Biography

Unlike Hawthorne: A Life (2003), Brenda Wineapple’s penetrating and engaging biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s Habitations, is a work of literary criticism informed by a narrow but fascinating range of biographical details and sources. These details support Robert Milder’s construction of an author ‘divided’ by contradictory drives that remained unresolved in Hawthorne’s fiction and life.\

The career of Marjorie Lawrence is one of the great might-have-beens of operatic history. The saga of a young Australian woman who, in an astonishingly short period of time, became a leading singer first at the Paris Opéra and then at New York’s Metropolitan and who was poised to become the Met’s prima donna assoluta in the Wagnerian repertory when disaster struck, sounds like a script for the Hollywood weepie it eventually became. Although her career was spectacular and her talent indisputable – the renowned British critic Neville Cardus described her as ‘the finest musical artist ever to be born in Australia’ – her name seems to have faded from view. Now, in his comprehensive biography, Richard Davis redresses the balance.

My mother-in-law often spoke fondly of the Blitz. I had visions of her as a plucky young woman cycling down the bombed streets of London, going to work as a secretary to the stars of show business, enjoying ridiculously cheap hotel meals, and in the evenings going out on the town with an exciting boyfriend – perhaps a Turkish admiral, perhaps the man she later married. It always sounded as if she was having the time of her life. I was puzzled by this, because I knew her parents had both been killed in a bombing raid, though she didn’t talk about that. Was she unconsciously putting a positive spin on a time that must have been distressing and terrifying?

The title of Ray Monk’s biography of Robert Oppenheimer plays on several ‘centres’: the entrancing interior of the atom wherein physicists found the secrets of nuclear energy; the institutional centres of American intellectual life that served as Oppenheimer’s professional milieu; the seductive hubs of political power to which he felt a fatal attraction; his own inner life, full of strange shadows and paradoxes.

My Swedish neighbour is rebuilding. From my back garden I overheard her Australian builder loudly introducing her to a tradesman named Hans. ‘Now, we’re for it,’ he chortled. ‘It’ll be talk, talk, talk, no stopping you now.’ As I hung out the washing, I reflected that the Australian nervousness around ‘Continentals’ that Madeleine St John details so deliciously in her novel about 1950s Sydney, The Women in Black (1993), still resonates in the twenty-first century. 

It would be a pity if this well-researched and nuanced biography of the greatest English composer of the second half of the twentieth century became known for the rather sensational medical revelations contained in the last chapter. Certainly, they gave me pause before I began reading the book.

However much we may locate the joy of travel in the sudden revelations of a new experience, one of its most enduring pleasures lies in collecting for later. For the collector–traveller, journeys abroad offer an escape from the familiar and, as importantly, a chance to assemble a different kind of education from the one we receive at home, a living textbook shaped by first-hand encounters and the possibility and urgency of adventure.

In 1985, at La Trobe University, a sociology undergraduate is in a tutorial with his supervisor. He has chosen to write 6000 words on the role of art and the artist in capitalist societies and his sixty-four-year-old tutor has, rather surprisingly, encouraged him.

In 1819, when Lachlan Macquarie was shaping New South Wales, Stamford Raffles established the settlement of Singapore, which was to fulfil his dream of becoming a great eastern ‘Emporium’ and which remains a key trade hub in the Asia Pacific region today. But that is about all most people know about the man who gave his name to so many institutions in the modern city-state, including the eponymous hotel where travellers go to drink Gin Slings.

Arthur Augustus Calwell is hardly the most celebrated or mythologised politician in the history of the Australian Labor Party. His achievements as the first minister for immigration have been overshadowed by his very public advocacy of the White Australia policy ...