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Sylvia Martin

Dear Editor,

I welcomed Barry Jones’s feisty response (February 2007) to my review of his autobiography, A Thinking Reed (December 2006–January 2007). Such autobiographies, the reviews and the commentaries on them are the first drafts of history, and such debates will be valuable to later and more dispassionate historians. Apart from some sardonic barbs, which I may well deserve, he seems to have only one substantive quarrel with the review and that is with my critical assessment of his performance as science minister in the Hawke government.

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Queer memoir is particularly given to formal play, to unpacking and upsetting the conventions of genre in order to question women’s roles as both narrator and subject. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) mixes scholarship and bodily transformation. Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House (2019) unpacks the nature of narrative itself to reflect on an abusive relationship. Into this field comes Sky Swimming, Sylvia Martin’s ‘memoir that is not quite a memoir, more a series of reflections in which I act as a biographer of my own life’. For Martin, the critical distance of the biographer enables her to consider the resonances that exist between her own experiences.

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It is almost twenty-five years since Garry Wotherspoon's City of the Plain (1991) was published. In his ground-breaking history of Sydney's gay subculture, he stated that the 'history of life for lesbians in Sydney ... is more properly part of women's history'. Rebecca Jennings seeks to redress that gap in Unnamed Desires. She offers a nuanced unde ...

My Swedish neighbour is rebuilding. From my back garden I overheard her Australian builder loudly introducing her to a tradesman named Hans. ‘Now, we’re for it,’ he chortled. ‘It’ll be talk, talk, talk, no stopping you now.’ As I hung out the washing, I reflected that the Australian nervousness around ‘Continentals’ that Madeleine St John details so deliciously in her novel about 1950s Sydney, The Women in Black (1993), still resonates in the twenty-first century. 

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My mother, a fine mezzo soprano, had three all-time favourite singers: Kathleen Ferrier, Maria Callas and our own Joan Hammond. When I was a child, my parents took me to see the famous diva perform Tosca in Melbourne – standing room only at the back of the circle. I remember red velvet, a thrilling voice, my own tired legs and a sense that I was in the presence of greatness. Sara Hardy’s biography of Joan Hammond (1912–96) is a timely publication. The number of people who remember the Australian soprano is dwindling, her fame eclipsed by another Dame Joan (who once, early in her career at Covent Garden, understudied Hammond in Aida).

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This book opens in Papeete one evening in 1935. Two American film-makers are in Tahiti to take location shots for Mutiny on the Bounty, and director Frank Lloyd laments his failure to find Captain Bligh’s log books. A small white-haired person of indeterminate appearance at the next table leans over: ‘I know where they are,’ she says. Of course she did. The logbooks were in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and the speaker was Ida Leeson, Mitchell Librarian from 1932 to 1946. The Mitchell Library, located in the Public (now State) Library of New South Wales, is based on the priceless collection of Australiana and south-west Pacific materials donated in 1907 by the reclusive bibliophile David Scott Mitchell. Leeson, its second chief custodian, not only knew the vast collection backwards but added significantly to it. She also used it herself, a key to effective librarianship.

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For some Australians, the exotic, exciting and ultimately tragic relationship of Charmian Clift (1923–69) and George Johnston (1912–70) has attained the mythical status of other famous literary couples of the twentieth century: F. Scott and Zelda, Virginia and Leonard, Ted and Sylvia. The combination of beautiful people, prolific and personal writing, illness and suicide makes them irresistible and seemingly inexhaustible subjects for biographers and readers alike. In the case of the Johnstons, escape to London from the conservative Australia of the 1950s, and then years on the Greek islands of Kalymnos and Hydra, add another level of fascination. The dream of an idyllic island life is a resilient one: evidence that it is unattainable only serves to strengthen the myth.

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