Derham Groves

Recently a group of third-year architecture students at the University of Melbourne had to read a Sherlock Holmes story and then portray the victim in that story by altering the appearance of a Barbie or Ken doll. (I got this idea from the ‘Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’, 18 dollhouse-sized dioramas of grisly crime scenes that were built by the International Harvester heiress Mrs. Frances Glessner Lee during the 1940s.) They produced a horrifying collection of dolls that had been bludgeoned, garroted, hanged, mauled, poisoned, scared, shot, stabbed and strangled. (The three featured dolls were constructed by Chen Gong, Nicholas Antoniou and Morsaleena Moytree Paruque.)

Mudrooroo’s Aboriginal detective Dr. Watson Holmes Jackamara is one of the most interesting characters in Australian detective fiction. He is certainly a lot edgier than Arthur Upfield’s Aboriginal detective Napoleon Bonaparte, although Jackamara owes much to Bonaparte. Jackamara is the subject of an artist’s book that I’ve been working on for far too long now, which I must finish in 2008 (my first New Year’s resolution!). In Mudrooroo’s Christmas story ‘The Healer’ (1991) Jackamara dresses up as Santa Claus (very appropriate for Christmas Day!). Following are four of the seven little linocuts for the artist’s book Dr. Watson Holmes Jackamara (L-R: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Jackamara’s namesakes; Napoleon Bonaparte, Jackamara’s predecessor; Jakamara as Father Christmas; and the unnamed crooked Queensland businessman/politician in The Kwinkin by Mudrooroo):

In 2002 I published a little book titled The Rebuses of Sherlock Holmes containing eight Sherlockian rebuses devised by the Australian book designer, cartoonist and graphic artist Vane Lindesay. This one is my favourite: