There was a time when The Good Weekend was the epitome of everything that is wrong with Fairfax – elitist, facile and shallow – but along came The Sydney Magazine and changed all that: just when you thought the bar couldn’t go any lower,jobbing journalists are lining up like drunken limbo dancers to get their by-lines into a publication that one reader described to us as “utter brain poison”. The Sydney Magazine makes the Good Weekend look like respectable, old school, quality journalism – even if we still can’t quite get our heads around the cognitive disjunction of having photos of dead people in Iraq (for instance) in a magazine called The Good Weekend…
Speaking of which, you may have caught the Two of Us recently that featured Melbourne gallerist Anna Schwartz and her daughter Zahava Elenberg talking about their relationship. Schwartz is well known in art circles as the proprietor of a gallery that has a lot of high profile Australian artists that she shares with Roslyn Oxley.
Anyway, there are two extracts from the GW piece you should have caught. The first was the intro to Elenberg’s ramble about her mother:
“[Schwartz’s] daughter Zahava Elenberg, 31, heads an architectural firm with her husband, Callum Fraser, plus a furnishing business and a property development company. She is expecting her second child and is Australia’s Young Business Woman of the Year…
Zahava: I’m an only child, so a lot has been invested in me. I grew up in a very creative household, and I’m not talking about your average wooly jumper, arts-and-crafts, touchy-feely kind of creativity. Dad [sculptor Jules Elenberg] was an artist and best friends with Brett Whiteley, so we always had interesting people around us. I was incorporated into their life, this big world, and not into the realm of children.”
It’s good to see that the investment in Zahava is paying off so nicely, what with all her accomplishments and her disdain for run-of-the-mill suburban creativity:
“Schwartz: The day [Zahava] moved out of home, when she was 21, I cried. I kept saying through my tears, ‘You’re not doing anything wrong, darling. It’s fine’, but I was totally bereft. She told me it would be better for us and she was right. When Lilith was born, she came back and lived with us, and now that she’s having another child we’ll be living together again, in adjacent penthouse apartments in a 28-storey building that Zahava and Callum designed, and that my husband [Morry Schwartz] built. It’s a wonderful arrangement, this penthouse village where we can have an extended family but also total privacy if that’s what we want.”
We read that and thought, how lovely, a family that builds together, stays together! Speaking of Morry, is there any truth to the persistent rumour that he’s bankrolling Ashley Crawford’s revival of Tension magazine? We count ourselves among those who want to see more art magazines on the newsstands and more pictures of Tim Storrier in a nice suit. Ah, memories.
