Biography

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.

Who there amidst them in the distance
Like something not belonging stands

(Pushkin, Eugene Onegin)

In the wonderful way of the ‘marvellous’ and ‘ravishing’ language that was Robert Dessaix’s ‘first Amour’, the Russian for the phrase ‘not belonging’ is just one word, lishnii. Generally translated as superfluous, it gained currency through Ivan Turgenev via the title of a novella, The Diary of a Superfluous Man, which he wrote in 1850. In it, a dying thirty-year-old intellectual recalls the brief and only period of happiness in his life, the three weeks when he was blissfully in love, which ended when the knowledge was forced on him that to his beloved he was – superfluous. Though he does not cite this little known work, an examination of lishnost (the noun) is the crux of Dessaix’s study of not quite belonging.

In 1999 Scott Bevan the journalist met Wendy Sharpe the artist. Bevan was on his way to East Timor to report on the country’s transition to independence; Sharpe was the official Australian war artist appointed to cover the INTERFET peacekeeping operation. Bevan could see a story in Sharpe’s role and activities: creating art amid death and destruction. From this chance meeting grew the idea for this book, a series of fifteen interview portraits of Australian painters who have depicted war, from North Africa in 1941 to Iraq in 2003.

How I do hate the ordinary sleek biography! I’d have every wart & pimple emphasised, every tricky trait or petty meanness brought out. The great writers are great enough to bear it.

This is Henry Handel Richardson writing to Nettie Palmer in 1932 about a biography of Charlotte Bronte. Michael Ackland takes this comment as the epigraph for his biography and demonstrates throughout that Richardson’s life and work can indeed sustain the kind of close scrutiny his subject advocates above.

The two finest politicians of their generation’: one can imagine Peter Costello choking over his cornflakes as he reads the cover blurb of Michael Duffy’s new book. The juxtaposition of Mark Latham with Tony Abbott will be taken as a shrewd journalistic punt on post-Howard politics. Many believe that John Howard is staying around long enough to ensure that Abbott replaces him.