Autobiography

On the 7 January 1934 in the Dutch town of Hilversum, a child was born and named Jopie Houbein. From her earliest days she felt that neither her face nor her name really fitted her. On the outside she was white, but all her feelings of kinship went out to people of alien races – a Chinese trader, travelling gypsies, school-friends from the East Indies, even a child disguised as St Nicholas’s black helper. One of her early fantasy playmates was the beautiful Indian actor Sabu, the Elephant Boy.

Like many students of Australian film, I became aware of Cecil Holmes’s work through the viewing of a scratched print of Three in One in a lecture hall in one of our tertiary institutions, many years after it had failed to gain general release within Australia and killed off the dream of an indigenous film industry, yet again. A brave and naïve film, it was clearly well-made, stylish, and addressed a local audience without condescension or parochialism. Three in One was an early hint of what an Australian cinema might look like, and is now held to be one of the landmarks in the history of Australian film. To those who see the film now, though, its maker must seem to have suffered the same fate as its optimistically named production company, New Dawn Films. There is some satisfaction, then, in reading One Man’s Way to see what did happen to a substantial talent squandered by an insecure and conservative Australian film industry.

Smokey Dawson, a millionaire, is a Mason.

He is also a country music singer/songwriter, knife thrower, whipcracker, cartoon strip, voice in radio programs well remembered by those over 35. He is still a kind of media institution reincurring the value of … precisely what? Cowboy kitsch?

I am sure A.B. Facey intended no irony in calling his remarkable autobiography A Fortunate Life. He is at once too unassuming and, too serious for smart games with words though he does find humour sometimes among the grim and frightful events of his earlier years and, after his perfect marriage, there were times of fulfilment and true happiness. He has chosen to emphasise triumphs as well as struggles, and, while such brave qualities determine his title, they are also what make this chronicler a great man and his book a classic to equal Carolina Maria de Jesus’s Beyond all Pity. It surpasses anything else I know of to which it might be compared; even Shaw Neilson’s autobiography must yield before Facey.

‘From the day you were born all you ever heard about was how you came from the “Blacks” Camp! You weren’t a person; you were just a thing that had to live out there to keep you away from decent people. It’s not too different today, either.’