Australian artist Margaret Preston
Margaret Preston's vibrant paintings and prints of Australian flowers, animals and landscapes have delighted the Australian public since the early 1920s.
Margaret Preston was born Margaret Rose McPherson in Port Adelaide, South Australia in 1875, the daughter of David McPherson, a Scottish marine engineer and his wife Prudence Lyle. She and her sister were sent at first to a private school, but when family circumstances changed, her mother took the girls to Sydney where Margaret attended a public high school. She decided early in life to become an artist and took private art lessons. In 1888, she trained for several months with Sydney landscape painter William Lister, and in 1893 enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, where she studied for just over four years.
In 1898, after her father died, Margaret returned to Adelaide to study and then teach at the Adelaide School of Design. Her early artwork was influenced by the German aesthetic tradition, in which subjects of the natural world were depicted in a true to life manner.
Margaret's first visit to Europe in 1904, and her studies in Paris, France had little impact on this naturalism that dominated her work from this early period. However some eight years later, after returning to Paris, she began to recognise the decorative possibilities of art.
With the outbreak of the First World War, Margaret traveled to England, where she had exhibitions and continued her studies of art. She was a student of pottery, but at some time developed her interest in various techniques of printmaking and design. In England's West Country, she taught basket weaving at a rehabilitation unit for servicemen. It was on board a boat returning to Australia that she met wealthy businessman William Preston, whom she married in 1919. Together Margaret and William settled in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Mosman. The most characteristic prints from her early years in Sydney are views of boats floating on Sydney Harbour and of houses clustered on foreshore hills. Although Sydney was their home, the couple traveled regularly, both overseas and within Australia.
Her first major showing in Australia was with her friend Thea Proctor, in exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney in 1925. Many of Preston's prints were hand-coloured in rich scarlet reds, blues and greens, and all of them were set in Chinese red lacquer frames. Harbour views were again prominent, but in comparison with earlier artworks, they were compact and busy, using striking contrasts of black and white combined with elaborate patterns and repetitions. Other prints from this period featured native flora. It was with these still-life subjects that she convinced the public that Australian native flowers were equal in beauty to any exotic species.
From 1932 to 1939, Preston moved away from Sydney and lived with her husband at Berowra, on the upper reaches of the Hawkesbury River. The area was one of rugged natural beauty, and for the first time Preston found herself living in a home surrounded by bush. Prior to this, the native flowers that featured in her paintings and prints had been purchased from local florists; they now grew in abundance around her home. Preston's prints became larger, less complex and less reliant on the use of bright colours. Flowers were no longer arranged in vases, and Preston began to concentrate instead on flowers that were growing wild.
While living at Berowra, and undoubtedly prompted by the Aboriginal rock engravings found near her property, Preston also developed what was to be a lifelong interest in Aboriginal art. On returning to Sydney in 1939, she became a member of the Anthropological Society of New South Wales, and later visited many important Aboriginal sites throughout Australia. Preston believed that Aboriginal art provided the key to establishing a national body of art that reflected the vast and ancient continent of Australia.
During the 1940s, symbols used by Aboriginal people, together with dried, burnt colours found in traditional Aboriginal paintings, became increasingly prominent in her prints. The artist's titles from this period frequently acknowledge her sources, and reveal the extent to which she drew inspiration from traditional Aboriginal art to create her own art.
It was in 1953, at the age of 78, that Preston produced her most significant prints. The exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney included 29 prints made using the ancient technique known as stenciling. Many of the artworks in the exhibition incorporated her fusion of Aboriginal and Chinese concepts. Preston had admired Chinese art since 1915, when she acquired the first of her many books on the subject, and she had visited China on two occasions. Chinese elements may be found in several of her earlier paintings.
However, in her prints of the 1950s, Preston combined Chinese ideas with her understanding of the ‘Dreamtime’ creation stories of Aboriginal Australians. Preston did not let age alter her habit of working hard. As she got older, her love of painting, printmaking and travel continued. By the time of her death in 1963, when she was 88, she had produced over 400 paintings and prints. In a career spanning almost 60 years, she created a body of work that demonstrates her extraordinary originality and the intensity of her commitment to Australian art.
