Autobiography

The word ‘memoir’ is used with a nice precision in the title of this beautifully written book. The Macquarie Dictionary distinguishes between the singular and the plural meanings of the word: ‘memoirs’ are autobiographical, ‘records of one’s own life and experiences’; a ‘memoir’ is a biography. Almost all of the book is written in the voice of its protagonist, Bette Boyanton, with some sharp interventions from her daughter Gina; her husband Les is credited as a co-author, though he does not speak. But the book also stands firmly as a biography, elegantly crafted by its major author, Carolyn Landon.

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Our retail establishment has never received the spotlight focused on its predecessors, the miners, pastoralists, makers and land boomers. The next wave, the shopkeepers – the Foys, McLellans, Treadways, Nathans, Morans and Coles – are mainly remembered by fading signs above grand buildings occupied by others. (For a wonderful example of history in pressed cement, stand in Prahran’s Cato Street car park and look east.) Melbourne’s glittering exception is the Jewish-Anglican Myer dynasty.

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This memoir moves through points of intensity in Kate Llewellyn’s life, from an idyllic childhood at Tumby Bay on the Eyre Peninsula in the 1940s through to her leaving Adelaide to make a new life in Sydney in the 1980s. By this time she is a recognised poet, but her life is in turmoil. The book does not set out to tell a success story; rather, it describes that uneven movement from childhood innocence through adult experience, with all naïveté, self-delusion, idealism, and hard-learned lessons. It is quintessentially a poet’s book, its stories heightened by arresting images, its movement circling rather than linear.

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The tasteful title of this autobiography echoes the story once told of how the ebullient Italian producer Filippo Del Guidice performed the same disservice to J. Arthur Rank and survived to become a force in the British film industry. David Stratton, after looking sideways in a Venetian toilet, never looked back – despite Fellini’s understandable choler.

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In one of the most haunting phrases contained in Inside Outside (1992), the Australian Jewish autobiographer Andrew Riemer comments on the persistent sense of loss that still shapes him, many years after his entry to Australia as a child immigrant. He writes, ‘exile seals your eyes, allowing you to see only what your longings and your sense of loss will permit’. Earlier, Riemer reflects on his longing for a vanished world, ‘a country of the mind, fashioned from powerful longings and fantasies’. With the undercutting of his own position, so characteristic of his writing, he writes: ‘Perhaps I am merely describing the human condition. I have come to learn that this sense of displacement, of not belonging ... is shared by many …’ And yet, he adds, the experience of migration ‘brings that predicament into sharper focus than might otherwise be the case’.

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So many recent books have been about failure of one sort or another that when I read Michael Zifcak’s My Life in Print, with its eminently successful life story, I was at first inclined to scan it for points of criticism. Such is human nature. There are points, of course – the book is really two quite separate texts. The first, and most compelling, is the account of Michael Zifcak as a boy in rural Slovakia, then a youth and young man of estimable drive and a sharp, organising mind, who sets himself the task of improving his life – rapidly. Through a great deal of self-study and application, he gained his accountancy qualifications and pushed himself into a key position with one of the country’s leading manufacturers (ALPA, an ‘elixir’ with impressively high alcohol content), all this during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the ensuing German occupation of Czechoslovakia, World War II and the postwar Soviet takeover.

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In Alice Pung’s memoir of her childhood, Unpolished Gem, her young self is drawn into a conflict between her mother and grandmother, both Chinese-Cambodian refugees. The child becomes a double agent, informing each about the other, until her mother accuses her of ‘word-spreading’ and threatens suicide. The child frets over her breakfast: ‘I always spread my jam on toast all the way to the very edges – no millimetre of bread is left blank and uncovered. My word-spreading habits are similar.’

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David Suzuki is perhaps the best-known scientist living today. After developing an international reputation as a leading geneticist, he moved into science broadcasting and environmental activism. Why did he do this, and how did he become so successful? Now aged seventy, Suzuki explores these questions in his latest book, David Suzuki:The Autobiography. Suzuki’s previous auto-biographical work, now out of print, was aptly titled Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life (1986). Evolving from a collection of essays, it also charted his transformation from laboratory scientist to public educator of science and environmentalist. However, much has happened in the intervening twenty years. The new book mostly focuses on his environmental work in Canada and the Amazon, leading to the establishment of the David Suzuki Foundation in 1991, and his subsequent involvement in the Rio Earth Summit (1992) and the Kyoto Agreement on climate change (1997). In his preface, Suzuki writes that his story has been ‘created by selectively dredging up bits and pieces from the detritus of seventy years of life’. It is neither a story of the inner machinations of science nor the intrigues of a public personality in the media. Rather, Suzuki takes the position of an ‘elder’ in society, with the hope that his reflections on life may stir the reader to reconsider his or her own life.

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Justice Michael Kirby’s launching of Sir Zelman Cowen’s memoirs at the Melbourne University’s Woodward Centre in early June was a great Melbourne occasion. Two of Cowen’s successors as governor-general, Sir Ninian Stephen and Archbishop Peter Hollingworth, attended as part of a galaxy of judges, barristers, academics and a scattering of ex-politicians. The occasion was a festival of oratory, with five substantial speeches, possibly an Australian record for a book launch.

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I first met Sir Bruce Williams as a wise and wry voice in sceptical register at meetings of the Senate and its Finance Committee at the University of Sydney in the late 1990s. His service to these bodies followed a distinguished career as an academic, economist, university administrator and adviser to governments on policy formulation and implementation in higher education, science and technology. His is a public life that now extends over half a century and spans both Australia and the UK. The most prominent segment in Williams’s long and influential association with higher education in Australia is his time as vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney from 1967 to 1981, a period that he characterises as ‘discontent and disruption’: student and staff ‘revolt’, the protest movements against the Vietnam War and apartheid. It also saw the beginning to some modifications of the university’s hierarchical and gender structures ... (read more)