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Memoir

W ordsworth – poet–walker par excellence – had the best legs in the business. As his friend Thomas de Quincy noted: ‘Undoubtedly they had been serviceable legs beyond the average standard of requisition. For I calculate, upon good data, that with these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a distance of 185,000 English miles.’ In contrast, Simon Armitage’s legs, by his own admission, generally ‘do very little other than dangle under a desk’ or propel him from the multi-storey car park to the railway ticket office. ‘Even if I’m writing about the Sahara or the Antarctic,’ he confesses, ‘I’m usually doing it in a chair, in a room, behind double glazing.’

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A million people thronged the streets of Barcelona on 11 September 2012, clamouring for liberty. This had been their special day long before 9/11. Like Gallipoli, it commemorates a defeat: the rout of the Catalans and their Austrian Hapsburg allies by the Bourbon monarch Philip V of Spain on 11 September 1714 in the closing stages of the War of the Spanish Succession. How could something that occurred three centuries ago get Barcelonans so worked up? It all goes back to the foundation of modern Spain through the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469. Forging a nation-state in an age of non-stop warfare proved a brutal business.

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To go into any bookshop, if you can still find one, is to be amazed at the space devoted to militaria: endless shelves of books not just about the two world wars and Vietnam, but all wars in all times. This vicarious fascination with war echoes another phenomenon of our time: the rise of overt public respect for soldiers.

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In 2008 I was asked to write speeches for then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It was a tempting offer. The trouble was that I would be based in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), not the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), and would work as a public servant, not a political staffer ...

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Broomstick: Personal Reflections of Leonie Kramer has been some years in the writing, and is published now only with the assistance of Leonie Kramer’s friends, former colleagues, and daughters, with the delay ultimately due, the Preface informs us, to the progression of the author’s dementia. As the memoir of a very public figure whose name and decisive actions marked the national fields of broadcasting, the academy, and corporate boardrooms across the final decades of the last century, Broomstick might have promised to be of interest both to general readers and to social or cultural historians. And as the memoir of one of Australia’s most outspoken, even infamous conservatives, it might also have been expected to provoke some controversy, to reopen debates perhaps, to antagonise, or to consolidate and confirm positions and views.

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Robert Drewe’s first memoir, The Shark Net (2000) – an account of ‘memories and murder’ – opens in the transforming ‘different sunlight’ of a courtroom, a light that seems ‘harsher, dustier, more ancient looking’, making the figure in the dock somehow ‘uglier, smaller’, ‘like a criminal in a B-movie’, the very ‘stereotype of a crook’.

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As the maker of the nine-and-a-half hour film Shoah (1985), Claude Lanzmann created a work of major and enduring historical importance. Through its electrifyingly tense interviews with victims and perpetrators, it opens an indispensable, if harrowing, dimension to our understanding of Hitler’s Final Solution. A work that unrelentingly has as its subject death rather than survival, it will always confront and resist any temptation to forget the terrible specificity of the concerted extermination of millions of European Jews, or to repress the knowledge that this was the work of human beings. Towards the end of The Patagonian Hare, a hundred or so pages are devoted to the genesis and making of Shoah.

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Dorothy Hewett’s Wild Card: An Autobiography 1923–1958 was first published by McPhee Gribble in 1990. Now, a decade after Hewett’s death, UWA Publishing has reissued this extraordinary autobiography in a beautifully packaged, reader-friendly format. Reviewing Wild Card for ABR in October 1990, Chris Wallace-Crabbe drew attention to Hewett’s candour in relating explicitly her many sexual experiences. He noted that the sexual self – so often elided in autobiographies – is on full display in Wild Card, and made the crucial observation that for Hewett ‘sex is both somewhere beyond personality … and intrinsic to it’. As Wild Card makes clear, Hewett was an expressively sexual woman, but her sexual desires and experiences were inextricably part of her imaginative and political passions.

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It was David Marr who commented that the key character in Gore Vidal’s first memoir, Palimpsest (1995), was not Jimmie Trimble, the boy whom Vidal loved when they were at school and who died, aged eighteen, at the battle for Iwo Jima; nor Vidal’s blind and adored maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, whom young Gore would lead onto the floor of the Senate; nor his life partner of half a century, Howard Auster; not even the audacious and polymathic Gore himself. The star of the book was in fact Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, who was dying when Vidal began to write Palimpsest.

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This volume from musician, writer, and satirist Justin Heazlewood (‘The Bedroom Philosopher’) collects seven years of touring diaries from a performer well known for maintaining an ironic distance in singles such as ‘I’m So Post Modern’ and ‘Northcote (So Hungover)’. These diaries aren’t so derisive, and greater meaningfulness counterpoints his characteristic satire. When he isn’t floundering in overwrought literary passages, Heazlewood can be quite funny.

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