Biography

‘He looks a bit like Marty Feldman with two good eyes.’ So wrote a journalist of Geoffrey Blainey in 1977. In The Fuss That Never Ended, a collection of essays on Blainey arising out of a Melbourne symposium, Bridget Griffen-Foley no less irreverently compares the historian to a character played by Steven Seagal in a movie she saw on television – not because he shares Seagal’s ‘fake tan, ponytail, high-pitched voice, rippling muscles, kickboxing prowess or lurid, technicolour knee-length leather coat’, but because of his ‘style of investigation’ as a young historian. Blainey, she suggests, was neither bookworm nor archive rat. He went into the field, spoke to real people, visited historical sites. His work even helped his first employer, the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company, to exploit long-forgotten mineral deposits. Since producing his history of that company in his early twenties, he has been Australia’s leading mining historian, and one of that industry’s staunchest defenders. It has probably been easier for most people to swallow Blainey’s historical and economic arguments in favour of mining than Hugh Morgan’s biblical ones.

Most of us were taught at school to understand the difference between discovery and invention. Both words imply finding, but discovery meant finding something that already existed ‘out there’ in the concrete world; inventions were found in the imagination. Explorers discovered; scientists invented.

Martin Amis’s encapsulation of biography is that it should convey a sense of what it would be like to spend some time alone in a room with the subject. Robert Milliken begins his story of Australian journalist and rock music taxonomist Lillian Roxon by revealing that he once went one better: thirty years ago, as a rising reporter in London, he not only met Roxon at a boutique hotel in Notting Hill but jawboned with her at length. That is to say, she talked and he listened. Roxon, Milliken recalls:

talked without interruption for the next two hours, entertaining me, shocking me and making me laugh. She told scandalous stories about this one and that one, and even about herself. She also talked about her problems with editors, her asthma and her mother, three principal preoccupations of her life, even though Mrs Roxon, caricatured as an interfering Jewish mother, was long since dead.

I came to this book after reading Don Watson’s biography of Paul Keating. On the cover of Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, Keating is seen through a window frame, head bent, reading engrossedly, shirt sleeves rolled up – a remote and distant figure. He is seemingly careless of the attention of his photographer, and biographer; a recalcitrant subject ...

Nugget Coombs never accepted a knighthood. The reason, he told his one-time English teacher, the essayist and academic Sir Walter Murdoch, was that it would be ‘out of character’ for him to do so.

Nugget Coombs never accepted a knighthood. The reason, he told his one-time English teacher, the essayist and academic Sir Walter Murdoch, was that it would be ‘out of character’ for him to do so.

There is no shortage of calculated modesty in Australian public life. We cultivate it. Even the most self-absorbed of our sporting heroes can manage a spot of winning self-deprecation. But in Nugget Coombs – public thinker, public servant, economist, social reformer, Governor of the Reserve Bank, Aboriginal advocate, cultural initiator and great Australian – modesty was the genuine article. He was a man with enough distilled wisdom to know himself and enough shrewdness to know what fitted. And he was right: ‘Sir Herbert’, or, worse, ‘Sir Bertie’ would have been risible.

Roger Jose lived his adult life in Borroloola, married to an Aboriginal woman and beyond the pale of white civilisation, except in its most vestigial form. Nevertheless, he achieved a certain notoriety, through the writings of journalists such as Ernestine Hill and Douglas Lockwood. He also fascinated a young documentary film-maker named David Attenborough. Roger Jose claimed to be related to the respectable Jose family of Adelaide, which was not enthusiastic about acknowledging him. He lodged, an anarchic and glamorous figure, in the imagination of the young Nicholas Jose, and the tracking of his story provides the infrastructure that legitimises the writer’s journey into the north. Jose says: ‘I wanted the connection because I wanted to join myself to someone who had earned his belonging in this country.’ In the place to which he travels, this connection, real or not, is all-important, giving him an insider’s access to places and stories.

What is the appeal of biography for young people? Recently, I was asked by a Year Seven teacher to compile a list for her students. She commented that twelve and thirteen-year-olds were beginning to break away from fiction and that she believed biography made a good literary transition into nonfiction.

In the fever of bicentennial celebrations of Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia, thousands of words have been written and dozens of new books have appeared. The South Australian events and publications alone celebrating the encounter between Flinders and Baudin have almost reached plague proportions. However, Miriam Estensen’s Life of Matthew Flinders is the first full-blown biography of Flinders since Geoffrey Ingleton’s Matthew Flinders: Navigator and Chartmaker (1986), a deluxe volume not intended for the mass market. A paperback edition of Ernest Scott’s 1914 biography recently appeared, but new sources have become available since then and it is certainly time for a fresh assessment of Flinders’ achievements and character based on all the available evidence we now have.

This summer, browsers will probably find these chronicles of Eddie Gilbert and Mark Waugh snuggled close together in bookshops. Both, after all, are biographies of Australian cricketers, written by journalists, and published by firms with strong sporting backlists. But their proximity will be misleading. Cricket contains few less similar careers, and has generated few more different narrative styles. Indeed, reading them consecutively is to appreciate how stealthily our understanding of ‘biography’ has been elasticised.