Neha Kale’s A Foreign Return: On Art and Inhabitation seamlessly entwines memoir with art criticism. It’s a long consideration of art, colonisation, nostalgia and the places we may call home.

Review: A Foreign Return: On Art and Inhabitation – Neha Kale (New South)

Kale, who was born in Mumbai and now lives in Sydney, begins this unusual book with a description of Indian artist Dayanita Singh’s photographic installation, Suitcase Museum. The small black and white images of domestic interiors evoke childhood memories of holidays at Kale’s grandfather’s house in Goa.

The clutter of first memories from the Suitcase Museum is a visual contrast to the careful control in Kale’s analysis of another painting dealing with ideas of home, Australian artist John Brack’s 1953 work, The New House.

One of the pleasures of this book is the way the author translates her memories of time and place into analyses of individual works of art that have shaped her understanding of life. In Brack’s case, it is his evocation of 1950s suburbia.

Brack’s painting is of a modern suburban interior. A man stands tall in front of a mantlepiece, complete with a clock and reproduction of Van Gogh’s The Langlois bridge, while his adoring wife stares up at him, the provider of their prosperity.

Unlike those who have seen Brack’s work as satirical, Kale recognises his appreciation of his subjects’ achievement in buying their own piece of post-war aspiration. Brack’s generation was shaped by the Great Depression, while its youth was spent at war. The 1950s was a decade of affluence after deprivation.

Kale’s family is a part of the great Indian diaspora. When she was a child, they left their apartment in Mumbai for a bungalow in Perth. She remembers being entranced by the intense blue of the southern sky and the way each suburban house was self-contained, with no need to relate to its neighbours.

The neat, sliced-white-bread Perth suburb where Kale’s family settled was a contrast to the untidy multicultural narratives of television shows like Heartbreak High. But even the whitest of Perth’s suburbs were divided by class.

Kale describes the less-than-subtle signs of class discrimination: “Our (debating) opponents studied at places with one word names” (Hale, Wesley). When three young women were killed in the Claremont murders of the mid-1990s they became the centre of media attention, in part because they were from Perth’s privileged “golden triangle” suburbs. The killing of women from lesser places did not gain the same response.

Violence against women is hardly a new story, but few artists have been........

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