Mount Everest sherpa Tenzing Norgay touched hearts, changed lives on 1960s Tassie trip

by Zoe Kean

Mon 18 Nov

Tenzing Norgay encounters wallabies at Cynthia Bay near Mount Field, Tasmania. 
(Supplied: Jack Thwaites Collection, Tasmanian Archives NS3195/1/2836)

Imagine being 11 years old, on a family outing to a lake, when, without warning, one of your all-time heroes unexpectedly walks out from the forest and starts talking to your family.

In 1953, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary became the first two people confirmed to have summitted the world's tallest mountain, Mount Everest.

Just under 10 years later, young Tasmanian Allan King was at the Lake Dobson car park at Mount Field National Park in Tasmania when Norgay, the famed Nepalese Sherpa and mountaineer, emerged from a hiking track.

A young Allan King and his little brother were delighted to meet Norgay. 
(Supplied: Tasmanian State Archives, NS3195/1/2858)

The chance meeting would leave a deep impression on King.

"He appeared out of nowhere and walked over to mum and dad as if he knew us," King recalls.

"It was just like hail-fellow-well met, as if he knew us."

Being curious, King had one question he was bursting to ask his hero: who was really the first person to reach the top?

"I was certain at that age that he must have got there before Sir Edmund," King explains.

"I'll never forget the smile on his face, because he turned and he said to me, 'We both reached the top'."

King remembers Norgay fielding his questions with kindness and diplomacy.

"To me, he was just a legend," King says.

Why was Tenzing in Tasmania?

Norgay had been invited to Tasmania by Jack Thwaites, a conservationist, pioneer bushwalker, and co-founder of the Hobart Walking Club.

Norgay and Jack Thwaites at Mount Field. (Supplied: Jack Thwaites Collection, Tasmanian Archives NS3195-1-283)

Thwaites had been instrumental in early expeditions in the rugged south-west and Du Cane Range and was in the party that made the first official crossing of the Overland Track.

Thwaites had previously hosted Sir Edmond on a multiday trip to Tasmania's south-west in 1960.

Norgay's visit to Tasmania lasted 21 days. Hosted by the Adult Education Board, he visited shows, schools, clubs and societies.

His Tassie trip was topped off with a four-day camping trip at Mount Field National Park, where King bumped into him.

The board emphasised getting into nature and physical exercise and often organised outdoor odysseys.

Queenslander Tony Fox was 25 when he heard that Norgay was going to be at Mount Field and he knew he had to make the trip.

"It was a 'once in a lifetime' … someone like that does not come to Australia every day of the week," he says.

Fox was low on cash in '63, but he was determined to join the camping trip.

A mate dropped him off on the outskirts of Brisbane, he hitchhiked to the Bass Strait ferry and then hitched again to Hobart to join busloads of people headed to Mount Field.

"Now I'm 86, but I was young and dumb," he says.

Despite the snow outside, Fox recalls the campers enjoying cosy nights in the national park's historic cabins.

A letter that Norgay (centre) wrote to campers has been kept all this time by Fox (right). (Supplied: Tony Fox)

First published at ABC News, November 18, 2024

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An Australian plane wreck gives insight into a surreal landscape

By Kerry van der Jagt

Douglas C-53 Skytrooper wreck from World War I, Vansittart Bay, Kimberley coast. (Photo © iStockphoto)

It was the night of February 26, 1942, during World War II, when a Douglas C-53 Skytrooper, low on fuel and hopelessly lost, made a belly-flop landing on a salt pan in Vansittart Bay in a remote part of the Kimberley.

More than 80 years later the fuselage, wings and tail sit amid the pandanus palms like a prop from the television series Lost.

“The four crew and two passengers survived the wheels-up landing,” says our guide, Jesse Menghetti. “After a few days marooned on the beach they were rescued by a Qantas flying boat.”

