Memoir

The autobiographer faces a real problem: the self. ‘Which self?’ may also be the reader’s question and it may also be the question of the autobiographer. Should one write about the known self, the self vaunted or scorned by others, the public one, parts of which can be found in archives, on record, in the books and conversations of friends and enemies? Or should it be the private self, the self-protected and defended by jokes, chiack and taciturnity, hinted at here or there, but never accepted as real when defined by others?

Welcome again to Morris Lurie’s global village: Melbourne, Paris, New York, London, Tangier, Tel Aviv, Melbourne again, London. Lurie is one of our most reliable entertainers, but he is also, in the recesses of his stories, a chronicler of inner loneliness. The round world for him is signposted with stories; as one of his characters says, ‘everything is a story, or a prelude to a story, or the aftermath of one.’ The sheer variety of narrative incidents and locales in this collection is, as usual with him, impressive in itself. His characters play hard with experience in those bright or familiar places, a Tangier of easy living and surprising acquaintances, a London of the sixties fierce with contrasts. Yet finally they are always partly detached from it all and able to set themselves free, curiously able to resume the role of spectator of life. Many of Lurie’s characters give the initially disconcerting impression of possessing that ultimate detachment of a certain kind of writer, even when, as is usually the case, they are not actually cast as a writer or artist.

Serpent’s Tooth is a massive, sprawling novel. It is panoramic in its vision of twentieth century social and political history, and meticulous in its rendering of one man’s struggle to sustain the mighty ideal his father has inspired in him.

T.A.G. Hungerford’s new book Stories from Suburban Road is sub-titled ‘an autobiographical collection’ and comes complete with an appendix of photographs in the style of a family album with captions such as ‘Mick and me, 1922’, ‘Me, aged 16, and Phyllis Kingsbury, Scarborough, 1931’, and ‘Mum and Mrs Francis Victoria Wood, Como Beach, 1930’. Also, throughout the collection each story, sixteen in all, is accompanied by a photograph of the period of the author’s childhood and adolescence between the wars. The impression this provides is that the reader is invited to participate in Hungerford’s nostalgia for his past which consequently may be an inaccessibly private world – more reminiscence than substance. This impression proves to be quite incorrect. The photographs are moments frozen in time, enclosed in a period before this reader was born and the stories offer insight into them. They mutually contribute to the impression created, generally, of a world of innocence and delight. The happy and robust youth in the photographs looks contentedly into the camera from an ordered, acceptable world. They also perhaps complement the selectivity of the author’s imagination.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick wanted to be an actress. Instead, she became a famous lecturer and teacher in the History Department at the University of Melbourne, and in one of the frequent revealing asides in her memoir implies that perhaps this fact explained her ability as an inspiring lecturer.

One heady day in the mid I920s, sculptor and Lindsayite recruit Guy Lynch (brother of the elegaic subject of Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’), held forth in a pub at Circular Quay on his plan for Sydney to become an Hellenic city. The Quay itself he saw as a magnificent ampitheatre for the incarnation of the Lindsay group’s Nietzschean dream of Dionysian joy, as revealed in the vital art affirmed as the salvation from the twin vices of bourgeois philistinism and modernistic decadence, the canon that ran from Shakespeare, Rubens and Beethoven, to Norman Lindsay and Hugh McCrae. He-men would lean against pillars, girls would stroll about, and grand opera would be played amongst forests of statues.

In the Australian administrative tradition, Dr H.C. Coombs is a remarkable survivor, a maximalist and an innovator, not least in his· preparedness to write in public. The key figure in the Post-War Reconstruction brains trust which flourished under Curtin, Chifley and Dedman in the 1940s, he became Governor of the Commonwealth and then the Reserve Bank for twenty years and then entered a new creative phase in the post-Menzies and the Whitlam years.

This is the story of one woman’s crusade to achieve social justice for a handicapped child. It is one person’s elevation of the ineptitude, the hypocrisy and the dishonesty that became associated with a particular group of handicapped children. It concerns an institution that attempted to tum a pretext into reality rather than declare that a terrible mistake had occurred. Rosemary Crossley found Annie in St Nicholas Hospital in 1976. The hospital was originally a children’s hospital built in the 1890s. In 1964 The Mental Health Authority took possession of the buildings and after demolishing some and refurbishing others opened again in order to cater for the needs of severely and profoundly handicapped children, those whose purported I.Q.s were believed to be below thirty. Although it was originally designed to cater for individuals on a temporary basis most of those who came never left. It is perhaps Indicative of our attitudes towards the handicapped that the ‘high brick walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass’ were left untouched. One wonders whether the author of the slogan ‘Break Down the Barriers’ had this in mind when he took up his pen.