Diaries

The diaries of Fred Williams (1927-82) invite the inevitable, unfair, but instructive comparison with those of Donald Friend; unlike the latter, they are not a masterpiece of witty and incisive prose, filled with insightful and indiscreet comments about contemporaries, the life of the artist, and the social and cultural world of the author’s time. They are plainly written observations on the day-to-day life of a hard-working painter, with an emphasis on the practical; it would be wrong to describe them as modest or self-effacing, for manifestly they were not written with any thought of publication. Friend, steeped in the culture of past centuries, was well aware of composing a literary work like the great diarists of earlier generations; Williams was jotting down, especially at the outset, largely professional notes in a standard page-to-a-day business diary.

At first glance, the life of an art historian, often depressed in the latter decades of her life, might not yield a compelling book. But Colin Holden’s perusal of Ursula Hoff’s previously unknown diaries has produced a passionate and valuable portrayal of a scholar wrestling with the challenge of buying works of art for the National Gallery of Victoria, in London. The biography is based on Hoff’s diaries, still owned by her estate, and not yet in the public domain.

Both a scholarly resource and a good read, Castieau’s diaries, effectively edited, enliven and enrich our sense of colonial Melbourne. Castieau’s modest standing adds to the diaries’ significance as they record the dailiness of life, combining the public and the private: work, life around town and ‘the domestic minutiae of everyday life captured in his relentless record’. What makes Castieau exceptional are the span and detail of the diaries: ‘His workaday life does not obscure the more important issues of colonial life – getting on, enjoying oneself, establishing a reputation, being part of the world.’

With the greatest novels, you can plunge into them anywhere and still savour their greatness; it is recognisable on every page. You won’t need to have read the two earlier volumes of these edited diaries to recognise that same quality throughout the third – and I mean novelistic greatness, of which all the great diaries (from Samuel Pepys’s to James Lees-Milne’s) partake in important ways.

Here is an entry in one of A.D. Hope’s notebooks: it is from 1961: ‘Ingenious devices for letting in the light without allowing you to see out, such as modern techniques provide – e.g., glass brick walls, crinkle-glass, sanded glass and so on – remind me very much of most present-day forms of education.’ This is a representative passage from the notebooks. Lucid itself, it bears on elements of frustration or nullification in experience. As such, it testifies to Hope’s recurrent sense that human beings can easily mislocate their ingenuity, with results that are both memorable and regrettable. In a later notebook, in 1978, speaking of the labyrinth as a model of human life, he writes: ‘Looking back one sees that comparatively trivial blind choices have often determined one’s course and that the majority of people do end up in blind alleys.’ One might contest the generalisation, but will not easily forget the analogy.

The publication of Miles Franklin’s diaries, written during her years in Australia from 1932 until her death in 1954, must be one of the year’s major literary events. events. Franklin, who frequently lamented her relative neglect in the contemporary literary culture of the 1930s and 1940s, has become steadily more and more visible since the 1970s, when international feminism discovered My Brilliant Career (1901). Meanwhile, much of her continuing significance is due secondarily to the extensive biographical research by Jill Roe and others.

Primarily, Paul Brunton’s source is the enormous archive of letters, manuscripts, reviews, notebooks, and diaries that Franklin left to the Mitchell Library. Brunton has mined this archive with great sensitivity and fine scholarship. This volume has a balanced introduction placing the entries in the context of Franklin’s life, explanatory footnotes through the text, a glossary of names, a bibliography of Franklin’s published works, a list of manuscript sources, an index and photographs. An occasional editorial note is inserted tactfully as a biographical signpost.

The memoirs of Australian war leaders have not enjoyed the commercial success gained by American and British commanders. Monash’s The Australian Victories in France in 1918 is possibly the only book of its sort which has ever had any real success. In the last few years the Australian Trenchard, Air Marshal Sir Richard Williams, could not attract a commercial publisher for his autobiography, though it covered the entire creation of the RAAF. Public interest apart, the fact is that Australian generals, admirals and air marshals do not tend to be literary. We just cannot imagine an Australian Slim. The only classic works produced by any Australian connected with the armed forces and aviation in general have been P.G. (Sir Gordon) Taylor’s finely wrought books.