We are on a 10-day Kimberley expedition cruise from Broome to Darwin aboard Seabourn Pursuit, and although we expected the waterfalls, wetlands and wildlife, the human stories are a surprise.

After a Zodiac landing on the beach, a hike across the vast salt pan brings us to the wreck, now largely engulfed by greenery. We learn that the C-53 had been assisting with the transfer of Dutch citizens following the invasion of the Dutch East Indies by Japanese forces, and was on its return leg from Perth to Darwin via Broome when the pilot became disoriented in a storm.

Hearing about this wartime evacuation hits hard. My Dutch father-in-law, who was just a 14-year-old boy at the time and had been living a peaceful life with his family in Java, wasn’t so lucky. Instead, he was separated from his mother, sister and extended family and interned by the Japanese in a camp for the next 22 months. His hand-scribbled diary, which tells of hunger, brutality and loneliness, still makes us weep.

First published at Nine msn, November 17, 2024

Archive celebrates 40 years of collecting, preserving and sharing

Tony Burke at the NFSA’s birthday party. (Photo supplied)

By Helen Musa

It was smiles all around on Wednesday night when federal arts minister Tony Burke joined the National Film and Sound Archive retiring chair Caroline Elliott and CEO Patrick McIntyre to celebrate 40 years of collecting, preserving and sharing Australian audiovisual media and culture.

On October 3 1984, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke officially opened the archive’s new headquarters in Canberra, calling it “an institution devoted to the popular cultural expression of our age”.

Hosted by broadcaster Wenlei Ma, the celebratory event took place along with dancing and DJ sets in the audiovisual gallery at the heritage art deco building in Acton.

The opening was backed by footage of Hawke opening the archive – the former Institute of Anatomy – and the crowd heard that the transformation of the old institute into a home for Australia’s visual and audio collections had been the culmination of an extended lobbying campaign but the project nearly collapsed some years down the track when the idea was floated of subsuming it into Sydney’s Australian Film Commission on a permanent basis.

That was put paid to after demonstrations and marches by angry Canberrans refusing to lose their institution to Sydney. In 2007 the NFSA became fully independent, as it is now.

McIntyre took the stand to note that not only was it the 40th anniversary of the archive but the 93rd birthday of the building itself, a unique piece of architecture that he and his team were tending carefully.

Minister Burke said that the timing of the archive was serendipitous given the massive popular cultural explosion of VHS and BETA from the ’70s, and archivists found it hard to keep up with the amazing wealth of A/V material in Australia.

“It was an exciting moment for our country,” Burke said.

First published at Canberra City News, November 14, 2024

Australia's musical matriarch: composer, pianist and arts advocate Margaret Sutherland

By Jennifer Mills

Thu 14 Nov

Margaret Sutherland was a composer, pianist and staunch advocate for the arts in Australia. (ABC Archives)

When she died in 1984, Margaret Sutherland was remembered as the "matriarch" of Australian music. But few outside of the classical music world know her name today.

Sutherland was a composer, pianist and staunch advocate for the arts.

She wrote around 200 pieces of music, performed during her lifetime by leading Australian artists like the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

The somewhat forgotten composer and pianist lived a difficult life, marred by grief in her early years and relationship difficulties later on. She wrote in the weaving and chromatic style of the time but with her own signature and striking melodiousness.

Musicians and academics are working to change Sutherland's unsung status, performing music that's rarely been heard since her death and even unearthing music that was previously thought lost.

This year, Jillian Graham's recent biography on Sutherland, Inner Song, won the Award for a Debut Work at the National Biography Awards.

On concert stages that are increasing their representation of music by women, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra presented Sutherland's Violin Concerto in 2021 with then-concertmaster Sophie Rowell as soloist.

The performing arts, particularly in her home of Melbourne, are still benefiting from Sutherland's achievements.

