![]() ![]() Positioning art as a repudiation of the corrupting colonial logic of plunder, Anna celebrates Morrell as a ‘Prospector of the Marvellous’.įinding a book of Morrell’s reproductions in her local goldfields library at the age of twelve, Anna pressed it ‘against her chest as though claiming a lover.’ Growing up for some years in the Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie, and herself a writer in the modernist tradition, Jones’ embrace of an early twentieth-century aesthetic is similarly ardent. His fondness for proudly comparing the depth of his mine to the inferior height of the Eiffel Tower makes her flight to Paris symbolic, more than the act of a provincial putting on airs. Interviewing her flamboyant subject, Anna discovers that Morrell’s extravagance conceals a deep shame that her father, owner of the local Midas mine, was violently racist. In Gail Jones’ debut novel Black Mirror (2002), young Australian biographer Anna travels to London to meet Victoria Morrell, who in the 1930s fled a Western Australian gold-mining town for Paris, where she became an artist at the fringes of the surrealist movement. ![]()
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