Biography

Richard Freadman’s first work intended for a non-academic readership is, in his own words, ‘the Son’s Book of the Father’ and thus belongs to a venerable genre. Freadman, whose contribution to our understanding of autobiography has been acute, is well qualified to draw on this tradition in portraying his own father and analysing their relationship. Along the way, he discusses memoirists such as John Stuart Mill, Edmund Gosse and Henry James.

Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself can’t have been an easy book to write. Few family memoirs are, if their authors are honest about their families and themselves. Freadman knows that autobiography is a ‘chancy recollective escapade’. ‘My father,’ he writes, ‘was an extremely, an impressively complex man, and there is no single “key” to a life like this.’

I must confess I picked up this celebrity autobiography, complete with embossed cover and a price suggestive of a huge print run, without anticipation. I could not have been more wrong. Mike Munro’s excoriating and frank account of his abused childhood and early years in journalism chronicles a survival story that is Dickensian in scope and impact. Like Dickens, Munro managed to overcome poverty, cruelty and emotional deprivation to reach the top of a demanding profession. Remarkably, considering his scarifying experiences as a child and adolescent, he fell in love and married a partner with whom he has created the kind of loving family life that he never knew as a child. But I am jumping ahead.

Rupert Murdoch certainly attracts a good class of biographer. There was George Munster, who contributed so much to Australian politics and culture by helping to establish and edit Nation, and William Shawcross, one of Britain’s most prominent journalists. There were other biographies, too, before the efforts of Bruce Page ...

In the Australian world of HIV/AIDS, David Menadue is something of a legend. He tested positive to HIV in 1984, and first became ill with AIDS in 1989. This makes Menadue one of the longest-term survivors of an AIDS-defining illness in Victoria. As his doctors note, and as he reaffirms, not without a hint of justifiable pride, ‘this is a remarkable record … my survival is exceptional’. Equally exceptional is Menadue’s optimism. ‘I have always been an optimist,’ he writes, ‘and even in my darkest days with AIDS, I don’t think I ever gave up hope.’ This is how Menadue accounts for his longevity – a mix of optimism, hope and good fortune. The reader might also add courage.

Not since Henry Parkes has New South Wales had such a literary-minded premier as Bob Carr. Parkes published his own poems and wrote two earnest volumes of autobiography. Carr, so far, has tried his hand at a novel, a memoir and a diary, as well as writing lots of occasional pieces. Carr, like Parkes, was a journalist before becoming a professional politician. Parkes, too, dragged himself from humble beginnings to a position where he could use official letterhead to arrange meetings with those he admired. Carr has sought out writers such as Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal to autograph his copies of their books and to join him at dinner. Once established, Parkes’s main aim was to stay in power. It was his only source of income, so his manipulation of factions, policies and the electorate all focused on that end. Graham Freudenberg has said of Carr: ‘Labor politics is central to Bob’s identity … if you took the politics away from Bob there would be nothing much left.’ But unlike Carr, Parkes did not have the option of moving to federal politics (he died before 1901). After Federation, NSW politics was stripped of talent as its leaders, including Edmund Barton, William Lyne and George Reid, made the move. Reid, a long-serving and highly effective NSW premier, is one of only two state premiers ever to have succeeded in becoming prime minister, the other being Joe Lyons.

In 1519 the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés marched into Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), heart of the Aztec Empire. Thus began the often tragic history of European colonialism in the Americas. Anna Lanyon’s previous book, Malinche’s Conquest (1999), retraced and recovered the extraordinary life of Cortés’s translator and lover, the native American woman Malinche. The present book does the same for their child, Martín Cortés.

Not one word is wasted in Sir Nicholas Shehadie’s memoir, A Life Worth Living. Almost all the words are. This book is a triumph of lack of style over lack of substance. It’s a pity to attach such a proud word as ‘book’ to a publication like this, as it is to attach ‘music’ to two-fingered renditions of Chopsticks. Shehadie is no writer, nor does he pretend to be, which is a shame. A little pretence might have tricked up the work from being a tedious CV to a worthy member of Australia’s naïve school of sports memoirs, the current champion of which is Dawn Fraser’s energetic Dawn: One Hell of a Life (2001), with its patches of vivid, detailed recollection and clean, functional prose.

From 1768 until 1779–80, in a series of remarkable voyages of circumnavigation, Captain James Cook ‘fixed the bounds of the habitable earth, as well as those of the navigable ocean, in the southern hemisphere’. During these voyages, Cook sailed further, and further out of sight of land, than anyone had previously done. He discovered – or rediscovered – numerous islands. He demonstrated how the new ‘time keeper’ (chronometer) might be used to determine longitude much more accurately than ever before. He showed how scurvy might be controlled. He encountered and left detailed descriptions of peoples about whom Europeans had little or no knowledge. The scientists who sailed with him made very extensive collections of birds, animals, fish and plants, and obtained a wealth of information about the atmosphere and the oceans, all of which contributed significantly to the emergent modern scientific disciplines. In short, as one of his companions observed after his death, ‘no one knew the value of a fleeting moment better and no one used it so scrupulously as [Cook]. In the same period of time no one has ever extended the bounds of our knowledge to such a degree.’

Assuming the Chair of a business regulatory authority might not be thought of as an ideal path to media stardom, but Allan Fels showed otherwise. Fels is easily Australia’s best-known cartel buster and the scourge of price-fixing business and anti-competitive behaviour generally. For years he was regularly on the nightly news. In a savage sea of rapacious price-gougers, Fels was the consumer’s friend.