Sutherland with fellow artists Dorian le Gallienne and Muriel Luyk ahead of a performance
of Sutherland's Concerto for Strings in 1954. (ABC Archives)

Growing up in Melbourne

Sutherland was born in Adelaide in 1897 but lived in Melbourne from the age of four until her death at 86.

The Sutherland clan were quite cosmopolitan by the standards of the time: their homes in Melbourne's inner-east were filled with music, art and robust discussion of philosophy and the affairs of the day. Her Aunt Jane was a well-regarded visual artist.

Living among extensive gardens and taking routine hikes with an uncle instilled in Sutherland a lifelong awe of the natural world.

Schooled in a private home in Kew until she was 16, Sutherland was a quick study. She achieved consistently high marks but to the frustration of the school's principal, she never completed her final exams.

Instead, Sutherland was determined to pursue a career in music.

Having learnt the piano since she was a child, Sutherland received a scholarship to continue her studies in composition at the then-private Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.

Studying abroad

Feeling frustrated by the limits of the Australian music scene, Sutherland went to Europe in 1923, where she was mentored by British composer Arnold Bax.

During this time, she wrote one of her more well-known works, a sonata for violin and piano. Bax famously declared it, "the best work I know by a woman".

Although Sutherland's gender was almost always raised in connection to her work, musicians today take a different attitude.

Zoe Knighton, Melbourne-based cellist and founding member of the Flinders Quartet, has played a lot of Sutherland's music.

"Quite simply put, her compositional craft is exemplary.

"Her focus on artistic integrity and forging her own musical path is as inspirational today as it must have been to all composers of her time regardless of their background or gender," Knighton says.

Violinist Sophie Rowell thinks the Violin Sonata is "extraordinary".

"It celebrates moments of romanticism alongside moments of edgy rhythm. It is written in a language unique to Margaret Sutherland, and that language is an intriguing and beautiful one.

"It is most certainly one that deserves listening to and celebrating," says Rowell, who is now artistic director of the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra.

The obstacle of marriage

Sutherland returned to Australia in 1925 and married physician and psychiatrist Norman Albiston two years later. The marriage was not a happy one.

Albiston was not supportive, even dismissive of Sutherland's independent pursuits as a composer, irrespective of the welcome income she brought into the household.

In spite of these difficulties, Sutherland composed close to half of her musical output during her marriage to Albiston.

Once their two children, Mark and Jennifer, were in their late teens, the couple separated.

During her marriage, the ABC provided a significant outlet for Sutherland's music.

It was a fraught relationship, with Sutherland frequently criticising the ABC for inopportune placement of Australian works.

Margaret Sutherland with fellow composer Esther Rofe in 1941. (ABC Archives)

Sutherland's own music was written to be played, usually with specific performers and colleagues in mind.

The majority of her compositions are chamber music, particularly piano or piano with voice. She also wrote choral and symphonic works, string quartets and an opera.

"Her writing is bristling with intelligence, wit and clarity but the moments that stay with me the most are the emotional ones," Knighton says. "Even though she had the reputation of being a spiky character, she obviously had a heart of gold."

A blossoming career

By the late 1940s, as Sutherland's children grew more independent and with keeping house for Albiston no longer her concern, she was free to explore her career and her activism for Australian composition more broadly.

Some of Sutherland's most enduring works came out of this time, including her Violin Concerto.

When the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra presented it with Sophie Rowell, it had only been performed in Australia a handful of times.

Rowell says playing the concerto was inspirational.

"I was struck by the sheer scale of the work, and also by the world of colours it invokes. It is very much a conversation with the orchestra … I love that aspect of the concerto, when you get to feel like a chamber musician rather than a soloist out the front."

In addition to composing, Sutherland was always looking for opportunities to promote the arts in Australia.

During World War II, she raised money for the Red Cross through running a series of Wednesday lunch-hour concerts, known as the "Middays'.

Sutherland played a leading role in the Combined Arts Centre Movement, which campaigned for a multipurpose cultural centre for the public in Melbourne.

