The correspondence of Kostas Tachtsis with the Australian painter Carl Plate is published in Greek

Christos Paridis LiFo 2024

Restless Spirits

Cassi Plate,  Pan Macmillan, 2005     

2006 Magarey Medal Highly Commended

Citation
Cassi Plate's Restless Spirits, published by Macmillan, is an intriguing, perceptive and always very readable biography of the author's grandfather, German artist Adolf Gustav Plate. Derived from Plate's doctoral thesis, Restless Spirits is the pilot work in an innovative partnership between the University of Sydney and Pan Macmillan to turn the thesis into a book. Reconstructing the life of her nomadic grandfather through treasures from the bottom of his old sea chest, Plate embarks on a journey of her own, traveling across Australia and the Pacific while trying to retrace Adolf's steps and piece together the scattered fragments of his life. Written in an intimate and often whimsical tone, the book evinces an openness to reading a wide range of sources as the archive of her grandfather's life and offers an original perspective on the relation between memory and biography.   The book is beautifully illustrated with photographs of the artist's paintings and other memorabilia from the sea chest. Cassi Plate deftly weaves discussion of these images into her text, so enhancing the hybrid nature of her biography.
Penny Russell,  Mary Spongberg,  Elizabeth Webby,  July 2006
  

Malcolm Knox, ‘Dusting off a thesis to create a classic’, Sydney Morning Herald, Nov 27, 2004

Adolf Gustav Plate, a German seaman, spent New Year's Eve of 1900 on the Fijian island of Rotuma. He took a photograph of women lying around on piles of coconuts and laughing - a mood at odds with the more common shots taken by Europeans of Pacific islanders sullenly awaiting their extinction. A century later, those women's laughter sparked a fascination in Plate's granddaughter, who has turned the artist's story into a book that will create what its publisher says is a world first.

Cassi Plate, 50, will be the first author published in a project to transform the most interesting Australian university theses into books for the public. Behind the project is the editor and best-selling author Drusilla Modjeska, who read Plate's PhD thesis on her grandfather two years ago and chose it as the pilot.

"[Samoan writer] Albert Wendt said he writes stories to overcome the tragedies of the past. My grandfather was travelling around the Pacific, painting and taking photographs, while Germany had colonies there. His art didn't stand outside history; it was part of it. I think this book is my way of working out where I belong, by taking responsibility for the past."

Adolf Plate died of throat cancer in 1914. His pioneering photographs - there are about 1000 of them - sat in a trunk for decades, and some hundreds of his paintings were only shown once, in the 1930s, before being donated to the Penrith Regional Art Gallery in the 1990s. Cassi Plate began digging through these archives and became inspired to reconstruct life in the Pacific a century ago, "with my grandfather hovering at my shoulder" for her "From Thesis to Book" idea.

 Felicity Plunkett, Restless Spirits by Cassi Plate, The Age, July 2, 2005

Restless Spirits is a book about the silences and gaps in family history, and history more broadly, and the quest for the cement of knowledge to fill these. At its centre is Adolf Gustav Plate, artist and sailor, and grandfather of writer Cassi Plate. Writer and subject are the restless spirits of the title, with the writer's figurative and literal journeys to recover her grandfather's story mirroring his own relentless mobility and protean nature. 

Plate alludes to Walter Benjamin's suggestion that the past erupts into the present in flashes, emitted by objects or events, and this book is a museum of eloquent objects (the weathered sepia photos in which Plate studies her grandfather's expression) bartered objects (decorated mats and glass torch-tops) exchanged in Fiji, and the logs, letters and journals left behind. The encyclopedic nature of the work is striking. Both Plates have a gift for recording detail, with Cassi Plate reinterpreting the observations of her forebear with the aid of writers such as Freud and Foucault. Yet there remains a sense of the secrets that objects don't tell. 

Restless Spirits shows the provisional nature of biography, as Plate's recapturing of her grandfather's life remains, for all its detail and assembly of evidence, imbued with the loss and longing suggested by the imagined facts that sit alongside the proven. The fictional elements – Plate's imagining of her grandfather – in no way detract from the story. Adolf Plate was, as well as a seaman, painter and photographer, a collage-maker, and the collage his granddaughter assembles in his honour is as eloquent in its gaps as it is in what it includes.  

 Peter Corris, ‘An academic thesis spawns a tale of 19th-century exploration’, Weekend Australian, May 28-29, 2005   

Restless Spirits has ‘a lot going for it: the history of a German, the writer’s grandfather, who wandered across the Pacific for ten years from his youth, and as a married man with a family attempted to establish himself as an artist and writer and settle in Australia. There was adequate documentation in the form of letters, diaries and published journalism. More important, Adolf Plate left behind hundreds of drawings, paintings and photographs: illustrations for the book, no problem. 
To a great extent, this promise has been borne out. The narrative of Adolf Plate’s travels is engaging, occasionally dramatic, and his granddaughter is objective in her assessment of him. No hagiography here.  She also provides snippets of fresh information from her extensive research. Having written a bit about the Pacific, it shames me to learn the reason for the strong market for copra in the 19th century. I thought it was for soap; apparently it was a source of glycerine for nitroglycerine and therefore explosives and firearms.’   

