Biography

Among the diaspora of European-born Jewish artists, architects, academics, and intellectuals who made a life on Australian shores pre- and post-World War II, Harry Seidler (1923–2006) was, arguably, the most successful and at various times during his life, one of the most visible and most controversial. As an architect, he left behind signature office buildings in five state capital cities, a brace of stunning modernist houses in Sydney, Canberra, and Darwin from the 1950s to the 1990s, the much-acclaimed Australian Embassy in Paris, as well as buildings in Acapulco, Hong Kong, and Vienna. He also made sure he was remembered. He published Houses, Interiors, and Projects, the first book on his work, in 1953 and then, almost without fail, every ten years a book on his architecture would appear, culminating in 1992 with the magnum opus, Harry Seidler: Four Decades of Architecture, complete with essays by architectural historians Philip Drew and Kenneth Frampton. The last word? Certainly not. Four more books followed, and now, in the tradition of marking each decade, another book has appeared on Seidler, this time by journalist and author Helen O’Neill.

In his brief preface to Volume 1 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography 1788–1850 A–H (1966), Douglas Pike describes the ‘all-Australian, Commonwealth-wide … consultation and co-operation’ underpinning the volume and notes that the breadth and complexity of its intellectual network meant the Dictionary could ‘truly be called a national project’. Five decades later, in an informative, elegant introduction to Volume 18, the present general editor, Melanie Nolan, endorses Pike’s pioneering claim for the ADB, describing it as ‘a national collaborative project, the largest and longest running of its kind in the social sciences and humanities in Australia’. As such – ‘a reference work for many purposes’ – it is familiar territory to historians, researchers, biographers, film-makers, novelists, and any number of browsing general readers.

Henry Friendly was a judge of the highest reputation – greater than Learned Hand in Justice Scalia’s opinion. His output was prodigious, his legacy unmatched: of his fifty-one clerks, twenty-one (including the present incumbent) became justices of the Supreme Court of the United States; in that Court’s decisions, only Learned Hand was cited more often than Friendly.

In 1939 President Roosevelt nominated the poet Archibald MacLeish to be the Librarian of Congress, replacing Herbert Putnam, who had held the post since 1899. MacLeish had not previously been employed in a library. American librarians reacted to the news with outrage and disbelief, with one of their leaders claiming that he could no more think of a poet as the Librarian of Congress than as the chief engineer of a new Brooklyn Bridge. Roosevelt was unmoved by the protests and petitions, and MacLeish duly took up the position. He held it for less than five years, but in that time he achieved a major reorganisation of the Library, broadened its research and cultural roles, and made some astute staff appointments, including two of his successors.

As I write this article in my Adelaide Hills home, surrounded by native eucalypts and introduced fruit trees, large areas in New South Wales are dealing with the consequences of some of the worst bushfires in recorded history. Remarkably, given the unseasonally extreme weather, the rugged terrain, and the ferocity of the fires themselves, there have been few human casualties. Nevertheless, the cost will be enormous, not only in terms of the physical reconstruction required, but also of the effort required for individuals and families to rebuild lives from the ruins of their destroyed habitations. I live in a bushfire-prone area, in a house that could not be easily defended in the inferno of a firestorm. We have made our plans. We think we know what to do in the face of the fire emergency we hope will never eventuate. But how would we cope in such a situation? In practice, we have no idea.

I’ve interviewed Stephen Hawking twice. On both occasions it was in his old office in Silver Street, Cambridge – in front of his huge poster of Marilyn Monroe. The first time, in 1989, I was a little anxious, not because I was with the world’s best-known scientist, but because I found the awkward silences waiting for his answers hard to manage. What do you do, having asked a question, during the two or three minutes it takes him to put together a sentence on his machine? You can’t stare at him for that long – we’re not equipped to do that with anyone for more than seconds. Ignore him? The way we ignore other crippled folk, without realising it? Hardly!

In the 1890s the six Australian colonies were preoccupied not only with getting a fair deal over tariffs and customs – and maintaining the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race – but also with the location of the national capital. Denizens of Melbourne and Sydney felt that it should be one of them. The compromise was a capital in New South Wales, closer to Sydney than Melbourne, but with Melbourne as the seat of federal government until it was constructed.

Our media treat leaders as personifying everything that matters, yet social scientists disdain leadership. Most of what we know about leaders comes from biographies. And biography, dominated by those wishing either to demonise, or to celebrate, their subject, is a craft monopolised by insiders, acolytes, and journalists. Regarding Margaret Thatcher, academics have discussed her premiership (1979–1990) in terms of economic change, social history, value transitions, and party decline. They display a disabling ambivalence over whether she was an agent or a manifestation of tectonic shifts. In parallel, there have been multiple biographies, the first published before she was defenestrated by her own party. A great deal, then, has already been written.

Even the most seasoned political observers would have been surprised at the Palmer United Party’s triumph at the federal election, which saw it claim three seats in the Senate. Was it a stroke of luck or the work of a remarkable political strategist? In any case, the political fate of the PUP’s founder remains undecided ...