Biography

There is a fine tradition in Australia of two-volume prime ministerial biographies. John La Nauze on Alfred Deakin (1965), Laurie Fitzhardinge on Billy Hughes (1964, 1979), John Edwards on John Curtin (2017, 2018), Allan Martin on Robert Menzies (1993, 1999), Jenny Hocking on Gough Whitlam (2009, 2012): all are insightful and enduring accounts of significant figures who exerted deep influence on the country.

In a dark age on a burning planet, radical hope is not an easy assignment, but every decade or thereabouts, Bob Brown invites Australians to give it a crack. His Memo for a Saner World (2004) was followed by Optimism (2014), and his new release, Defiance, opens as a redux of both, with the cinematic story of the environmental campaign that changed Australia’s political contours.

Some literary biographies are best known for their gestation – or malgestation. Some authors, we might go further, should have a big sign around their neck – noli me tangere. Muriel Spark is one of them. Her voluminous archive, lovingly tended all her life, is full of booby traps. Twice she went into battle with biographers: first Derek Stanford, a former lover; then Martin Stannard, whose biography of Evelyn Waugh she had admired. 

For seven years after her 1963 burial, Sylvia Plath lay in an unmarked grave near St Thomas the Apostle Church in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. The gravestone, when it came, bore her birth and married names, Sylvia Plath Hughes, the years of her birth and death, and a line from Wu Cheng-en’s sixteenth-century novel Monkey King:Journey to the West: ‘Even amidst fierce flames, the golden lotus can be planted.’

On weekday mornings in the 1950s a teenager called Geoffrey William Finch would ride his Malvern Star through Sydney’s Rookwood cemetery on the way to his carpentry job. Cutting across fields of headstones, he talked incessantly. When, several decades later, Katia Ariel asks who he was speaking to, Finch pauses, closes his eyes and then, ‘with a boyish smile playing on his bearded face’, explains that he was ‘talking to God’.

That Elizabeth Harrower should merit not one but two biographies would have both surprised and pleased her. That the biographies would be published within months of each other, by two Sydney writers and journalists, using much the same source material, would have intrigued her, as it did me. I don’t know Helen Trinca or Susan Wyndham, or who had the idea first, or anything of the anxiety they must have felt at being pipped at the post, or of any rivalry for sources and access to people or documents, but the two books arrived on my desk together.

The subject of this fine biography was my Doktorvater or postgraduate supervisor. He hailed from York, ancient capital of England’s northern counties. So did my biological father, Wilfred Prest (1907-1985). Both won university scholarships to study history. But their family backgrounds and life trajectories were very different.

Ron Chernow is a renowned journalist and bestselling biographer, whose best-known work is probably Alexander Hamilton (2004), the main inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American musical (2015). Chernow’s latest book joins several acclaimed biographies of Mark Twain that have appeared in recent decades, including Gary Scharnhorst’s three-volume Life (2018, 2019, and 2022). The complete Autobiography of Mark Twain, also in three volumes, was published in 2010, 2013, and 2015. Twain dictated much of this to Albert Bigelow Paine, his authorised biographer and literary executor. As Chernow reflects, ‘The challenge for Paine, as for all future Twain biographers, was that Twain was peerless at bending the truth.’

In literary careers, straightforward narrative arcs are less the rule than the exception. A writer can begin with a resounding debut, only to stumble at what in the music business is called the ‘difficult second album’. Authors can change genres and audiences; fail at achieving significant sales figures; succumb to hostile reviews, or simple indifference. Miles Franklin expressed it best in her novel title My Career Goes Bung (1946).

You Are What You Make Yourself To Be is the documented personal history of one Victorian Aboriginal family. The author’s story is interspersed with researched documented facts intended to authenticate and support the narrative but at times these lengthy italicized notes work against the continuity of the story.