John Thompson

For 175 years the Sydney Morning Herald has recorded the annals of colony, state and nation, never missing an issue. When the paper was established in 1831, the colony of New South Wales was still being opened up by exploration and settlement. Sydney’s population was little more than 15,000, while the colony itself numbered around 50,000 Europeans, including 20,000 convicts. Less certain was the extent of the indigenous population. To the first Australians, the Herald was initially unsympathetic. It called them savages and in 1838 campaigned against the trial and subsequent hanging of the men involved in the massacre at Myall Creek; to its credit, that view was soon recanted. In 2006 the Herald reflects the aspirations of the majority of Australians for a decent and just reconciliation with the Aboriginal people.

With the publication of Eminent Victorians in 1918, Lytton Strachey famously created a new mode of biographical writing – spare, ironic, satiric, detached. In his preface to that slim cathartic volume of portraits of four famous Victorian personalities, Strachey extolled the biographer’s virtue of what he called ‘a becoming brevity’. That preface has been called a ‘manifesto of modern biography’. In his breaking of new ground, Strachey turned his back on the sombre and dutiful ‘lives’ that had become the accepted mode of biographical homage in Victorian England.

At the age of twenty, Peter Conrad slammed his Australian door shut behind him. He was travelling into the ‘wider world’, away from his native Tasmania to take up his Rhodes scholarship at Oxford; he went with barely a backwards glance. Growing up as an omnivorous reader of English literature in the years of what he has called his ‘colonial childhood’, the young Conrad had become increasingly resentful at the perverse randomness of his exile. What he could only think of as an administrative error had relegated him to an Australia that seemed vacant and vacuous. When his time came, he ruthlessly withdrew his affection from parents and country. This snake-like shedding of skin was his liberation. Crossing Waterloo Bridge in August 1968, he had – like Wordsworth before him – a moment of epiphany. As the bridge ‘ran out into the Aldwych in a sunny crux of blue dust’, the young Conrad passed innocuously through the door by which he stepped into life. In confessional mode, he later celebrated this as the exact moment of his birth. That was when the years of his Australian youth were cancelled out, relegated to a phase of mere ‘pre-existence’.

From his precocious youth in inner-city Sydney until his death – still in harness at the age of seventy-five – the Australian photographer Frank Hurley lived for ‘adventure and romance’. By any standards, his was an extraordinary career. Yet the individual delineations of its great landmarks have blurred in the factual catalogue of Hurley’s achievements in two Antarctic expeditions during the cradle period of exploration in that great southern continent; in his work as an official photographer during the two world wars; in his pioneering of filmed documentaries and as a cinematographer in the making of major Australian feature films in the 1930s. In the last twenty years of his career, Hurley travelled the length and breadth of his own country, celebrating its people and eulogising what he saw to be the heroic Australian landscape. Always restless, always yearning for the next challenge, Hurley was a citizen of the world. He was drawn to record the cultures of the ancient world and, closer to home, aspects of New Guinea and the Pacific.

Frederick Septimus Kelly – pianist, composer, Olympic oarsman, gallant officer and Australian – was killed at Beaucourt-sur-Ancre during the final battle of the Somme on 13 November 1916. Only a few weeks before, he had been enjoying ‘the most delightful still bright autumn weather’ and the unexpected loveliness of the French countryside, strangely removed from the booming guns of war. Kelly was then thirty-five. One of the last men to leave the Gallipoli peninsula in January 1916, his bravery in the front trenches before the evacuation had won him the Distinguished Service Cross. As a boy in Sydney, he had demonstrated a precocious musical talent, ‘playing Mozart and early Beethoven piano sonatas before he could stretch the octave’. At the time of his death, this gifted man was moving into what promised to be a new period of fertility and confidence as a composer and performer.

Posthumously and handsomely published, this book is a poignant tribute to its author’s ‘magnificent obsession’. For a decade before her sudden death in April 2000, the Melbourne historian Jacqueline Templeton had pursued her interest in the migrations to Australia of Italians from the Valtellina, a province of Sondrio in Lombardy, high up in the Alpine and pre-alpine zones of northern Italy, close to the present-day border with Switzerland. On the day following the completion of her manuscript, Templeton was diagnosed with a terminal illness and told that she had only months to live. That night she suffered a severe stroke; three days later she was dead. Family and friends grieved for the loss of a vibrant and charming woman.

When he died in 1989, the artist Donald Friend left a double legacy. The first was his artistic output, as various, dazzling and charming as it was vigorously contested in terms of its ultimate quality. The second was an accumulation of forty-nine diaries commenced precociously at the age of fourteen, kept briefly for a year or two and then, from the war years on, written lovingly and obsessively for much of the rest of his life. Friend’s art as draughtsman and painter is widely held in public and private collections; the bulk of the surviving diaries were eventually acquired by the National Library of Australia. Profusely illustrated, these intimate personal records document a remarkable life while providing a detailed insight into one man’s struggle with the processes of making art. In their span, the diaries constitute an extraordinary individual record of twentieth-century Australian experience in war and peace.