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Memoir

It’s a Proustian title, or at any rate a Powellian one, that Bernard Smith has produced for this memoir of his life in the long-ago 1940s, and, yes, there on the cover is Anthony Powell’s hero, Poussin. That’s doubly appropriate because one of the more vivid figures (though also one of the more saturnine ones) in this remembrance of things past is Anthony Blunt, great scholar of Poussin’s work, master spy, eminent director of the Courtauld and critical educator of the Young Bernard.

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The facing island in Jan Bassett’s memoir is Phillip Island, where her maternal grandparents had a dairy farm and where it seems she was most emotionally at home. Summer holidays there as a child in the 1960s, in the midst of her grandmother’s extended family and surrounded by familiar tokens of past decades reaching as far back as the early 1900s, undoubtedly sparked her lifelong commitment to Australian history. The title, taken from Peter Rose’s poem ‘Balnarring Beach’ (‘The facing island, a mortal blue, / beckons, intensifies, vanishes’), could hardly be more appropriate, compressing in a few words much of the emotional intensity of Bassett’s autobiographical last journey.

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Franca by Franca Arena & Speaking for Myself Again by Cheryl Kernot

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September 2002, no. 244

If Cheryl Kernot writes another book – and if Speaking for Myself Again is anything to go by, you had better hope she doesn’t – her publishers should at the very least make sure the punctuation police do their job. It appears they didn’t even show up to the scene of the accident this time. Exclamation marks are strewn throughout the work. Each time Kernot wants to bitterly labour a point, up pops an exclamation mark, as if she’s hitting the keyboard and cursing, ‘Take that you bastards’. Thus we get: ‘And some people can be so rude!’; ‘Women have sustained me!’; ‘I could write a whole book on my experiences with the media. Perhaps I will!’; and ‘Opinion rules!’ In a teen diary, that’s fine, but not in a book by a former senior federal parliamentarian.

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Colin McPhedran, the son of a Burmese mother and a Scottish oil company executive father, was living a comfortable middle-class colonial life in Central Burma with his mother, sister and two brothers when the Japanese invaded the country in 1941. He was eleven years old. The invasion spread terror throughout the population, which feared the notorious savagery of the Japanese army. The European and mixed races felt particularly threatened, and Colin’s mother made the fatal decision to flee their comfortable villa and escape to India. The children’s mixed parentage concerned her; she resolved to undertake the journey with her three younger children. She was especially anxious about her fifteen-year-old daughter whose youthful European beauty would, she thought, make her a special target for sexual abuse. Colin’s father did not play any part in this disastrous decision, having escaped to Calcutta when Rangoon fell to the Japanese.

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At seven o’clock on the morning of 2 February 1999, I was due at the Memorial Hospital in North Adelaide to relieve my older sister at my mother’s bedside, where she had been all night. The alarm was set for six. At five-thirty, I was woken by the phone; my mother had died, as we had known for a couple of days that she would, from complications following a cerebral haemorrhage.

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It’s the silence. Even by the river, my ears are straining. It’s the silence. At this moment it’s a warmish humid silence with the grass outside lushly mesmerising the eye.

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First, a disclaimer. Since 1975 I’ve had a sneaking affection for Jim Cairns. At that time, I was flirting with various environmental causes – as you do at the age of nine. I circulated some petitions at my primary school calling for the preservation of the Tasmanian south-west from its concrete-crazed Hydroelectricity Commission. I forwarded these to a string of political power-brokers, identified rather shrewdly by their appearances on the ABC news.

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Clive James is a fussy A-grade mechanic of the English language, always on the lookout for grammatical misfires or sloppiness of phrasing that escape detection on publishing production lines. Us/we crashtest dummies of the written word, who drive by computer, with squiggly red and green underlinings ...

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A Wealth of Women by Alison Alexander & Eating the Underworld by Doris Brett

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November 2001, no. 236
Shirley Walker’s autobiography, Roundabout at Bangalow, is a remarkably rich book and a significant addition to the distinctive group of life stories that continue to fascinate Australian readers. It seems that at least once a year a striking memoir appears that strangely alters our relationship with the national past. These books are more than books. They are transforming cultural events. Inserting their stories into the generalised narratives of historians, autobiographies such as Sally Morgan’s My Place, A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life, Bernard Smith’s The Boy Adeodatus, or Andrew Riemer’s Inside Outside appropriate the past in new and compelling forms. To use Raymond Williams’s phrase, they make the past ‘knowable’, and they do so with an immediacy available to no other form of writing. For this reason alone, they inevitably win a large popular readership. ... (read more)

How seriously do we take an author who, in her mid-forties, writes about ‘street cred’, calls a department store ‘humungous’ and, discussing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, asks: ‘Bourgeois decadence? Hel-lo.’? Linda Jaivin studied one of the world’s most difficult languages in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China, and, as a scholar and journalist, published perceptive analyses of China. Then she turned to fiction and biography.

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