The centre began construction in 1973, with the present-day Arts Centre Melbourne still a significant cultural hub in the city.

An enduring legacy for the arts in Australia

A near-fatal stroke brought Sutherland's composing career to a halt in 1969. But Sutherland continued to be a formidable presence in the Australian arts scene.

She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Melbourne that same year, an OBE in 1970 and the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977. In 1981, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia.

Sutherland lived to attend the opening of the Melbourne Concert Hall at the new Arts Centre in 1982.

Now known as Hamer Hall, its concertmaster's suite, which Rowell occupied during her tenure at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, is named in Sutherland's honour.

Rowell acknowledges Sutherland's pivotal role in convincing the state government to create a dedicated space for the performing arts.

"How lucky we are today as musicians, actors, artists, dancers, to have those spaces for performance and to bring the artistic life of Melbourne together."

Sutherland proved that a woman could have a sustainable musical career alongside her domestic responsibilities, something a lot of her peers thought was impossible.

"Her legacy lives on not only in her music," Knighton says. "She opened many doors for composers and musicians and paved the way for artists to stay true to their own identity and voice.”

First published at ABC News Classic FM, November 14, 2024

Merchant Ivory, a documentary at the British Film Festival, honours the long, storied career of Oscar-winner James Ivory

By Stephen A Russell

James Ivory helmed 30 movies between 1961 and 2007 from the esteemed production company, Merchant Ivory. (Supplied)

Despite winning his only Oscar at the age of 89 for his adapted screenplay of queer love story Call Me by Your Name (2018), many would know James Ivory best as a gifted director.

Between 1961 and 2007, he helmed 30 of the most adored movies from esteemed production company Merchant Ivory, including sweeping literary adaptations of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, Maurice and Howards End, plus Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.

Indeed, the term 'Merchant Ivory' is often used as shorthand for lavish period pieces. But as Stephen Soucy's rollicking British Film Festival (BFF) documentary of the same name reveals, they were often chaotic behind their prestigious façade.

Heat and Dust, the 1983 drama adapted by "extraordinary" author-turned-Merchant-Ivory screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her novel, is a prime example. Starring Greta Scacchi, Shashi Kapoor and Julie Christie and screening at BFF as a retrospective highlight, it was quite the scene, a dapper Ivory, now 96, informs me via Zoom from his New York apartment.

"We ran out of money in the middle of the shoot," he chuckles. "All the actors had arrived to do the first part of the film that takes place in the 20s and we were all set up and ready, so we shot what we could and had to give up after a certain point."

Merchant and Ivory shared a 40-year romance. (Supplied: BFF)

Thankfully, enough money was raised to complete the sequence set in 1982, largely due to the efforts of the late Ismail Merchant, Ivory's partner — in life and cinema.

The talented producer is characterised, at one stage in the documentary, as something of a charismatic pirate who could charm the pants off anyone while relentlessly emptying their pockets.

"I just knew that he would always somehow manage to pull us through," Ivory says. "I just believed in him so completely."

Excerpt first published at ABC News, November 14, 2024

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Timothy West, star of stage, film and television, dies aged 90

By Chris Wiegand and Caroline Davies

With a career ranging from Shakespeare to EastEnders and Great Canal Journeys, actor was a familiar face from the 1960s onwards

Timothy West with his wife, Prunella Scales, in May 2024. They were married for 61 years and starred together in Great Canal Journeys. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA Media

The actor Timothy West, whose career ranged from Shakespeare, Ibsen and Pinter on stage to TV appearances in Brass, EastEnders and Great Canal Journeys (with his wife, Prunella Scales), has died aged 90.

His children, Juliet, Samuel and Joseph West, said in a statement: “After a long and extraordinary life on and off the stage, our darling father, Timothy West, died peacefully in his sleep yesterday evening. He was 90 years old.

“Tim was with friends and family at the end. He leaves his wife, Prunella Scales, to whom he was married for 61 years, a sister, a daughter, two sons, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. All of us will miss him terribly.