John Charles Ryan, ‘Restless Spirits: The Life and Times of a Wandering Artist’, Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language, vol 5, issue 1, 2012

I first became interested in the work of the German-born sailor and artist Adolph Plate (1874-1914) when researching the depiction of Western Australia’s plant life in early twentieth-century poetry, visual art and historical documents. My attention turned towards one image in particular: Plate’s ‘Untitled [WA Bush Scene with Ringbarked Gum]’, a watercolour painted in 1912 when the enterprising artist and his family took up a parcel of land east of Geraldton to cultivate wheat. ‘Untitled’ was created soon before Plate and his young family left Perth for Sydney where he would die abruptly, at age 40, from throat cancer. What is it about this image of a Wheatbelt gum that draws me in? I think it’s the story of the tree’s circumferential gash—a graphic testimony to the land clearing practices of settlers (here exemplified by ring-barking) during a time of rapid environmental change in the Wheatbelt. In this region, more than ninety percent of the pre-settlement eucalypt woodlands have been eradicated, a transformation in part fuelled by the misplaced pastoral dreams of European-born settlers like Adolph Plate. But the appeal of the image also reflects the complex story of Plate himself and the many societies—as well as cultural and environmental values—he navigated during his brief, intense life.

Restless Spirits stems from Cassi Plate’s 2002 doctoral thesis completed at the University of Technology, Sydney, ‘Wandering Ghosts, Land and Landscape: Restless Spirits in the Culture of Colonialism’. Plate’s thesis was chosen by esteemed author and editor Drusilla Modjeska as the pilot project for the three-year ‘From Thesis to Book’ initiative, funded by the Australian Research Council. Part of Modjeska’s vision involved a partnership between publisher Pan Macmillan and the University of Sydney in which academic texts would be adapted for the public market. I suspect that part of the ‘adaptation’ of the original version of Restless Spirits entailed softening the theorisation that most typically defines university theses. Indeed, while Plate invokes old standards like philosophers Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, she refrains from leading the reader into abstruse conceptual tangles. Instead, she follows zealously the compelling story of her grandfather and her narrative of tracing his movements nearly one hundred years after the height of his powers.  

Cassi Plate’s research process in Western Australia particularly intrigues me. She draws upon a rich bed of information, including Adolph’s paintings and writings; accounts of her grandfather’s exhibitions in Perth newspapers; legal documents such as leases; first-person impressions from visits to the places depicted in Adolph’s works; and visits to the several properties around Western Australia owned by his family during their brief tenure in the State. As Plate makes clear from these resources, in some respects Adolph’s Western Australia saga was not unusual—but what distinguishes the story is the steadfast restlessness coupled to a profound creative vision which characterised the course of his life and subsequently his family’s. In the first pages of Restless Spirits, Cassi Plate brackets Adolph’s years of travel as 1887 to 1914. In other words, her grandfather spent two-thirds of his life and all of his adult years as a ‘restless spirit’. Although his South Pacific years are presented early on in the book, I’m especially interested in his Western Australia period during which he reached an apex of recognition as a painter of landscapes. In ‘Part Five: Unsettled Land’, she tracks Adolph’s arrival in WA in 1907 where he set out to pursue the challenges and rewards of land ownership. Again, Plate’s analysis of her grandfather’s itinerant labours recognises his ambivalence towards land—as the object of art and settlerism. The author makes this plain: his activities as both a pastoralist and artist reflect a conflicted vision of ‘landscape’ as something to be appreciated on its own terms yet manipulated by the colonial imagination. As one interested in the relationships between nature, aesthetics and colonialism, I find Cassi Plate’s distinction between land and landscape quite generative. For instance, in describing John Winthrop Hackett’s (1848-1916) purchase of her grandfather’s watercolour Dinninup, Evening for the emerging Art Gallery of Western Australia collections, Cassi Plate observes: ‘It was the earliest sign of a story which grew between the two men, of the relationship between landscape and land, between spectacle and speculation [emphasis added]’. As such, Restless Spirits is also about the aesthetic sensibilities that settlers imported into frontier lands like Western Australia where ‘park-like’ appearances were applauded because they were reminiscent of a home somewhere in the northern hemisphere. Early settlers of course were less aware that ‘park-like’ appeal was characteristically the result of Aboriginal land management practices. Her grandfather’s perception of the endemic trees of Western Australia also reflects his dualities: ‘[he] alternates between assessing their mercantile value, and praising their vulnerable grandeur. They are desired objects, and destroyers of a settler’s very existence’. Plate’s account of her grandfather is not an ordinary family history, one written to extol or idealise the settlers who carved an existence out of the land, one written at some level to exonerate one’s forebears. Restless Spirits reassures me that any account of a human life should comprise the laudable and the regrettable, equally. In a milieu like Western Australia where forgetting the past is still an unfortunately strong contemporary drive, Plate’s message is critically important to the conduct of regional historical research. 

Her portrait balances Adolph’s humanness as he searched for artistic gratification and, later in his life, agricultural and pastoral wealth. The following passage, I think, is representative of the spirit of equanimity with which she approaches her grandfather’s story:
"For my grandfather, to settle or belong meant, ideally, cultivation of the land and the mind. The principle of coexistence with nature (the German love of forests) became a central paradox, as he promoted agricultural expansion and admiration for the natural world; he cut down the trees he wished to paint in order to graze sheep and plant wheat. The reality of one came at the expense of the other."

The greatest triumph of Cassi Plate’s Restless Spirits is the eloquence with which the book recognises Adolph Plate’s dualities while, at the same time, celebrating his achievements as an artist, publisher and one of Western Australia’s early European settlers. Through careful and dedicated (in fact, zealous) research, Cassi makes her grandfather’s elusive complexities the book’s central exploration. In doing so, she creates a beautifully nuanced, thoughtfully presented and strikingly personal account of Adolph’s ‘restless’ peregrinations—from his early years as a young South Pacific mariner to his later years as a recognised landscape artist, literary publisher and pastoral entrepreneur. In particular, I recommend Restless Spirits to anyone interested in the literary, cultural and environmental history of Western Australia in the early 1900s.

Retrieved from https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol5/iss1/23

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