Biography

It’s interesting how many comic autobiographers are theatrical, like Barry Humphries, Clive James, Hal Porter, and Robin Eakin, whose Aunts up the Cross (1965) is a minor masterpiece and very funny. Eakin’s belated follow-up, An Incidental Memoir, published under her married name of Dalton, compares interestingly with Dulcie Deamer’s posthumously published The Queen of Bohemia.

Tom and Audrey McDonald have shared a life of commitment together, promoting what they consider to be the political, social and economic interest of the Australian working class.

Joy Hooton must know more about Australian autobiography than anyone else. Her critical and bibliographical works are now complemented by this marvellous anthology – humorous, plangent, and surprising. It replaces the more literary Penguin anthology by the Colmers (an important collection, though now somewhat outdated), and more than accounts for the period not dealt with in Gillian Whitlock’s impressive UQP anthology of contemporary Australian autobiography.

In a recent history of punishment in Australia, Mark Finnane observes that there is a ‘seemingly inexhaustible vein of convict history’. This has been especially true most recently of the history of convict women and the increasing number of accounts which are now being published in this field is to be welcomed. These studies offer a corrective to histories which have relegated convict women to a footnote, and, perhaps more significantly, some historians have attempted to reconceptualise and recast our understandings of colonialism, gender, power, and sexuality during the nineteenth century.

Jane Austen’s aunt was once at risk of transportation to Botany Bay for shoplifting. It is piquant that Austen named two of her major male characters Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and Captain Wentworth in Sense and Sensibility, because a leading inhabitant of New South Wales in those years was D’Arey Wentworth, disreputable but acknowledged kinsman of Lord Fitzwilliam. D’Arey Wentworth’s career smacks more of Georgette Heyer than Jane Austen, since he was a highwayman four times acquitted. Rather than push his luck further, he went, a free man, as assistant surgeon with the Second Fleet in 1790. As a young teenager Jane Austen may have read about him in the Times.

Veronica Brady is a highly respected critic with long and distinguished experience in the academic and literary worlds. She understands as well as anyone, I am sure, the mysterious workings of the imagination – how a feeling, an image or an impression may strike a spark capable of igniting a flame that fuses often contradictory thoughts and experiences into the ‘little room’ of a memorable poem. So it must have been a deliberate, though to my mind regrettable, decision that made her concentrate on Judith Wright’s life as a conservationist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights almost to the exclusion of everything else – poetry included – in this ample and painstaking biography.

This is a tale of good guys and bad guys. The bad guys (mostly called Whitlam, Hawke, or Keating) are zealous lackeys of two ogres called Centralised Wage Fixing and Political correctness. They are often helped by other guys (frequently called Peacock, Elliott, and Bjelke-Petersen) who pretend to be good but aren’t.

Imants Tiller is one of the most distinguished of Australia’s postmodern generation of artists. Just about every trendsetting exhibition within Australia throughout the 1980s had a Tillers piece on centrestage, and his inclusion in internationally touring shows then and in the 1990s has been a matter of course. His commercial success has matched his fame and his prodigious output. But Tillers’s high profile and fashionable appeal are contradictory phenomena. For an artist whose work is declaratively derivative – brashly quoting, awkwardly imitating or strategically appropriating other artists’ imagery – Tillers has nonetheless managed to develop a signature effect in his working method which is inimitable.

Frank Wilmot has aways existed in my mind under his nom-de­-poetical-plume: that is to say, as Furnley Maurice. This, even though his proper name was given in my first collection of Australian verse, that of H.M. Green forty-five years or so ago. For several decades, from the mid-1950s on, modernism was seen as a Good Thing and our stuffy Australian forebears were upbraided for not taking it on more quickly. Over those years we strove to find the modernist traces which had gone ahead of us: in Kenneth Slessor or Chester Cobb, in Margaret Preston and Adrian Lawlor, in Walter Burley Griffin. Some of us had turned against aspects of this imprecise movement in the 1950s, I admit, because of its associations with fascism, but who could really resist for long the world of Picasso, Stravinsky, Woolf, Joyce, and Auden? What incomparable riches were there, I felt, and still do.

What do the fab four of this book have in common? Not simply that they are Australian and expatriate, that they are writers who have achieved a degree of celebrity and performers who have made skilful use of television.