Netherlands — before the dust could settle after World War II. As a young boy, he was a direct witness to fatal military conflict in the streets of his own neighbourhood. As a teenager, he and 4.5 million of his compatriots nearly starved to death in the Hongenvinter (hunger winter) of 1944-45. At the age of twenty-one, mostly recovered from .1 mild dose of polio, he left for Australia on the SMN Gaasterkerk with a work ticket for a job in a state-run native-plant nursery in Sydney's West Pennant I fills. In a letter written in July 1952 to his mother back home in The Hague, he says: 'The guys working at the nursery are "good blokes", real Australians: the only problem is they are not easy to understand.' ' (Introduction)
 

'At COP25 in Madrid—the twenty-fifth United Nations climate summit, held in December 2019 — I watched as the vice president of the European. Commission, Frans Timmermans, elaborated on the important role of forests and biodiversity protection in the newly launched European Green Deal. The proposal to make Europe a carbon-neutral continent by 2050 had been announced by Ursula von der Leyen at the opening of the Madrid conference on 3 December — her first day as president of the European Commission. Now, in week two of the climate talks, the European Parliament was hosting a panel discussion on how forests could help countries meet their commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement.' (Introduction) 
 

'There are things you miss about Australia when you live in London, but you need never want for Australian company. There's an Australian teacher at my kids' school. I find Australians serving coffees, working at reception desks, handling public relations, running tech start-ups, churning out think-tank papers, poring over spreadsheets at accounting firms, publishing books, designing buildings. They may not be in Earl's Court or Shepherd's Bush anymore, but they're in Clapham, Putney, Islington, Whitechapel — all points of the London compass.' (Introduction)