Biography

This dainty, delicate, savage book is lovely and rare because it is truthful, vicious, brimming with the blue eyes of memory, the red eyes of defeat, the open mouth and congo drum of childhood. When Barry Oakley writes of his childhood, it is you booting him the footy of laughter.

He writes, wonderfully, sweetly, dreamily of taking his sore-footed mum and soft-drink-eyed son for the satiric day to Taronga Zoo. Among the gorillas and orchids, you watch him scribble in the light. A journalist cobber to fellow mysteries, his friends.

This book is a testament to the persistence of the legend of King O’Malley. Larry Noye tells the story of the self-proclaimed founder of the Commonwealth Bank and builder of Canberra very much as O’Malley himself never tired of telling it, heavily embellished with the exaggerated ‘spreadeagle’ rhetoric and baloney of the hot gospellers, land-boomers, social reform cranks, and snake-oil salesmen of the American West among whom O’Malley took his first steps in the adult world. The book’s strength is that its author is so intoxicated with the O’Malley legend that it faithfully gives us a picture, as it were, straight from the horse’s mouth, full of colour and incident; its weakness is that it fails adequately to step back and separate fact from fiction.

The Australian colonies were much more of an ethnic mix in the middle of the last century than is nowadays imagined. In 1861 one Victorian in ten was Chinese. Germans were everywhere, not just in the Barossa: 10,000 also lived in Victoria. The folk memory of such groups was not continuous enough to preserve a sense of their collective heritage. Few material traces remain: overgrown tombstones, fading foreign surnames atop country stores, an exotic farmhouse looking quite unlike its neighbours.

The vast majority of these itinerant aliens left no mark at all. They lived in a goldfields tent, rented a room in the inner city, or built a shanty amid tall timber. Within a few years they moved on, perhaps to New Zealand or the Americas, and returned home in old age. Of Italians, for instance, probably 120,000 had come to this country by the time of the Great War, but the 1921 census counted only 8,000 of them.

Humour is much too serious business to be left to humourists; it is up to others to find it funny, while the comic goes about his trade with desperate lugubrity, Thus humour that goes out of its way to be funny falls flat: dryness is all.

Most biographies are about active people who do several things well but usually do them one at a time. As the publisher’s blurb says, Baldwin Spencer did many things and when Mulvaney came to describe his activities he found that the usual chronological approach used by most was not appropriate; four chapters of the book describe Spencer’s contribution from about 1895 to 1920 to biology, University administration, the Melbourne Museum and Australian art, and the reader must integrate these if he wishes to establish a chronology. Spencer’s anthropological work, including his stint as Special Commissioner for Aboriginals in Darwin in 1911, runs as a thread throughout the whole book. Biographers have to face up to controversies in the lives of their subjects and with Spencer these were the disintegration of his marriage, his lapse into alcoholism in the early twenties, and criticisms of his techniques as an anthropologist.

Despite its faults, this book has the merit of being the first biography on the legendary Australian batsman, Victor Trumper (1877–1915). Young cricket lovers of today may well ask what feats of batsmanship Trumper performed to deserve this handsomely produced volume about him. After all, his test average was only 39.04, not to be spoken of in the same breath as Don Bradman’s 99.96.

Before I came across this attractive and instructive book, I knew very little of the art of Sam Byrne, thinking of him merely as one of a group of outback ‘primitives’ based on Broken Hill, the Silver City, of whom the best known is Pro Hart.

In the penultimate chapter of his memoir, Bernard Smith describes a meeting of the Sydney Teachers College Art Club, an institution he founded and later transformed into the leftist NSW Teachers Federation Art Society. The group was addressed in 1938 by Julian Ashton, then aged eighty-seven and very much the grand old man of Sydney painting and art education. He spoke at great length on the inadequacy of the NSW Education Department’s art teaching practices. Smith adds that Ashton also ‘told his life story (as old men will)’.