Biography

Hamish McDonald has for more than thirty years written about foreign affairs and defence in Asia for publications such as the Sydney Morning Herald, Far Eastern Economic Review, and, more recently, as the world editor for the Saturday Paper. His writings on Indonesian politics and Australian complacency over the Balibo controversy have been more likely to put him in the firing line than on the bestseller’s list in Jakarta’s bookshops, but his tenacity and journalistic skills place him among Australia’s finest. In a departure from his usual subject matter, McDonald has shone a spotlight on Japan’s historical past in the form of a memoir. A War of Words owes its origins to a chance encounter while he was on assignment in Tokyo when the Japanese economic bubble was at its peak. After a fellow journalist gave him a box of papers that included photographs and an anecdotal manuscript of the life and adventures of one Charles Bavier, McDonald spent the better part of three decades piecing together the details of Bavier’s colourful life. Besides being an excellent tale, The War of Words represents an enlightening chapter in the history of both Japan and its ever-changing relationship with Australia.

When I was commissioned to write this review, I assumed that this book would be a conventional political biography. I looked forward to reading about Dunstan’s career as premier of South Australia (1967–68 and 1970–79), as his record of achievements showed that our states and territories have the potential to be powerful players in social and cultural reform. However, the focus of Dino Hodge’s intriguing book is Dunstan the man, with an emphasis on the way in which his personal beliefs and ambiguous sexuality influenced his political life and legacy. Don Dunstan, Intimacy and Liberty makes a solid contribution to our understanding of Dunstan and the blurring of his private and public life, fanned partly by the media, but also, sometimes inadvertently, by the man himself.

He painted Kate Moss naked. The Kray twins threatened to cut off his painting hand over bad gambling debts. He was officially recognised as father to fourteen children by numerous partners, but the unofficial tally could be as high as forty (three were born to different mothers within a few months). He is Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud, born in Berlin on 8 December 1922. All of his gambling disasters came from using his ‘lucky’ birth number, eight. Fittingly, he died at the age of eighty-eight in 2011.

I was a part-time pilgrim on John Eliot Gardiner’s extraordinary year-long journey, from Christmas 1999 to New Year’s Eve 2000, when he took Johann Sebastian Bach on the road. Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, with his fifteen-member Monteverdi Choir and the twenty instrumentalists of the English Baroque Soloists, performed in Britain, Europe, and the United States all of JSB’s 198 surviving sacred cantatas on the liturgically appropriate days for which they were composed.

Never heard of him – that’s the most common reaction when I mention Gerry Glaskin. Some Western Australians remember him, as they should: he was born and spent his last years there. Yet in between he was a bestselling novelist in the 1950s and 1960s. He was translated into French, German, Swedish, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Danish, and Norwegian. Doubleday commissioned him to write a book about northern Australia. He was also a prolific short story writer, with two published collections. All of this is documented in the appendix and reference list of Dare Me! So how and why has Glaskin been erased from the Australian literary consciousness?

On the rear jacket of this fascinating and important book is a picture of Winston Churchill at his desk at Chartwell, his house in Kent, just a few months before the outbreak of World War II. Apparently caught in the moment of literary creation, cigar in mouth and concentrating on his papers, the photo credit – to a Picture Post photographer – leads to the obvious suspicion that this was actually a staged shot. For Churchill, his country home was not merely a place of repose but a writing factory, the output of which would earn him the large sums of money necessary for its upkeep. At the same time, his image as a man of letters served to advertise the product as well as to suggest the existence of a non-political ‘hinterland’ of the kind appropriate to a statesman of fertile brain and broad views.

Twelve years after Swift’s death, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu showed a visitor to her house in Venice a commode lined with books by Pope, Bolingbroke, and Swift. This, she explained, ‘gave her the satisfaction of shitting on them every day’. We still don’t know exactly what it was that caused her to fall out with Swift, Pope, and their friends in the 1720s, but there’s no questioning the enduring passions involved. The clichéd ‘men in powdered wigs’ image of the eighteenth century tells only a small part of the story. The violent intensities of the satirists are really much more interesting. We read Swift still for the visionary moments of humour, indignation, disgust, and existential terror sometimes hard to distinguish from tragedy; oh, and also for the deadly poise of his prose. Wortley Montagu was right thus to line her commode. Satire in her day was a visceral business.

I have never met a pope, but I have sometimes felt their shadow. In 1981, at the tender age of nineteen, I was a novice in the Jesuit order. We lived in a vast establishment in Sydney: the community included naïve youngsters such as myself, wily old retired Jesuits, as well as representatives of every age group in between. It was quite a fun place to live. One day, we were all summoned to a community meeting, a rare event for such a large group. The rector solemnly read out a special letter which announced the fact that Pope John Paul II had sacked the superior general of the Jesuits, the much-loved and saintly Father Pedro Arrupe. It was clear to me that even those Jesuits who had seen everything had never seen anything like this. The mood was sombre.