Biography

Of the two groups who opened up Australia to settlement, the squatters have created about their persons a huge library, both admiring and critical. The surveyors, who followed in their footsteps, have rarely captured the imagination (with the exception of Sir Thomas Mitchell and Colonel Light) but their influence, especially in metropolitan Australia, has been incalculable. The site of Melbourne was chosen by a governor, but it was surveyors who laid out the grid plan of the square mile, imposing it on a hilly site, bounded by a narrow river to the south and swamps to the west. Principal among the Melbourne and Port Phillip surveyors was Robert Hoddle, who ended a long career as the first Surveyor-General of Victoria (1851–53).

Mention Colin Thiele’s name, and at least one listener will sigh and say The Sun on the Stubble in a wistful or regretful voice, depending on their schooldays memories. This biography takes us on ngrugie ngoppun: a ‘good walk’ with its subject. Largely chronological, it begins with a glimpse of the writer poised to tell his enduring story of the Coorong, Storm Boy (1963), and then retraces his long life and career (Thiele was born in 1920). His idyllic boyhood in the bosom of a loving farm community, his academic studies as a young adult, his RAAF service and his long distinguished teaching career are all laid out, leading to his subsequent fame as a part-time writer.

Thiele has been a prolific and versatile writer for over sixty years. He has written poetry, short stories, plays, biography, textbooks and novels, while working full-time as a teacher and then principal of Wattle Park Teachers’ College. He is best known for his novels about his beloved South Australia, in particular those set in fictitious settlements in the Barossa Valley: The Sun on the Stubble (1961), Uncle Gustav’s Ghosts  (1974) and Labourers in the Vineyard (1970), among others. Storm Boy is widely acknowledged to be his best-loved story for children. Some of his short stories for young readers are small gems: Danny’s Egg (1989) could easily fit into the ‘Aussie Nibbles’ series. He has published a biography of Hans Heysen (Heysen of Hahndorf, 1968), and his own memoir of childhood, With Dew on My Boots (1997). He published poetry in the notorious Ern Malley issue of Angry Penguins, and had radio plays broadcast while still a young teacher. His work has been adapted for cinema and television. Considering his long life, too few photographs are included, but a note directs the reader to a website for more. There are more than thirty pages of notes and bibliography, and an extensive index.

Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, the name Morrison seemed to be almost everywhere I looked. Scraping and stumbling through Geelong College, I attended assemblies in Morrison Hall, was a member of Morrison House, and daily passed a trophy cabinet in which was exhibited a copy of Morrison of Peking (1967), Cyril Pearl’s biography of George Ernest ‘Chinese’ Morrison (1862–1920), a scion of the founding family in whom its pride was visible.

It would be nice to say that the example of Morrison’s life spurred me to tackle journalism, what he called ‘the noblest of all the professions’, with its emphasis on ‘energy, courage, temperance and truthfulness’. But truth be told, he was at the time a little too exotic to take in – as Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin put it in their new biography, ‘a Scot by breeding, an Australian by birth and experience, British imperialist by choice and a Sinophile by compulsion’. Only later did I find myself bewitched by An Australian in China (1895), the vivid pedestrian’s panorama that Morrison wrote about his foot slog from Shanghai to Rangoon, which became, as it were, his successful job application to The Times.

In Across the Magic Line: Growing up in Fiji, Patricia Page comes full circle, returning with her sister Gay after an absence of fifty years to the enchanted islands of their childhood, reliving their memories and examining the very different Fiji of the present. Despite changes everywhere, the astonishing beauty of the islands remains, and the kindness of the Fijians is constant.

In 1936, at the Nazi Olympics, Jesse Owens won four gold medals and the hearts of the German people, but when he returned to the US his main aim was to turn Olympic gold into real gold. At Mexico City in 1968, Tommy Smith and John Carlos threw away their own careers by appearing on the victory podium barefoot and gesturing with the Black Power salute in protest against the treatment of their ‘brothers’ in the US and elsewhere. Television sent the Smith–Carlos message around the world, but earned the two athletes more opprobrium than praise in Western nations that were still coming to terms with the cultural revolution of the 1960s. This was before the Moscow Olympics in 1980, when the democracies could still convince themselves that sport and politics were worlds apart and should never mix.

Donald Thomson’s stature as a great Australian and a champion of Aboriginal rights is confirmed by this engaging compilation. Thomson was also a world leader in ethnographic field photography. Published first in 1983, this revised edition contains a gallery of eighty additional evocative, annotated images of vibrant people and their ways of living. Today’s evaluation contrasts with that around the time of Thomson’s death in 1970, when his reputation reached its nadir. Most anthropologists then disparaged his work, few appreciated the richness and complexity of his collections, while only one academic book testified to his credentials.

The last institution of old Collingwood, the Collingwood Football Club, is poised to take flight from yuppified terraces in the former industrial suburb or new headquarters, on the site of what was once John Wren’s motordrome, Olympic Park. Now is a perfect moment in which to read this intriguing story of the one-time patron of Collingwood’s football, politics and gambling – Its masculine working-class culture, more or less. Published fifty-one years after Wren’s death, will Griffin’s biography finally allow the ghosts – not of Collingwood, but of its fictional shadow, the Carringbush of Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory (1950) – to rest? Probably not.

In her recently published collection of critical writing by indigenous Australians, Michele Grossman notes that ‘[s]ince the early 1980s, the burgeoning interest in and publication of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing …has become increasingly well-established’. This is particularly true when we consider the success of life-writing by Aboriginal women in the last twenty years. Sally Morgan is practically a household name, and even the once-maligned work of Ruby Langford Ginibi has taken its place on school reading lists around the country.

Do John and Janette choke on their cereal at the name of Robert Manne as they breakfast in their harbourside home-away-from-home? They have every reason to do so. No single individual has provided so comprehensive a challenge to Howard and his ideological claque in the culture wars now raging in this nation. Manne was early to denounce Howard: for his soft-shoe shuffle with Pauline Hanson; for the inhumanity of the government’s approach to the boat people; for the shallow basis for our participation in the Second Iraq War. In the wider war, he wrote a savage critique of the right-wing cognoscenti who assailed Bringing Them Home, and he has rallied the troops to repel Keith Windschuttle’s revisionist history of black–white confrontation in nineteenth-century Australia. Now he has edited this selection of essays, which provides a critical survey of the Howard government across a wide range of its policies.

Alfred Felton, bachelor who lived for many years in boarding houses of one kind or another, might seem a familiar Victorian figure, particularly in a colony where there were not enough women to go around. But Felton was a bachelor with a difference. In the first place, as the co-founder of the prosperous drughouse Felton, Grimwade and Co., he was a colonial success story. He also had interests beyond business. His rooms at the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda, where he spent his last years, were crammed with paintings, books and objects; some splendid, recently unearthed photographs document this ‘obsessive profusion’, as John Poynter describes it.