Past Programs
Galleries, Libraries and Museums - 2007
An extraordinary collection: the Macleay Collection of natural history
13/12/2007
What's worth collecting? What are the cultural, scientific, philosophical and aesthetic principles that determine why we preserve some objects and discard others? What do collections tell us about ourselves and our world? And how are collections best displayed?
Museum is a handsome new book that focuses on one particular collection, the Macleay Collection of natural history, housed mainly at the University of Sydney. Museum combines a stunning photographic survey of the specimens -- most of which are insects -- with a history of the Macleay Collection. Photographer Robyn Stacey has captured the look and feel of the collection with the eye of a still-life painter.
Robyn's images are combined with essays by Ashley Hay that tell an important Australian story.
This is the second book collaboration between Robyn Stacey and Ashley Hay -- their first book, in what seems to be becoming a series, was called Herbarium, and was about the National Herbarium of NSW.
Inga Clendinnen on the impossibility of biography Read Transcript
09/11/2007
Virginia Woolf loved reading autobiography, but said biography itself was impossible. So, can life stories be told? It's a question that Inga Clendinnen, the writer and historian, faced when she was asked to give this year's National Biography Award Lecture.
Inga Clendinnen has been praised around the world for her work on Aztec and Mayan cultures, and her book, Reading the Holocaust, received many awards, including being named as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times in 1999.
The following year, Inga Clendinnen published her own memoir, Tiger's Eye, but it's something that she looks back on with mixed emotions.
She recently gave her lecture, on the impossibility of biography, in Sydney and a week later, in Melbourne. It was the fifth ever National Biography Award Lecture, an annual lecture tied to the National Biography Award, which was established in 1996 to encourage the highest standards of writing in biography and autobiography and to promote public interest in the genre.
And this year, the award went to Jacob G Rosenberg for East of Time, set in Poland during Rosenberg's own childhood.
Here is Inga Clendinnen giving the 2007 National Biography Award Lecture on Virginia Woolf's declaration of the impossibility of biography.
Inky Awards - teen choice for young adult fiction
30/10/2007
We all know of the Booker prize, the Pulitzer prize, the Miles Franklin award but now there's the Inky awards. These are the only Australian awards for young adult fiction whose judges are the teenagers who read them.
Young adult fiction may not always get a lot of attention in literary circles, but this award is raising its profile. It's also raising the profile of the readers who are able to connect with the characters in the fiction, like in Simmone Howell's Notes from the Teenage Underground, which made it on to the short list of the Inky awards.
The Inky Awards is run by the State Library of Victoria's Centre for Youth Literature and Insideadog.com.au, where the Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to the organisers and some of the younger judges of the awards.
Inscriptions and marginalia - a tradition of annotations
19/10/2007
How many of you feel comfortable about picking up a pen or pencil and writing inside a book that you might be reading? For example, to create a book program, which involves a great deal of reading with the purpose of a subsequent interview with an author, we have to work quickly and directly with the text to make sense of our thoughts. And this is only possible by making notes in the margins, a sort of shorthand that allows us to then construct a conversation.
And although some people might consider this to be disrespectful of the work, we're certainly working in a very long tradition of people inscribing their thoughts around an existing text. A loose definition for these sorts of annotations is 'Marginalia' - although today guests manage to fine-tune that definition quite substantially.
The history of Marginalia goes back a long way before the printing press, with early hand-drawn manuscripts and books being constantly added to and modified, to make sure that the text maintained its relevance to contemporary thinking.
So on The Book Show today we look at the function and value of these inscriptions over the centuries. And to help us with this, we've been joined by three people who have spent a great deal of time surrounded by books of all descriptions.
In Melbourne is Professor Margaret Manion, who is one of Australia's most eminent and valued Art Historians, and it's Margaret's deep understanding of Medieval and Renaissance books and manuscripts that we delve into today. Margaret is currently the guest curator for a wonderful exhibition, due early in 2008 at the State Library of Victoria, called The Medieval Imagination, which will bring together illuminated manuscripts from Cambridge, New Zealand and Australia. Many of these works have never been loaned before, so the access will be remarkable.
From Palmerston North in New Zealand we're also joined by Dr Nikki Hessell, who teaches in Communication and Journalism at Massey University. Prior to that though, Nikki worked closely with Professor Heather Jackson in Toronto, studying the Marginalia of the Romantic Period, and especially the prolific annotations by Samuel Coleridge - and together Nikki and Heather produced a book called Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia.
And our third guest is Kay Craddock, whose antiquarian bookshop is something of an institution in Melbourne. Kay and her parents have been dealing in rare and valuable works for a many decades and she brings a rich knowledge of the world of the book collector, and the importance of Marginalia in determining the provenance and the authenticity of books.
Limits of Location -- delving into the Mitchell Library collections
01/10/2007
The Mitchell library gave access to its extensive collection of its now huge collection of documents to l2 academics and writers from the Independent Scholars group - and from that comes The Limits of Location, edited by Gretchen Poiner and Sybil Jack.
