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Gillian Bouras

When is it morally defensible to take one’s own life? Whenever, might be the first response: it is, after all, one’s own life. While the church still regards it as a grave sin, attempted suicide is not a crime, though helping someone else to commit suicide is. Yet does not a desire to end one’s life at a time of one’s own choosing have to be weighed against the pain it might cause others? Is suicide not a statement to family and friends that whatever love, care and support they have given, it was not enough?

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My great-grandfather Robert had a beard, a pointed one, presumably grey. He stands in a sepia-coloured photograph, gazing steadily at the camera, leaning on a walking stick and wearing a grainy-looking overcoat. But these are only dimly recollected details: I have not looked at the relevant album for years. Much more vivid is the voice I never heard. It was transmitted by my mother, who is now also dead. Throughout my childhood my imagination was peopled by various characters, as she recalled their exact words, entertaining my sister and me as she herself had been entertained: by using remembered voices she recreated her past and created one for us.

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George Johnston by Garry Kinnane & A Foreign Wife by Gillian Bouras

by
February–March 1987, no. 88

Like those of Tom and Viv, and Scott and Zelda, the life story of George Johnston and Charmian Clift is a high drama of love, sickness, loyalty, passion, talent and suffering, with a tragic intensity not often found in Australian life. The lives of artists are now often turned into works of art themselves. Garry Kinnane’s biography and the ABC radio documentary based on it make George and Charmian more fascinating than their books, with the possible exception of My Brother Jack.

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