Biography

Alison Rogers has shone the spotlight on a shadowy aspect of politics: the role and experiences of the media adviser. As her story is also an insider’s account of Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja’s period as leader of the Australian Democrats, its value is enhanced, both for what it tells us about Stott-Despoja, as well as its less than flattering treatment of the Democrats’ party machine.

In a long and interesting life, Peter Ryan has been especially fortunate in getting to know quite a few influential Australians and some little-known but unforgettable characters. Brief Lives offers pen portraits of fifteen of them, all but one of them male. The solitary female, Ida Leeson, had the distinction of being the ‘presiding genius of the world-famous Mitchell Library’, held the rank of army major in World War II, and was perhaps regarded as an honorary male in the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs (DORCA), a rather peculiar army unit where Ryan met her in 1944.

An unfamiliar character from a strange land is barred from setting foot on mainland Australia. Desperate to land, he leaps from ship to shore, breaking his right leg in the process. A conservative attorney-general desperate to protect our borders, pursues this man, now on crutches, through the courts. The charismatic stranger wins his court case and holds the government up to ridicule. Shadowed unrelentingly by Canberra’s spooks, he urges Australians to look past their government’s pronouncements and discover for themselves the real dangers to world peace. Whilst history, even in Marx’s cycles of tragedy and farce, never neatly repeats itself, these duels between Egon Kisch, Czech communist, and Robert Menzies, Anglophile attorney-general, do have contemporary import. No doubt this explains why Kisch’s adventures in 1930s Australia have been told several times through film, theatre and books. In this new and enjoyable recasting of the drama, Heidi Zogbaum reminds us of the bare bones of Kisch’s Australian sojourn, focusing for the most part on his successful courtroom battles and European background. These are interspersed with detailed summaries from spies such as ‘Snuffbox’, charged with dredging up the evidence on Kisch’s European activities that led to his eventual deportation.

Janina Milek – born in Poland in 1921, shunted out of it with her parents and siblings by the Russians to become human draught horses in Siberia in 1940, released via Uzbekistan to a refugee camp in Iran in 1942, transferred to another refugee camp in Lusaka in Africa in 1943, and shipped to Australia in 1950 – told Tim Chappell that her family was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. When she finally had some kind of say as to where she might live (an Australian commission offered places to healthy persons from the African camp), the one thing she knew was that she would not go back to Poland and live ‘on the back of an old woman’s tongue’ (Janina’s marvellous phrase for gossip mongering). Her mother, to whom Janina had been completely devoted, suddenly announced that she wanted only to return home. Janina was deserted by the one person she now lived to care for.

For a man who has as much claim as anyone to the title of ‘greatest Australian’, John Monash has remained a somewhat distant figure in the national imagination. Certainly, he is far less well known than that other pretender to the title, Donald Bradman. But the publication of a new biography by Roland Perry should put some balance back in Monash’s ledger.

The Heart Garden was the subject of considerable controversy even before its launch, ruffling art world feathers and propelling the Heide set once again onto the front page of an Australian newspaper. Janine Burke has a knack for provocation, which must delight her publishers, and this new biography of Sunday Reed makes bold claims that challenge some of the orthodoxies of Australian art. No doubt the book’s sensual and charismatic subject, Sunday Reed, and her famous artist friends Sidney Nolan (her lover for some nine years), Albert Tucker Arthur Boyd, Joy Hester and Charles Blackman among others, can also claim credit for the continued public interest. After all, their libertine proclivities make contemporary Australian society seem dull by comparison.

Childhood is a fertile territory for writers. Almost all first-time authors hoe it, and some continue to do so for the rest of their careers. Given the chance, most people cannot resist the impulse to reminisce about the horrors and delights of being a child.

‘Wildflowering’, a term coined by Judith Wright, describes the activity of searching for wildflowers in the bush. In letters between the poet and her friend, wildflower artist, writer and activist Kathleen McArthur (1915-2001), ‘the language of flowers’ becomes part of the mutual exchange of their friendship and epitomises the interactive and intimate relationship they maintained with landscape. Over the years, these women took the knowledge and love of their places into political campaigns to preserve the fragile ecology of an ancient coastland against the ravages of development and commercial exploitation.

This, of course, is literary Archibald Prize and, just like the art competition that annually sets Sydney’s cognoscenti abuzz, it will provide grist for plenty of arguments. Which of these profiles catches a passably good likeness of its subject? In which are the brush-strokes boldest and most compelling?

For more than twenty years, Bruce Ruxton was Victorian president of the RSL, and one of the best-known names in Australia. ‘Best-known’ does not necessarily mean ‘best-loved’; few public figures cut so clear a chasm between supporters and detractors. Knowing Ruxton well over many years, let me declare that on the day I meet another man who equals him for kindness of heart and dedication to the welfare of others, I’ll take my hat off to the second man, too.