Biography

Neville Wran (1926-2014) was a great Australian success story. His early childhood was spent in the Sydney suburb of Balmain, long before it was gentrified. He won a scholarship to study at the selective Fort Street Boys’ High School and then completed a law degree at Sydney University. Wran subsequently enjoyed a lucrative career as a Sydney lawyer, ultimately becoming a Queen’s Counsel (1968).

I first encountered Race Mathews in the early 2000s, around the time of the publication of my biography of Jim Cairns. He struck me as reserved and cerebral, but generous. As national secretary of the Australian Fabian Society, he invited me to deliver a talk about the biography at the Melbourne Trades Hall. Following Cairns’s death in late 2003, Mathews initiated a Jim Cairns Memorial Lecture as a joint endeavour between the Fabian Society and several university ALP clubs. What struck me about this was that Mathews and Cairns had been from different wings of the Labor Party, the former probably the most fervent disciple of Gough Whitlam, a philosophical and leadership rival to Cairns, and yet here he was helping to preserve the memory of Cairns. It suggested a refreshing ecumenicalism, an open-minded, enquiring spirit.

In a letter to her friend Raymond Queneau in 1946, the twenty-seven-year-old Iris Murdoch asked, ‘Can I really exploit the advantages (instead of suffering the disadvantages) of having a mind on the border of philosophy, literature and politics?’ Well known as a philosopher and a novelist, Murdoch is less likely to be thought of as a political writer, though Gary Browning claims it to be the ‘simple truth’.

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was an influential figure in the academic development of interdisciplinary studies during the early years of the twentieth century, and Hans Hönes’s excellent new biography charts the contributions and contradictions of Warburg’s life and work. Born into an immensely rich banking family in Germany, Warburg nevertheless resisted the expectations associated with his Jewish family background and, despite his grandmother’s hope that he might become a rabbi, opted to carve out for himself a career in humanities scholarship.

In her Preface to Telling Lives, editor Chris Wallace invites the reader to join a thought experiment: a group of biographer-refugees, driven by earthly global warming to reside on planet Alpha Centauri, ask themselves: ‘Did biographers play a role in the downfall of Homo sapiens on Earth?’ Were they, in other words, complicit in the culture of disinformation that contributed to global catastrophe? Writing in the ‘post-truth era’, Wallace highlights the centrality of truth in what has traditionally been termed the ‘biographical contract’.

We look to literary biography to understand how works of literature came into being and made their way in the world. But how much can we learn about the processes of artistic creativity from biography when the public self of the author almost completely effaces the private self of the writer: when we are left wondering how this person, of all people, could have created the works that bear their name?

At various times in its history, the Australian Labor Party’s strict insistence that its parliamentarians vote along party lines or face expulsion has caused angst within the party. On the one hand, the practice means that talented party members might be lost to the ALP; on the other, party solidarity is the key to passing legislation and to maintaining cohesion. One of the early architects of Labor’s strict party discipline was J.C. Watson, who was a major figure within the labour movement between 1890 and 1916.

Valerie and Yvonne Cohen were ‘artful’ in more ways than one. Both sisters were artists, and most of their friends and lovers were artists. They were ‘artistic’, seeking an unconventional life. For years they spent their winters on a tiny tropical island. And they – particularly Val – were artful dodgers.

It is easy to imagine book-buyers nodding with approval at the subtitle of this biography: ‘The making of a larrikin’. With ‘larrikin’ today applied to knockabout young men who are irreverent and mischievous but genuinely good-hearted, Bob Hawke seems a quintessential example. Yes, the myth goes, he used slipshod language now and then, and was quite a sight when he was in his cups, but generally Hawkie was a top bloke, a man who would call a spade a spade, a mate who could sup with princes and paupers but never forget who he was.

There might be a million stories in the naked city, but the early childhood of Stanley Kubrick was one of the more typical: born in 1928, in the Bronx, to upwardly mobile, artistically sophisticated Jewish parents, one generation out of the Pale. ‘I’m not Jewish but my parents were,’ he liked to joke.