Darleen Bungey

Leap of Imagination

April 2008, no. 300

Brenda Niall (ABR, March 2008) feels ‘confronted’ by an ‘extraordinary claim’ in my book, Arthur Boyd: A Life. The two sentences that caused her consternation are: ‘Yet it seems that ultimately Martin’s spirit was crushed. His broken body would be discovered in the Blue Nuns’ gardens, lying where it had fallen, below his hospital window.’ Niall complains that I did not ask her opinion about Martin Boyd’s likely suicide. Since this was not included in her biography, Martin Boyd: A Life ( 1988), I believed she knew nothing about it. I understand how annoying it must be to write a full biography of a person and learn later of information that may have been available, but Niall’s defensive and plaintive attack demands a response.

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Daddy Cool: Finding my father, the singer who swapped Hollywood fame for home in Australia by Darleen Bungey

by Tali Lavi •

June–July 2020, no. 422

Tali Lavi reviews 'Daddy Cool: Finding my father, the singer who swapped Hollywood fame for home in Australia' by Darleen Bungey

‘“I must remember accurately,” I told myself, “remember everything accurately so that when he is gone I can re-create the father who created me.”’ This is Philip Roth exhorting himself while witnessing his declining father bathe in Patrimony: A true story (1991), a memoir that opens when Herman Roth is diagnosed with a brain tumour. The book, tender but also brutal, slips between the present and the past. Philip Roth, after all, is the writer. The matter of accuracy feels particularly perilous when the subject is the writer’s parent, if the intention is not to write a hagiography. It takes a particular kind of courage to countenance a parent’s failings when not motivated by revenge.

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John Olsen: An artist's life by Darleen Bungey

by Patrick McCaughey •

March 2015, no. 369

Patrick McCaughey reviews 'John Olsen: An Artist's Life' by Darleen Bungey

Eight years ago Darleen Bungey published a revelatory biography of Arthur Boyd. She cast shadows across the ‘idyllic’ Open Country years where the extended Boyd family lived in suburban Murrumbeena and unflinchingly detailed his declining, alcoholic years at Bundanon. Bungey’s compelling new biography of John Olsen has its share of revelations. Olsen’s weak and inadequate father wound up destitute on the streets of Sydney, largely sustained by handouts from his son. Boyd was an intensely private man, friendly but reclusive. Olsen has been a public figure for most of his long career, reaching back to the early 1950s when he emerged from the Julian Ashton school as the star student of the difficult and demanding John Passmore. Boyd was dead before Bungey published her biography. John Olsen, happily, remains a boisterous octogenarian, going strong in art and life. A living subject is not always to the biographer’s advantage. Bungey can sound like a cheerleader: ‘Like Jay Gatsby, John was a man from an impoverished childhood with a mind for enquiry, a hunger for romance and a need for invention.’

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One more falling body

by Brenda Niall •

March 2008, no. 299

In September 1985, when I visited the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome to see the room in which Martin Boyd died, I never thought to check the height of the windows, nor to cross-examine the calm and affable Sister Raphael Myers, with whom I looked at Boyd’s last view of the city. If anything was fully documented in my biography (Martin Boyd: A Life, 1988) it was his final illness and death.

It was midday, so my diary reminds me: the only time when the room would be empty before the next admission. The hospital was a cool, quiet place, air-conditioned, I think, with windows closed against Rome’s heat. Sister Raphael remembered Boyd, but she hadn’t been on duty when he died. She could tell me nothing that I didn’t already know from Boyd’s diaries or from the testimony of the friends who had visited him. ‘A difficult patient?’ ‘All patients are a little difficult; one expects that.’ I went on to lunch in the Borghese Gardens, feeling that I had done a biographer’s duty on my last day in Rome.

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Arthur Boyd: A life by Darleen Bungey

by Ian Britain •

February 2008, no. 298

Ian Britain reviews 'Arthur Boyd: A life' by Darleen Bungey

‘More difficult to do a thing than to talk scintillating dialogue of 1890, ‘The Critic as Artist’. To hold to such a belief, Gilbert declares, is ‘a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.’

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