Bugger The Scenery. Where’s the butter?

Item: A Biased Memoir
Author: Elizabeth Jolley

by Elizabeth Jolley •

December 1997–January 1998, no. 197

A Biased Memoir by Ruth Cracknell

Viking

Bugger The Scenery. Where’s the butter?

by Elizabeth Jolley •

December 1997–January 1998, no. 197

David Marr, in his biography of Patrick White, makes the statement that White saw suffering as a force of history shaping human life and events. The worst suffering of all being loneliness and the need to be rescued from it. White is quoted as saying; ‘I have always found in my own case that something positive, either creative or moral, has come out of anything I have experienced in the way of affliction.’ Marr explains that White admired, in others, signs of his own ambivalence: ‘men of unexpected gentleness and women with masculine strength’. A realisation, an explanation, sensed in childhood and expressed when he was an old man. Perhaps the inheritance for many sensitive and perceptive children.

Elizabeth Jolley

Elizabeth Jolley AO (4 June 1923–13 February 2007) was an English-born writer who moved to Western Australia in 1959 with her husband Leonard Jolley and their three children. She was fifty-three when her first book, Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories (1976), was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels (including an autobiographical trilogy), four short story collections and three non-fiction books. She won The Age Book of the Year Award three times, for Mr Scobie's Riddle (1983), My Father's Moon (1989) and The Georges' Wife (1993), and she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Well (1986). She was recognised in Australia with an AO for services to literature and was awarded Honorary Doctorates from Curtin University (1986); Macquarie (1995), Queensland (1997) and The University of New South Wales (2000).