Richard Johnstone

We expect memoirs to be true – it is one of the main reasons we read them – but we have also grown accustomed over the years to the idea that, while the memoir may be true in spirit, events may not have happened exactly as described. Indeed, it is not unusual for the memoirist to include some prefatory remarks to that effect. Such caveats seem fair; we have come to see them as no more than acknowledgments of the way things are.

In 1961 a young Noeline Brown was playing in Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince (1954) at the Pocket Playhouse in Sydenham – ‘just across the Princes Highway from Tempe Tip’, as she characteristically locates it – when Vivien Leigh, on tour with the Old Vic, came to see a specially arranged Sunday evening performance. From the moment she emerged from the chauffeured limousine, Leigh was the star of the show. She was, Brown recalls, ‘wearing a gorgeous, waist-length mink jacket’, and ‘there were strands of lustrous pearls and sparkling diamonds on her delicate throat and hands’. Brown, on the other hand, ‘was in a dress my Mum had made’. That contrast, between theatrical elegance and put-upon pathos, has been the essence of Brown’s own style ever since, and the key to her success as a comedian and an actor. She hid under a large picture hat to introduce Mavis Bramston, a parody of English self-assurance, to a bemused public in 1964. At the other end of the register, her world-weary, ‘You’re not wrong, Narelle’, delivered in a way that was both funny and sad, outlived its many iterations on the televised version of The Naked Vicar Show (1977) to become part of the Australian lexicon.

In ‘St Patrick’s College’ a poem that appears in his 1975 collection Immigrant Chronicle, Peter Skrzynecki recalls the last day of school, when ‘mass was offered up for our departing intentions’, after which the young Peter makes his way home, ‘taking the right-hand turn out of Edgar Street for good’. It is characteristic of Skrzynecki that he should locate such a crucial turning point in his life so precisely, naming the very street that led him to it. It is this impulse to map, to plot the coordinates of a life, that lies behind much of Skrzynecki’s work, forming a grid by which he reads the past and makes sense of it. ‘The streets of Regents Park,’ he says elsewhere, ‘run through my blood /even though I don’t live there anymore’.