Autobiography

Some autobiographies are like novels, some resemble suites of lyric poems, some would seem to be educative tracts and others shade into history. From time to time one is published which reads as though a life of talk had somehow made itself over into book form. Patsy Adam-Smith’s Hear the Train Blow is certainly such a narrative, giving the impression again and again that we are not reading but sitting around enjoying a long, bright evening’s yams.

Ida Mann’s autobiography reminded me a little of the kind of speech that well-known elderly women tend to give to girls’ speech nights – full of zest, homely admonition, and assurances to the rows of upturned young faces that they’ll get out of life what they put in.

Don’t let the silly title put you off; this is a marvellous read, stylish, splendidly crafted, the kind of autobiography that is all too rare in the Australian experience. Who to compare with MacCallum (beware: the elder Mungo, not the one still being rude from Canberra) in recent years? Hasluck perhaps. Whitlam maybe, overlooking the egoism. Donald Horne, again discounting the ego. The genre, if the word must be employed, is restricted.

Some autobiographies are like novels some resemble suites of lyric poems, some would seem to be educative tracts and others shade into history. From time to time one is published which reads as though a life of talk had somehow made itself over into book form. Patsy Adam-Smith’s Hear the Train Blow is certainly such a narrative, giving the impression again and again that we are not reading but sitting around enjoying a long, bright evening’s yams.

Like many students of Australian film, I became aware of Cecil Holmes’s work through the viewing of a scratched print of Three in One in a lecture hall in one of our tertiary institutions, many years after it had failed to gain general release within Australia and killed off the dream of an indigenous film industry, yet again. A brave and naïve film, it was clearly well-made, stylish, and addressed a local audience without condescension or parochialism. Three in One was an early hint of what an Australian cinema might look like, and is now held to be one of the landmarks in the history of Australian film. To those who see the film now, though, its maker must seem to have suffered the same fate as its optimistically named production company, New Dawn Films. There is some satisfaction, then, in reading One Man’s Way to see what did happen to a substantial talent squandered by an insecure and conservative Australian film industry.

Maria Lewitt is, if anything, a writer in the realistic mode, and she might be among the last to see her own work – and characters – in either symbolic or allegorical terms, For, their flesh­bone-and-blood individuality and tangibility aside, the major protagonists of her autobiographical novel No Snow in December – sequel to her earlier prize-winning Come Spring – could well be seen to constitute a spectrum. representing the migrant’s coming to terms with the land of his/her adoption.

Smokey Dawson, a millionaire, is a Mason.

He is also a country music singer/songwriter, knife thrower, whipcracker, cartoon strip, voice in radio programs well remembered by those over 35. He is still a kind of media institution reincurring the value of … precisely what? Cowboy kitsch?

How do we explain our fascination with autobiography? Is it simply the pleasure of vicarious experience, or is it perhaps the self-indulgence of nostalgia, or even the addiction to gossip, the wish to know the hidden weaknesses of the famous or infamous? Oriel Gray’s Exit Left satisfies all these expectations, worthy and unworthy, as it takes us back to an earlier Australia which would appear to most of us remote, simplistic and naive.