Biography

The smallest, dullest link in the fateful chain binding John F. Kennedy and his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is that both men were big fans of the fictional spy James Bond. In the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, when investigators searched the tiny boarding room in Dallas that Oswald rented for $8 per week, they found the four Bond books that citizen Oswald had assiduously borrowed from a local library.

One of these was From Russia with Love, Ian Fleming’s novel from 1957, which has at its heart the cat-and-mouse relationship between Bond and the crack SMERSH assassin Donovan Grant, who is tasked and determined to take out Bond, and with him the agency he represents.

The death of Gabrielle Carey earlier this year was a cruel loss for the Australian literary world, especially its Joyce community. I first met Gabrielle shortly after moving to Sydney from London in 2010. She invited me to her annual Bloomsday celebration, which took place in a Glebe pub. I was new in town and delighted to join the readings and revelry. I suspected, rightly, that my Dublin accent would glean me some credibility, if nothing else did.

The story of the extended encounter between Eora Aboriginal man Bennelong and Arthur Phillip, first governor of the British colony at Sydney, has often been told as both emblematic and predictive of the history of British possession of Australia, and of Aboriginal dispossession. Historians such as Grace Karskens and Keith Vincent Smith have peeled back the layers of this narrative to find ways of telling more complex, contextualised, and open-ended stories. Fullagar reaches a new stage in this journey, and the journey of Australian history more generally. She offers a fresh perspective on Bennelong and Phillip, on the nature of their exchange and the broader currents in which they swam.

In Michael Wolff’s telling, the final stretch of Rupert Murdoch’s seventy-year media career plays out like a ghost story. When, in 2016, Rupert’s sons, Lachlan and James, vanquished Roger Ailes – disgraced architect of Fox News – in a rare moment of fraternal unity, the money-printing reactionary machine Ailes had built for their father kept on mutating and metastasising, in ways that would haunt the company and the Murdoch family. Fresh from writing a blockbuster trilogy documenting the Trump presidency, in The Fall Wolff braves the ‘nest of vipers’ that is the late-stage Fox News empire with a deep contact list and a strong stomach. Gone is the rare access to Rupert himself that informed The Man Who Owns The News (2008), but, fortunately for Wolff and his readers, the largely unnamed vipers of The Fall are a chatty bunch.

Nick Drake’s ‘Fruit Tree’, one of his best-known songs, addresses the idea that even if an artist is ignored in their lifetime, their legacy can be secured, and their work imortalised, with an early death. The song, as we learn from Richard Morton Jack’s exhaustive biography of the English singer-songwriter, was partly inspired by the precocious English boy poet Thomas Chatterton, who committed suicide at the age of seventeen, in 1770.

Near the end of this biography of Frank Moorhouse, author Catharine Lumby tells a story that will strike retrospective fear into the heart of any male reader who has ever climbed a tree. Watching an outdoor ceremony in which a cohort of Cub Scouts was being initiated into the Boy Scout troop to which he belonged himself, and having climbed a tree to get a better view, the young Moorhouse ‘slipped, and he slid a couple of metres down the trunk of the tree with his legs wrapped around it. He came to rest on a jagged branch, his crotch caught in the fork.’

Deborah Fitzgerald’s biography, Her Sunburnt Country: The extraordinary literary life of Dorothea Mackellar, struggles to convince readers of the validity of both those adjectives. Mackellar’s life was not especially literary: she did not mix in literary circles, and had no need to write for a living, although as a young woman she published many poems in journals. Nor was it an extraordinary life, except in the sense that it was extremely privileged by her family’s wealth and social standing. It was an unusual life for a woman of her time and place, in that she did not marry; but nor did she live independently of her family until after her parents’ deaths. By then she was in her forties and had effectively stopped publishing verse.

Here we are again, luck ringing over the land. Ryan Cropp’s new examination of the life and work of Donald Horne (1921–2005) comes out as we resume unpicking the gordian knot of what exactly is Australia. As Cropp observes, it has become impossible to describe this nation without the word luck, as if a continent rolls dice. It is the language of gamblers, of the complacent. It wasn’t introduced by Horne – any survey of the country’s newspapers will find Australia panegyrised or dismissed for riding its luck, but with the publication of The Lucky Country in 1964 Horne caught a truth in a sentence: ‘Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck.’ It was Horne’s personal stroke of luck, changing him as it changed his country. In later years, when Horne became one of those people who ran the place, had Donald joined the second-raters, sharing the spoils of chance? 

Journalist Peter Rees’s biography of Tim Fischer was originally published by Allen & Unwin in 2001 with the title The Boy from Boree Creek. Reviewing the volume in this magazine, fellow journalist Shaun Carney had many kind words for Fischer, but said that the book was ‘either a lesson in the wonders of our democracy or a cautionary tale demonstrating the mediocrity of our public figures’ (ABR, June 2001). The subject was a ‘decent, determined, and hardworking person’, Carney wrote, but one who left the National Party in ‘a seemingly permanent existential crisis’.

In the 1960s, as Egypt built the second Aswan Dam, the monuments of ancient Nubia, including the colossi at Abu Simbel, risked vanishing beneath a lake. Backed by UNESCO, an international coalition of archaeologists, celebrities, politicians, and engineers succeeded in moving them. Whole temples were cut off their rock bases and lifted with hydraulics, or removed in segments from cliff-faces and sinking islands, for reassembly on higher ground. The struggles involved, American author Lynne Olson’s book Empress of the Nile makes clear, were fiendish. The engineering problems were considered impractical, the politics foolhardy. For the sake of flood regulation and hydroelectricity, ancient buildings seemed an acceptable loss. Rousing the political will to save them took scholarship, conviction, charm, and sheer nerve. In short, it took French Egyptologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt.