Word: australian
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They are some of the most enduring images of Australian art. Having made his home in a thatched hut on an island off the coast of Queensland, eccentric Scottish-born painter Ian Fairweather (1891-1974) began to harmonize a lifetime of influences and impulsive traveling. Mixing Taoist philosophy with Cubism, and Ab-Ex drips with Chinese calligraphy, his grandiloquent '60s works like Monastery and Monsoon transcended abstraction to become austere meditations in paint, as elemental as lightning. And all the more remarkable considering their flimsy foundations - they were often completed on carboard with the cheapest...
...process, Stevenson has cast the usual artistic ideas about Fairweather adrift. While a 1994 retrospective installed the painter in the pantheon of Australian Modernism, "I actually believe this in a way undersells his achievements," says Stevenson, a graduate of Auckland's Elam School. "The story of his life seems somewhere between Gauguin and the hippy movement, and this aspect of his practice is also important and fascinating." Through his research, Stevenson began to see himself in Fairweather. The latter lived his last two decades as a virtual recluse on Queensland's Bribie Island, and the New Zealander, who moved...
...Queensland lawyer John Bell thought the Japanese troops responsible for the strangling of his grandfather in New Guinea had been tried and sentenced. He knew that 64-year-old John William Bell had been among a party of 23 Australian nationals, including a 14-year-old boy, who were rounded up and garrotted on New Ireland's Kavieng wharf in 1942. War crimes investigators indicted six Japanese over the massacre in the late 1940s. But what Bell didn't know was that the Australian government dropped the case against a seventh man, the officer who decreed that the victims...
...Formerly secret documents obtained by Time show how Australian officials, under pressure to shut down the trials, decided to slash the remaining cases from 45 to 20, mainly because they did not relate to Australian servicemen, because the identities of the victims were unclear, or because prosecution might not have resulted in the death penalty. The Kavieng case was just one example. "The cold war considerations had imposed themselves, and the new Menzies government decided that it needed to accept Japan as an ally,'' says historian Michael Carrel, who recently completed a Ph.D. thesis on the subject...
...Anderson writes: "Conviction of the accused appears probable and a court might possibly award the death penalty." But, he adds, "it is doubtful whether the Australian Military court should concern itself at the present juncture with cases involving Allied nationals...