Memoir

The heart of this book is an account of one year in the life of its author. In 1963, at the age of fifteen, Robert Hillman left his hometown of Eildon, in Victoria, and took a position as a junior in the ladies’ shoe department of the Myer Emporium in Melbourne. He didn’t last long. Before he knew it, he had booked a passage on a ship to Ceylon. He had a dream, not a plan. The dream was of a soft landing on an idyllic island of perfect women who would tend to his every need and desire. It was a dream of Eden, of a world before the Flood. In this case, the image is apposite. In 1954 Eildon had been submerged by the waters of a new dam. This project had brought Americans and money to the town; once they departed, the new Eildon was a shiny but emotionally threadbare place. The world after the flood was a punishing place for young Robert. He wanted to return to paradise.

Zoltan Torey’s Out of Darkness begins dramatically in Sydney. On a winter’s night in 1951, Torey, a refugee from Hungary studying dentistry, is on night shift at the battery factory in which he works to support his studies. When he moves a drum of acid, the plug blows off, ‘sending a massive jet of corrosive liquid at my face’. The acid eats into Torey’s eyes, blinding him for life. In addition, he swallows some acid, damaging his vocal cords. Torey describes this event twice: the second time, he emphasises how the event was experienced. ‘The last thing I saw with complete clarity was a glint of light in the flood of acid that was to engulf my face … It was a nano-second of sparkle, framed by the black circle of the drumface, less than a foot away.’ As this suggests, Torey’s prose has moments of extraordinary power.

Nancy Phelan’s Writing Round the Edges is a stylish and beautifully written memoir by one of Australia’s best-known and most prolific writers. Besides previous autobiographical works, Phelan has published four novels, a number of travel books, biographies of Charles Mackerras and Louise Mack (her aunt), as well as, collaboratively, books on yoga and Russian cooking. Winner of the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Award in 1988, she has also been shortlisted for a number of national prizes, including the Miles Franklin Award.

This memoir is selective in that its three sections – ‘Seafaring Days’, ‘With the Tide’ and ‘The Gatehouse’ – move in and out of the time continuum, omitting blocks of experience such as Phelan’s life in England during World War II and her work for the South Pacific Commission. These were covered in earlier writings. Passages crammed with anecdotes are interspersed with whole chapters devoted to particular people such as Jill Neville and Dorothy Hewett (to whom the book is dedicated), and the narratives often overlap. There is a moving chapter on the Russian funeral of her friend Paul and a number of lyrical chapters on the changing aspects of deeply loved places: Sydney Harbour and the Blue Mountains. For me, the elegant descriptions of Australian scenery, and especially its birdlife, are highlights of the book.

In October 2001, as a member of a group called Huon, I set out on my fourth US tour drumming in an ‘indie’ rock band: a low-key, non-profit cross-nation trek performing shows in colleges, small bars, even a few suburban basements. It was an extraordinary time to travel across the States, particularly since much of it was spent in a hire car with only AM radio for entertainment. AM radio in the US is riddled with amphetamined shock-jocks outdoing each other in ways to vituperate the pernicious liberal élites. Apparently, these élites had just destroyed some skyscrapers in New York. More poignant was the way Osama bin Laden had so quickly become a player with the usual pumpkins and skeletons in Halloween festivities, his name inscribed in white gothic lettering on black cardboard coffins on suburban front lawns with an express wish that he ‘never rest in peace’.

What is resilience? And why is it an important subject for research? Anne Deveson – former royal commissioner, noted documentary maker and social justice activist – explores these questions in her latest book. Human resilience is linked to courage, love, defiance and stoicism, and enables us to come through suffering with integrity. It requires hope and produces strength and action, while its absence results in weakness and victimhood, even despair. But no one seems sure exactly what it is. Deveson’s book opens with a quotation from Jeanette L. Johnson, suggesting that resilience may be ‘the poetry of life’ and that as yet ‘there is no language to share it’. That does not stop Deveson from trying to contribute to its dissemination.

Many of us, as we get older, become curious about relatives we hardly or never knew. Perhaps, if we have children of our own, we become more aware of the biological ties that bind us to those relatives and seek self-illumination through the lighting of the shadowy places in our ancestry. This process is beautifully implied by Peter Singer’s title, Pushing Time Away, a phrase taken from a letter written by his maternal grandfather, David Ernst Oppenheim, to his maternal grandmother, Amalie Pollak, in which Oppenheim declares: ‘what binds us pushes time away.’

Singer never knew his grandfather, but was prompted to discover him on learning that Oppenheim ‘wrote about fundamental values, and what it is to be human’. For Singer, who apparently rather surprised his family by deciding to be a philosopher, this was a spur to enquiry. Moreover, ‘[t]he handful of people who knew my grandfather are getting old’. If anything, indeed, bound Singer and Oppenheim together, it had to be found now, or not at all.

Edmund Campion’s latest book, Lines of My Life, is an elegant hybrid, part meditation, part gossip (of edifying kinds), part political testament. Its genial tone is suggested by the source of the title, which comes from Psalm 16: ‘the lines of my life have run in pleasant places’. Not that this is at all a self-satisfied book. Campion begins his ‘Journal of a Year’ in New York in September 2001. He had gone there to conduct research on Thomas Merton, an American monk and writer. This took him to the great public and university libraries of the city. In one of the moments when Campion pauses to praise, he says that ‘libraries are our richest cultural asset, their custodians singular servants of our intellectual lives’.

In 1980, a nine-year-old Aboriginal girl in Darwin, Nova Peris, watched the Moscow Olympics on television and told her mum that she was going to be an Olympic athlete. Alone at home in Melbourne, Raelene Boyle was also watching those Games on the telly, bawling her eyes out and desperately trying to get drunk. Raelene was twenty-nine years old, a veteran of three Olympic Games, with three silver medals. She’d qualified to run in Moscow also, but by then frustration, confusion and disillusion had set in. For athletes, mid-life crises come much sooner than for most of us.

In a number of guises, the question ‘why’ reverberated throughout my reading of Whatever the Gods Do: A Memoir. This book opens with Patti Miller describing her sadness at the departure of ten-year-old Theo, who is leaving for Melbourne to live with his father. We soon discover that the author has been Theo’s substitute mother for the past seven years since the tragic death of Dina, his birth mother and Miller’s friend. Dina suffered a brain haemorrhage when Theo was two years old. She spent thirteen months in a virtually immobile state before her death at thirty-eight. Why the vibrant, attractive Dina should have been struck down when she had so much to live for is a legitimate question, but, of course, an unanswerable one. Why Miller should choose to write about her own life through this incident is also worth asking. Few are more qualified than Miller to address the reasons for, and benefits of, life-writing: she has run ‘life stories’ workshops around the country for more than ten years. In her bestselling manual Writing Your Life: A journey of discovery (1994), she identifies various motivations for, and rewards of, life-writing, including healing and self-understanding, recording family and social history for future generations, remembering happiness and sharing one’s wisdom.

Anyone who remembers the amiable host of the ABC’s television show Backchat, which he compèred for eight years from 1986, will not be surprised to learn that Tim Bowden has written a breezily readable memoir. Its pages seem to turn of their own volition. In the foreword, Maeve Binchy daringly asks: ‘Who are the right people to do a memoir?’ Actually, it’s probably not so daring, as Binchy had no doubt read Bowden’s chronicle and knew he qualified as one of the ‘right people’. Two criteria leap to mind. The writer needs to exhibit a character and personality you’d be happy to keep company with for 300 or so pages. In addition, the reader – this one, anyway – wants a complementary sense of the times of the life in the foreground.