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Births Deaths Marriages by Georgia Blain & The After Life by Kathleen Stewart

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May 2008, no. 301

Each of these memoirs – Births Deaths Marriages: true tales, by Georgia Blain, and The After Life: A Memoir, by Kathleen Stewart – is the work of an accomplished novelist, and each writer is well aware of the risks involved in the shift of mode. If the novel, as Blain maintains, provides a place for the writer to hide, the memoir is the place of self-exposure, of speaking the truth, or a version of the truth. Although it is the wellspring of all creativity, to write about the life, to pin it down, is in a sense to distort it. Memory is unreliable and bias is inevitable. There is also the problem of exposing others, and the others in each of these memoirs are easily identified. Each writer faces the challenges of memoir in an entirely different way. The narrative voice in Births Deaths Marriages is thoughtful and contemplative; the account qualified at times by self-doubt. Stewart’s account, on the other hand, is sure of its truth. It is dramatic, forceful and defiant.

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How many books should an author have under their belt before they indulge in a piece of frippery? When John Steinbeck wrote Travels with Charley (1962), about his journeys across the country with his poodle, it must have been hard not to see it as a comedown from The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Adding the subtitle (‘In Search of America’) can’t have been enough to convince anyone that this was anything more than a writer who knew he was nearing the end of his life and career, going for a drive with his dog. By then, however, Steinbeck was widely regarded as having earned a certain licence.

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If between one footfall and the next, the wind
can swivel and issue empty threats of rain,
for all we know this could be one of those days,
unpinpointable even in retrospect,
when a dimly held belief begins to melt,
say the belief that it’s somehow generous
to assume that everyone’s rather like you.
An open-ended day promising nothing,
but just as full of zipjams, language splashes
and thixotropic flows, lost somewhere between
the day you realised you wouldn’t always
have to pretend to be interested in X
(opera, hot cars, Buffy Summers, poetry)

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Who exactly is available to tell us the story of our minds?
If I dream of an estuary called ‘Ephemeral Waters,’ an optimum of spectral love
anyone might allude to their misgivings. Or it’s interpersonal, the tide finds
its way round the three islands, flowing away from negative emotions, some remove
their shoes at the door, others talk of auras, or the portals of youth, the mark

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This is a song of the white.
The multitude or the pattern.
The rose or the wind.
A woman who begins,
a woman who disappears.
a woman drinking blossom’s shadow.

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The juxtaposition of the three words ‘fashion,’ ‘history’ and ‘nation’ in the title of Antonia Finnane’s study of Chinese clothing indicates the ambitious nature of her richly illustrated book. Her account is an engaging one, based in detailed analysis of the social and political circumstances that shaped not only what people wore but the body shapes they cultivated as well. Finnane, an associate professor of history at the University of Melbourne, tells us that her narrative of vestimentary change across a century or more in China is aimed at showing how ‘the relationship between national politics and fashion is not simple, predictable or steady’, in tandem with an analysis of how technology, industry, commerce and modern communications each played a significant part in changing Chinese styles of dress.

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On the front of the only postcard my grandfather kept is a picture of the United States Navy’s ‘great white fleet’ off Australian shores. A Pennsylvanian uncle sent it to the nine-year-old boy in 1908, ‘from one white man to another’. After reading Marilyn Lake’s and Henry Reynolds’s important new book on the transnational assertion of white racial identity in the early twentieth century, I now know that our American relative was merely echoing Rear-Admiral Sperry, who, at a luncheon in Sydney the same year, greeted his Australian hosts as a ‘white man to white men, and I may add, very white men’.

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This sixth poetry collection by Barry Hill is a fine, intense book of journeying and returns. Poems are based on pilgrimages made in the flesh (to Carrara, to Assisi, to Kyoto) and on those made in the mind as we visit works of art. But there is nothing blandly celebratory about these pilgrimages: the focus is always on the self of the journeyer. Indeed, at a deeper level, its poems are really about the experience of becoming, of being ‘drawn’. And one of the book’s central metaphors is the way there is a double process going on in the creation of the self: we emerge as human beings out of inchoate experience in the way that a sculpture emerges from stone; and, at the same time, we are shaped by the loved ones who surround us.

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On page sixty-two of Ann Blainey’s thoroughly researched, excellently written and beguilingly human biography of Nellie Melba there occurs a transition that is simple but that defines, in an instant, the moment the singer went from learner to legend. It happens when the young singer, under the wing of Madame Marchesi (née Mathilda Graumann; nickname ‘the Prussian drill-master’), is ready to make her public European début and requires a new surname. ‘Armstrong’ had to go; in its place, there had to be something ‘distinctive and memorable’:

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Australian Book Review has been in a sombre mood since April 8, having lost one of its great friends and contributors. It had been clear for some time that John Button’s condition was grave (he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer late last year). Just four days before his death, he resigned from the ABR board with customary punctiliousness. ... (read more)