“We would like to thank the incredible NHS staff at St George’s hospital, Tooting, and at Avery Wandsworth for their loving care during his last days.”

Hugely popular, with a commanding stage presence but unassuming personal manner, West toured the UK’s regional theatres with the same adventurous spirit with which he travelled its waterways.

“I feel more useful when I’m on the road, touring this country and others, playing in different theatres, exploring different places, meeting different people,” he wrote in his witty 2001 memoir A Moment Towards the End of the Play. “It’s no way to get rich, or famous, and it drives my agent mad, but I love it.”

Timothy West in King Lear at the Old Vic, London, in 2003. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

There were many tributes paid to West after news of his death. The writer and broadcaster Gyles Brandreth posted on Instagram: “A marvellous man – a marvellous actor, husband, father, friend. On stage, on screen, on a canal boat, on the end of a pier (he loved a seaside pier!), in the garden with a glass of wine, he was just the best. The great Timothy West has died at 90: what a worthwhile, well-filled life.”

West played leading roles in Uncle Vanya, Death of a Salesman, The Master Builder, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Macbeth and, on four occasions, King Lear. He also became known for portraying real-life characters on stage and screen, such as the designer William Morris and conductor Thomas Beecham, as well as political figures including Mikhail Gorbachev, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. West’s films included The Day of the Jackal (1973) and Cry Freedom (1987).

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First published at The Guardian (Australian Edition), November 14, 2024

Alexis Wright becomes the first Aboriginal author to win the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature

By Hannah Story

This year, Alexis Wright became the first author to win both the Stella and the Miles Franklin Award in the same year,
and to win the Stella twice. (Photo: ABC News, Timothy Ailwood)

Waanyi author Alexis Wright has won the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature, awarded to a Victorian writer who has made an "outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life".

She is the first Aboriginal author to win the triennial award, which has been running since 2004 and is for writers working in any genre, including poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction. Past winners include Helen Garner and Christos Tsiolkas.

The win caps off a banner year for 73-year-old Wright, who also won the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, both worth $60,000, for her latest novel, Praiseworthy.

The 730-page epic also won the UK's longest-running literary award, the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction, worth 10,000 British pounds ($19,000) and, last year, won the $15,000 Fiction Book Award at the Queensland Literary Awards.

This latest win puts Wright's prize winnings for 2024 at almost $200,000 before tax, largely off the critical success of Praiseworthy.

Praiseworthy was also shortlisted for the prestigious Dublin Literary Award, worth
100,000 euros ($162,000). (Supplied: Giramondo)

Set in the fictional small town of the same name in northern Australia, which is shrouded by a haze cloud, the novel follows Cause Man Steel, his wife Dance and their children, Aboriginal Sovereignty and Tommyhawk.

Cause Man Steel, a "culture dreamer", hatches a plan to use donkeys to solve both the climate crisis and the economic dependency of Aboriginal peoples.

It was described by ABC Arts book critic Declan Fry as "a realist's view of colonisation … told in language that is roiling and choral and haranguing and acrobatic".

"Wright is always willing to be paradoxical and contradictory, funny and serious, high and low, ridiculous and full of gravitas."

The Melbourne Prize for Literature celebrates Wright's whole body of work. This includes the novel that first won her the Miles Franklin in 2007, Carpentaria, and Tracker, her "collective memoir" of Arrernte activist Tracker Tilmouth, which won the Stella in 2018.

Award-winning poet Evelyn Araluen judged the prize, alongside Tsiolkas and Monthly editor Michael Williams.

"Alexis embodies an order of excellence and influence that is transformational for her readers, First Nations or otherwise," she says.

"It has been a privilege to read her throughout my life, and I'm honoured to have been able to play a role in affirming yet another well-deserved accolade for all her achievements.”

Read full article here.

First published at ABC News, November 14, 2024