The conquest of malaria in Italy
A The word 'malaria' means 'bad air' in Italian, and this terrible disease marked the life of the people of that country for thousands of years. Yet by 1962, Italy was officially declared malaria-free, and it has remained so ever since. Frank Snowden's study of this successful endeavour is a remarkable piece of historical work. Original, crystal clear, analytical and passionate, Snowden takes us to areas historians have rarely visited before.
B Everybody now knows that malaria is carried by mosquitoes. But in the 19th century most experts subscribed to the theory of 'miasma' or 'poisoning of the air'. Others made a link between swamps, water and malaria, but did not make the further leap towards insects. The consequence of these theories was that little was done to combat the disease before the end of that century. The situation was so serious that from a total population of 25m Italians, 11m were 'permanently at risk'. In warm, damp, malarial zones, the life expectancy of land workers was a terrifying 22.5 years. The economic impact of the disease was immense. Epidemics were blamed on people who originated from the hotter parts of Italy, given the widespread belief that malaria was hereditary.
C One of the first breakthroughs in the war against malaria came in 1898 when the zoologist Giovanni Battista Grassi demonstrated that the micro-organisms causing the disease were carried in the digestive tract of the mosquito. By releasing mosquitoes into rooms to drink the blood of healthy human volunteers, Grassi was able to make the direct link between the insects and the disease. Definitive proof of this theory was obtained after an extraordinary series of experiments in Italy, where healthy people were introduced into malarial zones but kept free of mosquito bites - and remained well. The recently formed Italian state at last had the necessary information to begin tackling the disease.
D A complicated approach was adopted, which made use of quinine - a drug obtained from tree bark which had long been used to combat fever, but was now seen as a crucial part of the war on malaria. Italy introduced a quinine law and a quinine tax in 1904, and the drug was administered to large numbers of rural workers. Despite its often terrible side effects, the drug was successful in limiting the spread of the disease, and in breaking cycles of infection. In addition, Italy set up rural health centres and invested heavily in education programmes. Malaria, as Snowden shows, was not just a medical problem, but a social and regional issue, and could only be defeated through multi-layered strategies.
E It was originally decided to give quinine to all those in vulnerable regions - even healthy people. However, peasants were often suspicious of medicine being forced upon them, and doctors were frequently met with hostility and stubborn refusal to accept the treatment offered. But despite the refusals, the strategy as a whole was hugely successful. Deaths from malaria fell by some 80% in the first decade of the 20th century and some areas escaped altogether from the scourge of the disease.
F The 1915-18 war delayed the campaign, as funds were diverted to the battlefields. In the 1920s and 1930s the draining of the damp, unhealthy marshlands around Rome had a certain impact on the spread of malaria. However, as war swept through the drained lands in the 1940s, the disease returned with a vengeance. Yet the country's leading malariologist Alberto Missiroli refused to order the distribution of quinine, so allowing the epidemic to spread unchecked. According to Snowden, he did this in order to create the ideal conditions for a new strategy, supported by the US Rockefeller Foundation – a massive experiment involving the extermination of mosquitoes with the chemical DDT. It is estimated that more than a third of the inhabitants in the affected area contracted malaria and countless thousands died.
G With the end of the war in 1945, the US government and the Rockefeller Foundation were free to experiment. DDT was sprayed from the air, and 3m Italians had their bodies covered with the chemical. The effects were immense, and by 1962 malaria was more or less gone from the whole country. One of the final victims to die of the disease in Italy was the popular cyclist, Fausto Coppi. He had contracted malaria in Africa in 1960, and the failure of doctors in Italy to spot the disease was a sign of the times. A few decades earlier, they would have immediately noticed the telltale signs; it was later claimed that a small dose of quinine would have saved his life.
H As there are still more than 1m deaths every year from malaria worldwide, Snowden's book also has contemporary relevance. This is a disease that affects every level of the societies where it is rampant. The economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s which made Italy into a modern industrial nation would not have been possible without the eradication of malaria. Moreover, this book convincingly argues that the disease was 'an integral part of the big picture of modern Italian history'. This magnificent study, beautifully written and impeccably documented, deserves an audience beyond specialists in history, or in Italy.
