Biography

Gough Whitlam is idolised, Bob Hawke respected, and Paul Keating admired, but Barry Jones is undoubtedly the most loved by the Labor party rank and file, a lovability which puzzled many of his colleagues in the Hawke government (1983–91). Insofar as they recognised it, they qualified it – labelling him ‘a loveable eccentric’ – a characterisation of ...

On the eve of the recent history summit, Education Minister Julie Bishop told an audience, which included some notable historians, that history was not peace studies, nor was it ‘social justice awareness week’, nor, for that matter, ‘conscious-raising about ecological sustainability’. History, she declared, was simply history: though when she went on to assert that ‘there was much to be proud of in the history of Australia’, it did seem that she might have an agenda of her own tucked away in her ideological handbag

What a big book it is! And so many photographs: only a few without Jenny Kee. The dust jacket is drop-dead gorgeous: just Jenny’s face, with the Revlon red of her trademark glasses and lips lifted to the title. But heavens, this isn’t a dust jacket but a jacket. Take it off. The lining is Jenny’s Monet Opal print, and there are French folds and more photos. Open the book, and here is Jenny’s big life in twelve chapters.

This is, of course, a much-awaited biography. Its subject, the commercial broadcaster Alan Jones, has long been a contentious figure. While some believe his influence over his audience has actually determined the outcomes of certain state and federal elections, others believe that this influence is a self-perpetuated myth that Sydney-siders should repudiate. Chris Masters, the author, is something of a local icon; one of the most respected and fearless of Australian television journalists, whose professional integrity is widely acknowledged.

Berggasse 19, the address at which Sigmund Freud and his family lived for almost fifty years, is now Vienna’s Freud Museum. It is the other Freud Museum, the one in London, that houses the extensive collection of antiquities which is Janine Burke’s main focus in The Gods of Freud, but the Berggasse museum contains a number of Freud’s other personal possessions, including some little bottles, pots and brushes that are the remnants of an old-fashioned gentleman’s dressing-case. Of high quality, these well-used tools of personal attention to a body now long dead are scratched and dented from use.

Mark Bowling was the ABC’s man in Indonesia from 1998 until 2002, and this book is an excellent account of the period of his posting. It covers a turbulent time in Indonesian life from May 1998, the end of the thirty-year Suharto regime, until May 2002, when the newly fledged nation of East Timor spread its wings. An epilogue adds his involvement in reporting on the most significant event in Indonesian affairs for Australians, the Bali bombing on 13 October 2002.

So many recent books have been about failure of one sort or another that when I read Michael Zifcak’s My Life in Print, with its eminently successful life story, I was at first inclined to scan it for points of criticism. Such is human nature. There are points, of course – the book is really two quite separate texts. The first, and most compelling, is the account of Michael Zifcak as a boy in rural Slovakia, then a youth and young man of estimable drive and a sharp, organising mind, who sets himself the task of improving his life – rapidly. Through a great deal of self-study and application, he gained his accountancy qualifications and pushed himself into a key position with one of the country’s leading manufacturers (ALPA, an ‘elixir’ with impressively high alcohol content), all this during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the ensuing German occupation of Czechoslovakia, World War II and the postwar Soviet takeover.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s description of Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, Percy Grainger is a minstrel wrapped in a harlequin inside a jack-in-the-box. His personality, obsessions, and general eccentricities still cause one to gasp and stretch one’s eyes even almost half a century after his own hypnotic eyes closed forever. His music, too, remains quicksilver; indefinable in its eclecticism, yet the work of a sprite who was also a genius who, magpie-like, collected music from wildly different sources to stuff into the capacious if overcrowded nest that was his mind.

Shane Warne is one of the greatest bowlers of all time, if not the greatest. Highly competitive and aggressive, he is one of the main factors in Australia’s prolonged dominance in world cricket. He has been involved in a series of controversies, on and off the field. He has been fined for sledging and over-aggressive appealing; and for providing, along with Mark Waugh, information to a bookie (something they both readily admitted, which the Australian Cricket Board tried to cover up). In 2003 he received a one-year ban for taking a banned substance, diuretic tablets, intended, he claimed (and this is not disputed by Barry), to help him lose weight. Off the field, like many leading sporting personalities, he is a serial womaniser

Theatregoers with long memories may well hug to themselves the ‘golden years’ of the Melbourne Theatre Company’s tenancy of the Russell Street Theatre in the 1960s, a time in which plays as varied as Hochhuth’s The Representative, Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear, Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s infallible matinee version of Henry James’s The Heiress, and many others jostled for attention. It was the time when an actor called Clive Winmill stepped on stage in the swinging London comedy The Knack and, instead of saying his lines, treated the audience to a passionate anti-Vietnam involvement speech. It was a time when the provocative new and the venerated classic made equal claims on a theatrical ensemble which achieved real importance in Melbourne’s cultural life.