Random House

As an unknown young artist, Margaret Olley gained instant fame as the subject of the enchanting portrait by William Dobell that won the Archibald Prize in 1948. With Olley’s Mona Lisa smile, the warm, summery colours of her dress and her extravagantly flower-laden hat, Dobell created an enduring image. An embarrassed Olley did not welcome the publicity. This was not the way she wanted to enter the world of art. ‘I also paint,’ she told reporters defensively. Today, her vibrant interiors and still lifes have made her famous in her own right.

These two first novels are based upon events and people from Australian history. Noni Durack recasts the story of the pastoralists of the north-west of Australia in terms of an enlightened awareness of land degradation, but the narrative remains oddly captive to the legend of heroic conquest that she is trying to critique. Wendy James, on the other hand, has written an elegant feminist account of the lives of women in Melbourne at the time of the struggle for women’s suffrage.

Families are curious entities. They are, by simple definition, households of individuals bound by common lineage. But they are also complex organisms, as these three novels show. Families nurture the individual and offer a refuge from the problems of the larger world, yet they can also impede the growth of their youngest members, who seek their own place in the world and attempt to shape their own responses to it.

First, the good news or the bad news about this novel? Perhaps the bad. Presenting the worst face of a character to the world is not in itself fresh or especially amusing any more. We are overrun with sitcoms reflecting us, warts and all. Bridget Jones was among the first of these types of characters in popular fiction, and I was variously amused and pained by her hapless and heart-warming antics. More recently, the anonymous Bride Stripped Bare startled me for the statutory fifteen minutes, and left me wondering where all the attractive taxi drivers were hiding. In Alison Says, a conflation of the above, I found the central character, Maggs, to be a bit tiresome – and tired. Maggs is a 24-year-old drama teacher who has recently been dumped. Two months later, Jamie, the ex-inamorato, becomes engaged to Lorelei, aka ‘the Rhine slut’. In the wake of these events, Maggs is emotionally vulnerable, but it’s all rather in the manner of someone in an arrested state of adolescence. Suzanne Hawley’s Maggs is a stock characterisation based on the humour of self-absorption and victimhood, narcissism and obsession. Hawley’s novel does not fully realise the key ingredient of chick lit: a central character that the reader either loves or loves to hate.

Pity the professional historian. It is hard to know where to turn these days to avoid being abused, even from the most unlikely sources. According to Andrew Riemer, writing lately in the Sydney Morning Herald, the main reason professional historians castigated Robert Hughes in 1988, when he published The Fatal Shore, was because he had ‘occupied their territory’. Is there any other professional group in Australia so childish, irresponsible, parasitical and useless as the professional historian? Judging from remarks like this, appearing weekly in the press over the last few years, apparently not. And why is it, at a time when the number of living professional historians probably outnumbers the total of their deceased predecessors since time began, we supposedly manage to work as a tiny clique? Someday an historian, maybe even a professional one, will explain this unlikely phenomenon. Allegations such as these are linked somehow with the overwhelming anti-intellectualism of early twenty-first-century Australia, but exactly why historians, among all the others, are hit so hard and so often is a puzzle.

Accounts of past child abuse and the inability or unwillingness of those in positions of authority to confront its reality are amongst the hottest of topics in today’s media. Generally, the story is about the perpetrators and their punishments, or about the impact of disclosures on church leaders forced to retire because of their negligent or political mishandling of cases brought to their attention. But what about the victims? Rules of privacy generally mean that we never learn at firsthand what it must be like to live with the knowledge of a childhood tainted by sexual abuse on the part of some adult with authority. Still less are we likely to know what that knowledge must be like when the abuser was also a much-loved family relation, such as, or especially, a father. For that reason, memoirs such as these are valuable in that they initiate the reader into the long-lasting effects of abuse with graphic emotional immediacy.

Here are two engaging books that trade on the romance and exoticism of northern Australia. Neither makes much demand on the reader nor offers profound insights, but both in their different ways abound in atmosphere and a genuine ‘feel for place’.

Rosemary Hemphill’s childhood was one of extreme contrasts. Her father, the product of Jewish Orthodox parents and Sydney Grammar, washed up in Broome with the dream of becoming the master of a pearling fleet. As so many do, he fell in love with the place and stayed until forced out by the fall of the pearling industry. He served in World War I and, while recuperating from wounds in England, fell in love with the beautiful and cultured daughter of a conventional upper-middle-class couple. The English in-laws insisted that he convert in order to marry their daughter. Back in Sydney, his father declared ‘my son is dead’, as is the custom of Orthodox Jews whose progeny ‘marry out’, and forced the rest of the family to cut ties as well. Louis Goldstein, now Louis Goldie, returned to Broome with his wife and pursued the half-glamorous, half-arduous life of the ‘master pearler’. The life was harder on the women, who were forced to battle the extreme physical conditions, isolation and monotony.

I must confess I picked up this celebrity autobiography, complete with embossed cover and a price suggestive of a huge print run, without anticipation. I could not have been more wrong. Mike Munro’s excoriating and frank account of his abused childhood and early years in journalism chronicles a survival story that is Dickensian in scope and impact. Like Dickens, Munro managed to overcome poverty, cruelty and emotional deprivation to reach the top of a demanding profession. Remarkably, considering his scarifying experiences as a child and adolescent, he fell in love and married a partner with whom he has created the kind of loving family life that he never knew as a child. But I am jumping ahead.