Memoir

Strange Museums is a strange book, a kind of fugue whose first theme is introduced by the poem ‘Tortures’ by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. It is a lament of evasion, uncertainty, the reservoir of pain that is the body and the inability to escape. It is enlarged da capo with the author’s discovery of a plaque commemorating the day in 1942 when Jews were rounded up and shot in the town of Piatrk w Trybunalski.

It is the tale of a most unusual journey made through Poland by performance artist and writer Fiona McGregor from May to July 2006. With A A Wojak, her performance partner and former lover, the journey is focused around an international action art festival where the two women, as senVoodoo, perform their confronting work, Arterial. It involves fear and shock, with the pain and risk endured by the artists calculated to take them to the edge. Even in description, Arterial draws a gasp.

Mother Land is a vibrant and charming yet sombre and brutal account of Dmetri Kakmi’s childhood on the Aegean island of Tenedos, now known by its Turkish name of Bozcaada. The book opens with the adult ‘Dimitri’, accompanied by his Turkish friend Sinan, standing on the mainland and surveying through binoculars places he has not seen for thirty years: ‘Three islets sit low on the water ... As a boy, I used to be captivated by their aloofness and solitude. When I’d had enough of people, I yearned to build a hut and live on one of them, alone, separate and untouched by a world that, even at that age, seemed capricious and delinquent beyond reckoning.’

‘Let’s get this death thing straight’, declares Julian Barnes in his recently published memoir-cum-meditation Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He sets out to confront mortality, the titular ‘nothing’, but manages only to peer at it through parted fingers. He takes short peeks, which calls to mind the title of his death-haunted novel Staring at the Sun (1986).

For Labor ‘true believers’, the night of 24 November 2007 was one to cherish. In the north, Brough the Rough was despatched and a host of lesser figures swept away, pork barrels and all; in the very heartland of the Howard battlers, the Wicked Witch of Penrith and her minions perished in a jihad of their own devising; above all, in his fortress of Bennelong, the Vampire King was slain by the Good Witch of the ABC. What a night! At the beginning of Peter Costello’s memoir is the challenge: ‘How did it come to this? How did a government that had created such an Age of Prosperity, such a proud and prosperous country, now find itself in the wilderness?’

Who is, or rather who was, André Gide? I ask this because a distinguished editor warned me, on hearing that I was about to review Robert Dessaix’s enticing new book, that nowadays nobody would remember who Gide was. Ah, the years, the years! It was another story in the time of my youth ...

Jim Sharman and Rex Cramphorn (a future artistic director of Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre) first met at NIDA in the 1960s, and Sharman returned there as a tutor in the 1970s. He was then a ‘radical populist’, while Cramphorn was scholarly, mad about Racine and Corneille. But they agreed that theatre was a vocation, and shared a ‘crypto-mystical’ interest in the slippery relationship between reality and illusion. They would set up a short-lived theatre company at the Paris Theatre (later demolished), and mount two premières of Australian plays, Dorothy Hewett’s Pandora’s Cross (1978) and Louis Nowra’s Visions (1979).

There has been no escaping Graeme Blundell lately. There was Catharine Lumby’s astute reappraisal of his image-making Alvin Purple for the Currency Australian Classics series; and, as I write, the advertisements for the new local documentary Not Quite Hollywood feature a bare-chested Blundell in a pair of unforgivable 1970s flares. Now, here is his own account of how he got to be that way – and a good deal more.

Blundell was branded for years by the Alvin persona, that of the improbable sex symbol, irresistibly attractive to women who are turned on by this short, faintly nerdish suburban lad with a curious magnetism invisible to the naked eye. And naked, of course, was the key word. There is a good more to Blundell than the Alvin image, but let’s get it out of the way first.

At Thy Call is Clive Holt’s account of his experience as a soldier in the Angolan War. The author aims to convey the enormity of this event and the impact it has had upon the servicemen involved. In doing this, he provides an alternative to those writings that have addressed only ‘the tactical components of the war’.

The book opens in the late 1980s, when the teenage Holt entered the conflict in Angola as part of South Africa’s compulsory two-year military conscription for white males. Holt describes the carnage and fear that he and his fellow servicemen frequently experienced. The author also discusses his struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the war’s aftermath.

When journalist Helene Chung grew up in Hobart in the 1960s, there were fewer than one hundred Chinese living there, and her complicated family seemed to include almost all of them. Her great-grandfather came to Australia for gold, but succumbed to opium. He was rescued by her grandfather, who worked in the Tasmanian tin mines, founding a small dynasty as brothers and cousins arrived with their multiple wives, and married more in Australia. It sounds like a familiar story, but as it unfolds the author’s intelligence and determination create an idiosyncratic portrait of what first- and second-generation migrants endure, and how they triumph.

Books may furnish a room but they also furnish the mind. As somebody once said, ‘A man is known by the company his mind keeps’. One of my first moves on visiting a home is to check out the bookshelves, to discover something about the owner’s mind. Bob Carr, New South Wales’s longest-serving premier, has conveniently outlined his reading life in this opinionated, sometimes infuriating but always compelling account, which allows us to read his mind without physically visiting his library.