Among the writers was Marie de Lepervanche, an anthropologist who has written before on Indian communities in Australia, and widow of George Munster. As an independent scholar, she found material in the library about a little realised part of Australian history -- the very early use of labour from India.
For the Book Show, Radio National's Kirsten Garrett talked first to Gretchen Poiner, about the purpose of the Independent Scholars group.
Bound for Timbuktu
07/08/2007
Evidence of the West African renaissance of literature from the 1500s is turning up in wooden trunks, caves and boxes hidden in the sand in Timbuktu. Shahid Mathee from the University of Cape Town has been studying these Mali documents known as the Timbuktu manuscripts. Shahid Mathee joins the Book Show from South Africa and talks about some of the surprising finds in these manuscripts, like advice on how to improve romantic liaisons for men.
Arthur Boyd's artist book: Sangkuriang, a mythical Indonesian story
23/07/2007
Sangkuriang is a collaborative work between Indra Deigun and Arthur Boyd, who created swirling, magical images to accompany this mythical Indonesian story about volcanoes and strange, unearthly creatures. It was printed in 1993 and is in the State Library of Queensland artist book collection.
The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to librarian Helen Cole about this book, which is one of her most treasured items in the collection.
Tom Staley ... the Harry Ransom literary archive in Texas Read Transcript
12/07/2007
A literary archive that contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects including a lock of Byron's hair must be a pretty impressive place. According to the New Yorker magazine, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas at Austin also has Ezra Pound's copy of The Waste Land in which TS Eliot wrote a dedication to him, as well as the corrected proofs of Ulysses, on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel.
For the last twenty or so years the director of the centre has been Dr Tom Staley, who joins Ramona Koval from the US to discuss the scale and role of the archive.
Australian illuminated manuscripts
03/07/2007
The heyday of illuminated manuscripts was in the middle ages. But, did you know there is a tradition of illuminated books in Australia and that works by Henry Lawson, AB Patterson and Ogilvie have been given this ornate treatment?
The State Library of Queensland has a collection of exquisite Australian illuminated books on display in the Talbot Family Treasures Wall at the moment.
For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange spoke to the exhibition conservator about some of her favourite exhibits. Rhiannon Walker starts with the Australian history of illluminated books.
Sanskrit texts for all
26/06/2007
The Clay Sanskrit Library is the brainchild and heart's desire of investment banker John Clay. It aims to produce bi-lingual volumes of Sanskrit literature, with the original Sanskrit text printed in Roman script on the left-hand page and a modern English translation opposite. This way poetry, drama, satire and epic works will be brought to the general reader.
Greg Bailey is Reader in Sanskrit in the Asian Studies Program at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and is translating Sanskrit for the Clay Sanskrit Library project.
New-look Brisbane libraries
08/05/2007
You wouldn't normally expect to see huge plasma TV screens or Xbox games in libraries, but libraries are in the process of a revolution as they harness new information technologies and model themselves on airport lounges to maintain their civic importance.
For the Book Show, Sarah L'Estrange visited Brisbane's latest library redevelopments which sit opposite each other on the river: the Brisbane City Council Brisbane Square Library which has a Gibsonesque Neuromancer feel; and the State Library of Queensland.
She began her tour at the State Library, which was redeveloped at the same time that the Queensland Art gallery was given a facelift along with the building of the Gallery of Modern Art. The library still has its distinctive horizontal layers of concrete facing the river but the entrance facade is actually green and rather beautiful. The architect, Timothy Hill, starts by explaining the challenges of redesigning the library.
Artists' books: A creative collaboration
15/03/2007
Collaborations are an important feature in the creation of finely made artists' books. Professor Sasha Grishin says that "collaboration is like the art of listening, but listening for the harmony, not the melody."
We meet two people who have been working together, in harmony, for over 15 years making artists' books: printmaker, Bruno Leti and poet, Chris Wallace-Crabbe.
The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange visited the studio of Bruno Leti in Melbourne to discover how they work together. Chris Wallace-Crabbe begins with a poem that marks the beginning of their collaboration.
Books as works of art
15/03/2007
Today we explore the poetic world of finely made books which are objects of art in themselves: that is, artists' books. These books are neither about art nor about artists, so how do we define them?
Dianne Fogwell and Sasha Grishin join us to discuss this hybrid form, which cuts across printmaking, bookbinding, words and images.
Dianne Fogwell is curator of the touring exhibition on artists' books that opens this weekend at the State Library of Victoria. She was also lecturer-in-charge until 2005 at the Edition + Artist Book Studio in the School of Art at the Australian National University.
Professor Sasha Grishin is head of art history at ANU and wrote the catalogue essay for this exhibition.
Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley Read Transcript
30/01/2007
The late Australian painter Howard Arkley was as much famous for his death by drug overdose in 1999 as he was for his pop-art take on Australian suburbia. Arts writer and academic Rex Butler surveys a new monograph on Arkley. Titled Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, it's been released on the occasion of a major travelling exhibition.
