Biography

At a time when President Donald Trump seeks to extinguish the legal recognition of trans and gender diverse people, Bonjour, Mademoiselle! and the life of April Ashley feel unexpectedly topical. Ashley, best known in Australia for her role in Corbett v Corbett, a precedent-setting divorce case that set back the legal right of trans people for generations, is the subject of a new biography by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts.

My first experience of Carlo Felice Cillario was in March 1969, when he conducted the Elizabethan Trust Opera’s production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne. I had never seen the opera; nor had I heard of its conductor, whose triple-barrelled name was more indicative of a musical marking than something that belonged to an active musician. ‘Active’ was certainly the word: Cillario rushed into the pit and, afterwards, practically danced on to the stage, baton still in hand, to rapturous applause. In between, the actual performance was the first time I really connected to the compelling vivacity and innate drama of live opera. It helped immeasurably that the cast included the great Australian tenor Donald Smith as King Gustavus III. That night, all of it, still resounds in my mind.

Australian liberals and the Liberal Party were once thought laggards in attending to their own history in comparison with the Labor Party. Even so, Robert Menzies’ life and career had been well documented, with multiple biographies and memoirs, including Allan Martin’s masterful two-volume biography (1993-99) and Judith Brett’s influential analysis of Menzies’ ‘Forgotten People’ speech as a key to understanding the ‘public life’ (1992). More recently, liberal political history has become a cottage industry.

Picnic at Hanging Rock, the 1975 film directed by Peter Weir, has achieved iconic status in Australian cinema, while the story on which it is based has also yielded a television drama series, a ballet, plays, and a musical. Indeed, the fiftieth anniversary of the film is being marked by the Sydney Theatre Company’s revival of Tom Wright’s modern adaptation. The story enjoying this long and varied life was originally published as a mystery novel in 1967. Yet the author of that story, Joan Lindsay (1896-1984), is herself something of a mystery. Aged seventy-one at the time of her novel’s publication and scarcely known as a writer, she has received little recognition since.

Boris Johnson is of course one of the most distinctive political leaders of recent times. With his mop of unruly blond hair, plummy Etonian tones, and carefully confected air of bumbling amiability, he seems to have been on the British political scene for decades. In fact, his political career has been relatively short by comparison with many of his peers. This in turn helps explain the timing of Unleashed. As becomes clear, Johnson is in no mood for idle reminiscence or nostalgia for the top table.

Just a few years ago, retiring after sixteen years as Germany’s chancellor (2005-21), Angela Merkel was praised to the skies as a stateswoman who represented all that was admirable in a (semi-)united Europe. Now her reputation has taken a nosedive (‘Angela who?’ The Economist asked, tongue in cheek, last October). That’s an occupational hazard for politicians, and Merkel, as a seasoned professional, knew the score. Still, she deserves to be remembered, if only because in 2015 she did something that seasoned professionals very rarely do: ignoring the risks, she took an important political decision for moral reasons. That decision was to open Germany’s doors to thousands of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East – in the end almost a million – desperately trying to enter Europe via the Mediterranean.

When Ronald Reagan died in 2004, Americans of every kind, ‘in rows three to five deep, thronged Pennsylvania Avenue to catch a glimpse of this melancholy but historic funeral procession’. In a note the presidential historian Richard Norton Smith wrote to Reagan’s widow, Nancy, he assured her that ‘their grief was equalled by their gratitude for a life that had become synonymous in their eyes with the nation itself’.

We who have a colonial past may not remember, nor want to remember, that our forebears had an attitude towards the French something akin to the attitude currently being shown towards them by those thugs in the White House and the US fast-food chains who have declared that they will stop adding to global obesity with ‘french fries’ and do it instead with ‘freedom fries’.