Biography

The word ‘memoir’ is used with a nice precision in the title of this beautifully written book. The Macquarie Dictionary distinguishes between the singular and the plural meanings of the word: ‘memoirs’ are autobiographical, ‘records of one’s own life and experiences’; a ‘memoir’ is a biography. Almost all of the book is written in the voice of its protagonist, Bette Boyanton, with some sharp interventions from her daughter Gina; her husband Les is credited as a co-author, though he does not speak. But the book also stands firmly as a biography, elegantly crafted by its major author, Carolyn Landon.

In 1881 Charles O’Neill abandoned a career in New Zealand and moved to Sydney, settling in The Rocks, close to the Marist fathers at St Patrick’s on Church Hill. Soon he had gathered about him a group of men keen to do something about the poverty they saw around them under the name of the Society of St Vincent de Paul. O’Neill was then in his early fifties, having been born in 1828 in Dumbarton, Scotland, the youngest of eleven children in the family of Irish Catholic parents.

Now aged in her mid-seventies, the activist, artist and one-time parliamentarian Joan Coxsedge has penned her memoirs. Cold Tea for Brandy is as entertaining a read as her own varied life seems to have been. Decades of public advocacy, a firm – some would say a fixed – moral compass and an illustrator’s gift for precise impression have given Coxsedge a writing style to be admired. Her prose is brisk, simple, amusing and easy-going, laced with an old-fashioned Australian vernacular. Some readers may find the writing as anachronistic as the socialist beliefs that Coxsedge has so ardently espoused for decades. Still, the clarity of her writing flows organically from the that of her politics.

Each of these memoirs – Births Deaths Marriages: true tales, by Georgia Blain, and The After Life: A Memoir, by Kathleen Stewart – is the work of an accomplished novelist, and each writer is well aware of the risks involved in the shift of mode. If the novel, as Blain maintains, provides a place for the writer to hide, the memoir is the place of self-exposure, of speaking the truth, or a version of the truth. Although it is the wellspring of all creativity, to write about the life, to pin it down, is in a sense to distort it. Memory is unreliable and bias is inevitable. There is also the problem of exposing others, and the others in each of these memoirs are easily identified. Each writer faces the challenges of memoir in an entirely different way. The narrative voice in Births Deaths Marriages is thoughtful and contemplative; the account qualified at times by self-doubt. Stewart’s account, on the other hand, is sure of its truth. It is dramatic, forceful and defiant.

On page sixty-two of Ann Blainey’s thoroughly researched, excellently written and beguilingly human biography of Nellie Melba there occurs a transition that is simple but that defines, in an instant, the moment the singer went from learner to legend. It happens when the young singer, under the wing of Madame Marchesi (née Mathilda Graumann; nickname ‘the Prussian drill-master’), is ready to make her public European début and requires a new surname. ‘Armstrong’ had to go; in its place, there had to be something ‘distinctive and memorable’:

Amongst Holocaust accounts, literature and writing, there have emerged four distinctly identifiable forms: the academic historical text, exemplified by historians such as Martin Gilbert and Philip Friedman; literature, by writers such as Eli Wiesel and Primo Levi; the allegorical tale, such as Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005), Karen Hesse’s The Cats in Krasinski Square (2004), and Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986); and the anecdotal account, such as this book by Sabina Wolanski, Destined to Live: One Woman’s War, Life, Loves Remembered.

In early 1980, Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin undertook yet another concert tour. One of their last concerts together was in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. There was a dismal yellow standard lamp for light and a revolving stage so that all the patrons could get value for money. The master of ceremonies introduced them as ‘Ham-erica’s own ... Yoohoo and Heffi Menhoon’. These exceptional siblings had been playing music together since 1932, usually in more salubrious venues. Yehudi often spoke of their liaison spirituelle and their ‘Siamese soul’. Their first public concert took place in 1934, in the Salle Pleyel in Paris. By 1980 it had become one of the longest and richest partnerships in the history of chamber music.

Roma Mitchell came first in nearly everything. Not only at school and university, but in becoming Australia’s first female OC, Supreme Court judge, Boyer Lecturer, university chancellor and state gover­nor. But she had no inside track to success. Her father was killed in World War I, her mother survived on his pension and the generosity of friends, and Roma and her older sister were taught by the Sisters of Mercy for nothing.

This memoir moves through points of intensity in Kate Llewellyn’s life, from an idyllic childhood at Tumby Bay on the Eyre Peninsula in the 1940s through to her leaving Adelaide to make a new life in Sydney in the 1980s. By this time she is a recognised poet, but her life is in turmoil. The book does not set out to tell a success story; rather, it describes that uneven movement from childhood innocence through adult experience, with all naïveté, self-delusion, idealism, and hard-learned lessons. It is quintessentially a poet’s book, its stories heightened by arresting images, its movement circling rather than linear.

In the wake of the Commonwealth parliament’s apology to the ‘stolen generations’, what are we to make of Daisy Bates (1859–1951) – especially given that, in the past year, two new biographical studies have appeared, indicating, more than fifty years after er death, an enduring fascination with her commitment to ‘render the passing of the Aborigines easier’?

Bates will not ( as Ann Standish hoped) ‘sink like a stone', taking with her with the easy popularisation of some of the most morally and politically debilitating characterisations of the 'plight' of indigenous Australians: that 'full bloods' are doomed to extinction because they cannot cope with 'civilisation'; that 'half-bloods' are, at best, the consequence of that failure, needing to be saved, or, at worst, evidence of irredeemable lasciviousness. 'The only good half-caste,' Bates once confided, 'is a dead one.'