Biography

Was Katharine Susannah Prichard one of those present at the first meetings of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), or not? Did she or didn’t she later pass intelligence to the Soviets, as charged by historians of ASIO Desmond Ball and David Horner? What difference would it have made to have had Lesbia Harford’s full queer oeuvre before the Australian public when it was written? Why didn’t Dymphna Cusack join the CPA if, as this book asserts, her politics were just as far left as Frank Hardy’s? How aware was Eleanor Dark of First Nations activism when writing The Timeless Land (1941)? Politics sit at the heart of Australian literary history, but a raft of questions remain for contemporary readers.

When teaching the history of medieval Europe it is hard to resist regaling students with lurid accounts of some of the extreme devotional practices performed by medieval women mystics. Saint Catherine of Siena, so it was claimed, drank the vomit of lepers to abase herself before God. Marie of Oignies, apparently, refused to eat anything but the consecrated host and died of starvation. Julian of Norwich lived in seclusion, inside a cell attached to a church, having renounced all things of the world including the opportunity to go outside. These women’s lives, in the retelling, can offer a visceral sense of the strangeness of medieval religious culture, and can also provide a sense of the particularity of gendered celebrity in pre-modernity. As a teacher, however, I am loathe to lean too heavily into the ostensible spiritual otherness of the Middle Ages. I worry that presenting these women as freaks risks alienating students from the historical work I am training them to do; to make sense of historical difference on its own terms.

To begin, a reviewer’s disclosure: I have known Lucy Sussex since we worked together in the mid-1990s on a research project about nineteenth-century Australian women’s writing. Lucy had already been following the various trails and clues left by crime writer Mary Fortune (1832–1911) along the winding, dimly lit corridors of pre-digital cultural history, as she reports at the end of this book: ‘In 1987 I moved from librarianship to working as a researcher for Professor Stephen Knight … I got the delightful job of largely reading old and vintage crime texts and reporting back … Stephen asked me to look into “Mrs Fortune” [and later] told me that Mary Fortune was no longer his research project, but mine. “You have that gleam in your eye!” he said.’

‘The unpredictability of biography,’ writes Timothy Snyder in On Freedom, ‘flows into the unpredictability of history.’ This is self-evidently true of leaders who, like William Henry Gates III, also known as Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, initiate the kinds of change that are destined to be viewed as history. Their lives, like all of ours, are amply shaped by contingency and event, the ‘what if’ moments and decisive decisions, both their own and others’. The mystique of what might never have been, or might have been otherwise, is powerful. Even though there are many alternatives and competitors, it is hard to imagine personal computing evolving as it did without the ubiquitous Microsoft products that have shaped the world. Consumer technologies such as these, which were also an early form of AI, have become all but invisible. Gratifyingly, the Microsoft co-founder and former CEO’s first autobiographical instalment, Source Code, is liberally sprinkled with fork-in-the-road moments and tensions. It is a hero’s journey narrative, blending memoir with personal case studies in business leadership and strategy. The book begins with Gates’s early childhood and ends in 1978. The author foreshadows a further two volumes.

‘Bea never swam with the tide’, observes Judith Brett in her eloquent biography of the social reformer, activist, and public intellectual Beatrice Faust. Brett takes us behind the public face of this confident, outspoken, and strident political figure, whose name became synonymous with second wave feminism in Australia. The psychological reading of Faust that Brett offers, in a refreshingly analytical approach provides depth, complexity, and insight which makes this beautifully written book compelling to read.

Product placement, admittedly not a term in vogue in Madame Melba’s time (1861-1931), was lucratively and occasionally indiscriminately deployed in her name. Since that name was itself an invention (one decided upon in late 1886, by Mrs Armstrong, née Mitchell, at the behest of her teacher, Madame Marchesi), it was officially or blatantly unofficially applied to everything from throat lozenges and mouthwash to cigarettes, motorcycles, and a sewing machine. Then, of course, there are Escoffier’s tasty tributes: Pêches Melba and Melba Toast – and let’s not forget that small town in Idaho, Melba (pop. 600). This was named not directly after Nellie, but a Melba once removed: the daughter of the man who founded the town in 1912. At the time, Melba was as fashionable a name for newborn girls in the United States as it was in Britain.

Rosalie Gascoigne seems exemplary of the popular fable of the late-blooming woman artist. Famously, her first exhibition was in 1974, when she was fifty-seven. This swiftly led to national recognition, then international exposure at the 1982 Venice Biennale. So this is a story for the times. But the achievement of Nicola Francis, the artist’s biographer, is to unpack how, in Gascoigne’s case, artistic success in later life was the result of long, careful training in two other creative pursuits: flower arranging, as taught by the English authority Constance Spry; then, crucially, training and a thriving career in the most radical form of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, through the Sogetsu School popularised in Australia by Norman Sparnon.

At a time when President Donald Trump seeks to extinguish the legal recognition of trans and gender diverse people, Bonjour, Mademoiselle! and the life of April Ashley feel unexpectedly topical. Ashley, best known in Australia for her role in Corbett v Corbett, a precedent-setting divorce case that set back the legal right of trans people for generations, is the subject of a new biography by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts.

My first experience of Carlo Felice Cillario was in March 1969, when he conducted the Elizabethan Trust Opera’s production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne. I had never seen the opera; nor had I heard of its conductor, whose triple-barrelled name was more indicative of a musical marking than something that belonged to an active musician. ‘Active’ was certainly the word: Cillario rushed into the pit and, afterwards, practically danced on to the stage, baton still in hand, to rapturous applause. In between, the actual performance was the first time I really connected to the compelling vivacity and innate drama of live opera. It helped immeasurably that the cast included the great Australian tenor Donald Smith as King Gustavus III. That night, all of it, still resounds in my mind.