Biography

On February 19 this year, Francis Fukuyama jumped ship. In the course of an essay in the New York Times on the failings of the American strategy to ‘democratise’ the Middle East, he declared that, ‘I have numerous affiliations with different strands of the neo-conservative movement’, but ‘neo-conservatism, both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support’. The neo-conservative project, he stated, has become self-contradictory. Though the Bush administration retains an evolutionistic scepticism about the limits of social engineering in domestic matters, it feels no such restraint in foreign policy, where its faith in the transformational uses of American power and in the exceptionalism of American virtue has overcome traditional doubts about the malleability of humanity.

However respectful its intentions, literary biography invariably takes on the character of a siege, laid by oneself against another. Every biographical subject, unwittingly or not, builds fortifications to repulse such invaders, and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was no exception. He did, however, adopt a characteristically sly defence. His castle was regularly open to the public. Inside, he would be on hand to guide visitors through its rooms, an amusing if distant squire, knowledgeably arguing the architectural merits of his own, not insubstantial, additions, and giving the punters their money’s-worth with polished tales of eccentricity, debt and alcoholism for each of the family portraits. He was both garrulous curator and living artefact in a museum of his own design.

Besides being a bookseller, publisher and literary agent, Henry Hyde Champion (1859–1929) – the subject of this fascinating biography – was also, at various stages, an army officer, a journalist, and a socialist organiser. Born in England to a wealthy family with aristocratic roots, Champion turned his back on a conventional upper-class life after witnessing the appalling poverty of London’s East End. He embarked on what was to become a lifetime of activism on behalf of the poor and the working classes. Champion was a pioneer socialist of late nineteenth-century England and in this capacity, had dealings with such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw and the union leader John Burns. He was a key participant in the London Dock Strike of 1889, which was to prove a watershed for the labour movement, and was an early promoter of the eight-hour day.

The name of Sir John Wilton would be unknown to the vast majority of the Australian public, to the defence community as a whole, and even, I suspect, to many of those now in the army. Such is the transitory nature of military prestige. David Horner’s biographical study seeks to correct this, and to explain the centrality of Wilton’s career to the development of Australian defence policy and operational deployment in the postwar period. This is more than a biography: while Wilton the man is not neglected, the emphasis is rather more on Wilton the professional, steadily climbing through the officer ranks in a series of appointments that culminated in his tenure as Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee from 1966 to 1970.

Jan Senbergs’ art is not easy to like. Sombre, brutal, austere in colour, it nevertheless represents one of the most sustained meditations on the industrial landscape in Australian art. Patrick McCaughey, well-known gallery director, academic and critic, has written about the artist and his work in a way that deliberately blurs biography, autobiography and visual critique. The result is an engaging and unusually meticulous account of the evolution of an artistic career, documenting the emergence of ‘Senbergs country’ as a force in the Australian aesthetic imagination.

In 1978 the French weekly L’Express published an interview that sent a shockwave through the French collective conscience. The subject was Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the wartime Vichy government’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs. Having escaped at the end of the war to the safe haven of Franco’s Spain, he was now an octogenarian, enjoying some prestige as the official translator of the Caudillo’s speeches. Darquier had been condemned to death in absentia by the Liberation courts, but never extradited. He was not the only Nazi collaborator to have escaped punishment, but what most profoundly perturbed the readers of L’Express was that his virulent anti-Semitism was still completely intact, as was his refusal to believe that the Shoah was anything other than a Jewish fabrication. In the late 1970s France was at the beginning of the long process of self-examination and self-remembering whereby it would seek to come to terms with one of its history’s darkest periods. For Charles de Gaulle, whose presence had dominated so much of the two decades after World War II, the Vichy government was an illegality, and its leaders traitors. After de Gaulle’s death in 1970 began the slow and painful process of acknowledgment that the experience and behaviour of the French during the Occupation was more complex than the Gaullian vision, and much more shameful.

It took twenty-five years for the first comprehensive feminist appraisal of the Chamberlain case to be published. This speaks volumes about the thrall in which Australia was held by the Chamberlain story. Adrian Howe writes: ‘It is as if the saga so overwhelmed the national psyche that it defied feminists, left-wing activists and most trained thinkers of any ilk to make sense of it.’ She does not exclude herself from this judgment. In fact, she describes her return to Lindy Chamberlain’s story and her collation of the other feminist critiques of the case as an act of expiation, making belated amends for having succumbed to the dominant media line and thus become complicit in the resulting miscarriage of justice.

When is it morally defensible to take one’s own life? Whenever, might be the first response: it is, after all, one’s own life. While the church still regards it as a grave sin, attempted suicide is not a crime, though helping someone else to commit suicide is. Yet does not a desire to end one’s life at a time of one’s own choosing have to be weighed against the pain it might cause others? Is suicide not a statement to family and friends that whatever love, care and support they have given, it was not enough?

Many older readers of ABR would remember Peter Russo – whether fondly or otherwise – for his newspaper columns (principally in the Melbourne Argus) from 1941, and for his ABC radio broadcasts, which continued until his death in 1985. As for younger readers: picture a journalist–commentator (his career defied easy description) who was as controversial in his day as any of our present ‘shock jocks’, but who actually knew what he was talking about. Leading politicians approached Russo not to curry favour with his audience but to understand matters within his areas of expertise: Asia and international affairs. Such expertise – including fluency in eight languages – made it difficult to ignore his contributions to public discourse which, as Prue Torney-Parlicki’s biography makes clear, were substantial. Until this biography (the first comprehensive study of the subject to be published), Russo risked being remembered not for what he said or did but, rather, for what others said about him.