The mystery of Easter Island
The giant stone statues of Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean have perplexed archaeologists ever since European explorers first witnessed them three centuries ago. Jacob Roggeveen, the Dutch seaman who gave the island its name in 1722, was amazed by the statues, each of which clearly weighed several tonnes. But as there were no forests on the island, he could not comprehend how people devoid of heavy timber could build and erect something that size. It was also remarkable considering the absence of metal objects for carving and cutting, and the reliance on mere human strength as no draught animals could be seen either. Roggeveen was equally amazed as to how the islanders could have come to colonise such a remote place. Their canoes were leaky and frail, not the sort of ocean-going craft that could survive a three-week sea journey. At the time of his visit, it seemed evident the islanders were living in extremely poor conditions and that there was no cultivation of crops.
What was the mystery behind the statues? In the 1970s, the author Erich von Däniken suggested the statues were the work of extraterrestrial beings. It was hard to believe the stones were the work of humans who were more than 2,000 miles from the nearest mainland, so for a short period of time his theory appealed to those fascinated with space travel. But for serious academics, the puzzle of the statues has caused a deep divide. Some archaeologists see Easter Island as an example of what can happen when the lust for material splendour — ever bigger stone carvings in this case — is satisfied at the expense of the environment. Others, meanwhile, take a different view. The island, these scholars argue, suffered at the hands of introduced diseases, notably smallpox, and a slave trade that stole a huge proportion of its indigenous population. At the heart of the debate is the issue of the island's deforestation. There is no doubt that the island was once covered in palm trees. There is also no doubt that something happened that caused the island to become completely denuded over a short period of time. But was it the islanders who triggered this environmental degradation or another event beyond their control, such as the introduction of rats? It is an indisputable fact that rats found their way to the island, although exactly how is a matter of debate.
In 2005, the anthropologist Jared Diamond claimed the islanders started building ceremonial statues in an atmosphere of rivalry between the many clans. To move the statues from the island's quarry in the south-east, they needed to cut large logs for the construction of long 'canoe ladders' to carry them to the coast. For its transport alone, each statue would have required several trees to be cut down. As a result of the deforestation, Diamond believes food production fell dramatically. Consequently the population collapsed from perhaps as many as 15,000 to the few thousand that were eking out a living by the time Roggeveen arrived. Smallpox and slavery killed off those who remained, but the islanders were on the way to total collapse even without any European contact, says Diamond.
But not everyone is convinced. Professor Terry Hunt, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii, says: 'There is no evidence that a population collapse occurred before European contact.' He is supported by Professor Carl Lipo of California State University. They argue that Easter Island was colonised by the first Polynesian seafarers nowhere near as early as supposed. They say the first people to arrive came around AD1200, about 400 years later than other scientists have suggested from radio-carbon dating. This makes it implausible for the population to have reached the 15,000 figure that would have caused such a fast ecocide. They also believe the deforestation occurred over a longer period as a result of climate change, and rats probably also played a part. The islanders did not go through a population collapse until after the arrival of Europeans, they say.
Hunt has examined new data from the Hawaiian and other Pacific islands that shows that by early historic times the deforestation of Easter Island was already complete, or nearly so. A dense forest of palm trees and shrubs had mostly disappeared and as a result, as many as six land bird species had also become extinct. Crucially, much of the forest damage appears to have been done before evidence of fires on the island. However, almost all of the palm seed shells discovered on the island were found to have been gnawed by rats which would have made them unable to germinate. Evidence from other Pacific islands also confirms how destructive rats can be. However, John Flenley of New Zealand's Massey University, who carried out much of the radio-carbon work on Easter Island, says there is ample evidence for a much earlier arrival of Polynesian settlers. He refutes the arguments of the sceptics: whilst admitting that the Europeans did bring certain disasters, he maintains that Hunt and Lipo are ignoring archaeological, botanical and sedimentological evidence proving the island was transformed from a subtropical rainforest to a treeless landscape. The radio-carbon dating points to an initial colonisation before AD900, Flenley argues. This was ample time for the rapid deforestation, environmental collapse and a population crash, he insists.
Why all this is important today is not, of course, lost in the age of globalisation, climate change and a rapidly growing world population in the billions. As Diamond says: 'The parallels between Easter Island and the whole of the modern world are chillingly obvious.'