Useless Beauty: Flowers and Australian Art
By Ann Elias
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015
In his short story ‘Useless Beauty’, Guy de Maupassant tells of a Countess who confronts her husband whom she believes wants her only as a breeding machine. But, despite having borne seven children in eleven years, she points out to him that she has lost nothing of her beauty. The eponymous phrase is never used in the story, but the author’s audience would have known that it was commonly applied to flowers, whose domesticated function are for decoration, yet never last long. But unlike a flower, the countess sees more than a domestic use for herself and her beauty which has not wilted. Ann Elias’s book, Useless Beauty is a fascinating examination of the many tensions, transactions and revelations in Australian art, involving art, gender, nature, and memory. Anyone believing that this is a study ‘just’ about floral fripperies will be pleasantly mistaken, for Elias shows the extent to which flowers can be used as an effective means of exposing issues which were central to Australian art until at least after the Second World War.
Australian art history is hampered by the fact that its audience is relatively small and that it is therefore difficult for historians to find interest from international publishers. This sounds like overly dry reasoning, but in the ‘publish-or-perish’ climate of academe, large and ambitious studies in Australian art history have languished because of it, which makes Elias’s study particularly welcome. While the flower is a metaphor for womanhood, Elias does not let herself be tied to a one-dimensional feminist analysis, or to jargon about reclaiming or re-addressing. She shows that flowers are complex symbols that implicate men as much as women. The flower is also