Brian Matthews
Brian Matthews (1936–2022) was the author of short stories, essays, and biographies. His memoir A Fine and Private Place (2000) won the inaugural Queensland Premier’s Award for non-fiction and his Manning Clark: A Life (2008) won the National Biography Award in 2010.
As Ratty observed to Mole, ‘There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ In Roger McDonald’s A Sea-Chase, lovers Wes Bannister and Judy Compton would certainly agree, but before they achieve Ratty’s state of nautical transcendence much that does matter has to be dealt with.
Having survived the last, tumultuous period on Friday aft ... (read more)
When some years ago I read Jim Davidson’s outstanding biography, Lyrebird Rising (1994), I was initially concerned by what seemed to be his potentially distorting fascination with the scene-stealing Louise Hanson-Dyer. But I soon discovered I needn’t have worried. Jim Davidson is not the sort of biographer whose obsession with his subject overcomes proportion. On the contrary, his sense of hum ... (read more)
‘Paris has gone crazy.’ There are people everywhere; ‘players and officials have been arriving like migrating birds’. The German team – including Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Gropius,Thomas Mann, Martin Heidegger – have already arrived, but their officials will permit no interviews. The Americans, amongst whom are Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Isadora ... (read more)
In the summer of 1988 I was part of an Adelaide Writers Week symposium on biography, the stars of which were two justly famous and accomplished biographers – Victoria Glendinning and Andrew Motion. I described that occasion at the time, like this:
I greatly admired Motion’s panache. As we ascended the podium to begin the session in front of a huge crowd of biography buffs, he was heard to ... (read more)
The seminar, as far as I can remember, took place in what was then the Melbourne Teachers’ College on Grattan Street. The late-afternoon sunlight slanting through ornate windows burnt bright on a huge World War I scene on the wall behind the speakers’ table where the names of those who had made ‘the ultimate sacrifice’ were listed with melancholy precision. I remember gazing at that painti ... (read more)
In The Oxford Companion to Australian History, of which he was a co-editor with John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre, Graeme Davison begins his essay on Geoffrey Blainey by saluting him as ‘the most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and – in the 1980s and 1990s – most controversial of Australia’s living historians’. In volume one of the Encyclopaedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Geo ... (read more)
Undaunted by Joseph Furphy's autodidactic complexities and indulgences, A.D. Hope proposed in his 1974 collection, Native Companions, Essays and Comments on Australian Literature 1936–1966, that Such Is Life was 'a novel based on a theory of the novel'.
Reading, with great pleasure, Michael Wilding's Growing Wild, it occurred to me that here was a memoir based on a theory of memoir. The theo ... (read more)
In her speech as the winner of the 2003 National Book Award, Shirley Hazzard said, 'We should do our best by the language. We mustn't torture it; we mustn't diminish it. We have to love it, nurture it, and enjoy it.'
Reading Hazzard, as she is variously represented in this collection, is to encounter a writer who has done her 'best by the language' and, in these essays, continues marvellously to ... (read more)
John McLaren, who died peacefully in St Vincent's Private Hospital on 4 December 2015, was a man of many fine attributes and talents, not the least of which was his capacity for friendship. John had many close friends towards whom he showed great loyalty, affection, and generosity. They, in their turn, recognised the strength and quality of the quite precious bond his character and personality mad ... (read more)
