Memoir

In 1961 a young Noeline Brown was playing in Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince (1954) at the Pocket Playhouse in Sydenham – ‘just across the Princes Highway from Tempe Tip’, as she characteristically locates it – when Vivien Leigh, on tour with the Old Vic, came to see a specially arranged Sunday evening performance. From the moment she emerged from the chauffeured limousine, Leigh was the star of the show. She was, Brown recalls, ‘wearing a gorgeous, waist-length mink jacket’, and ‘there were strands of lustrous pearls and sparkling diamonds on her delicate throat and hands’. Brown, on the other hand, ‘was in a dress my Mum had made’. That contrast, between theatrical elegance and put-upon pathos, has been the essence of Brown’s own style ever since, and the key to her success as a comedian and an actor. She hid under a large picture hat to introduce Mavis Bramston, a parody of English self-assurance, to a bemused public in 1964. At the other end of the register, her world-weary, ‘You’re not wrong, Narelle’, delivered in a way that was both funny and sad, outlived its many iterations on the televised version of The Naked Vicar Show (1977) to become part of the Australian lexicon.

Australia has become a cocktail country. Those multicoloured, sorbet-like concoctions that young women drink in twilight-lit bars with techno music for a soundtrack. Liquid lollies for the adult-children of our economic prosperity. It has not, however, become a martini country, as Frank Moorhouse might put it. No matter how many little cocktail bars spring up, often without signage, in the backstreets and alleys of our CBDs, few patrons are dedicated to drinking the prince of cocktails. The expensively shabby boys still drink beer, albeit in a glistening-necked bottle with a lemon slice between its lips. For the girls, champers; the various wines for those who don’t like the sickly sorbet liquor.

We revere Nobel laureates – and rightly. Sometimes that admiration is not repaid well, and those eminences become prey to a variant of Lord Acton’s wisdom – ‘All fame tends to corrupt’ – and consider themselves intellectual Pooh-Bahs: ‘Lord High Everything Else.’ A consequential risk of such renown is that bystanders who can see and vouch for reality are commonly unable to tell the truth to the famous.

Graham Freudenberg, who has been at the centre of federal and NSW Labor politics for more than forty years, has now written his political memoir. Elegantly presented by his publisher, A Figure of Speech details Freudenberg’s life story, from his childhood in Brisbane to his early career in journalism, a rite of passage to London, and the vicissitudes of life in politics.

David Lange’s autobiography was published on 1 August 2005. Twelve days later, he died in Auckland, at the age of sixty-three, after kidney failure and a long battle with amyloidosis, a rare disorder of plasma cells in the bone marrow, having been kept alive by a pacemaker, chemotherapy, peritoneal dialysis, and blood transfusions. He had been a diabetic for many years. When My Life appeared, press reports concentrated on isolated paragraphs and sentences, containing critical remarks about his former ministers, and about Bob Hawke. The book could have been dismissed as shrill vituperation, but it is far more than that. My Life is a touching, searching and reflective work, deeply analytical and self-critical. David showed great courage in completing an autobiography so close to death.

‘One day I will have to tell (my daughter) … that her grandmother is a bag lady.’ Josiane Behmoiras’s exquisitely crafted memoir of her mother, Dora, delivers its punchline in the opening chapter. Behmoiras’s childhood and youth were shadowed by her mother’s untreated mental illness and by their descent into chronic penury, loneliness and fear. Nonetheless, the overall effect of this work is of warmth and colour, and of a keen sense of the absurd. The pleasure taken in recapturing each vignette seems to reflect its subject’s irrepressible fighting spirit. Dora fostered her daughter’s artistic gifts, as well as her capacity for love, joy and compassion.

Melbourne woman Kate Holden’s memoir of being a heroin user and of working as a prostitute to fund her habit opens with a quote from Virgil: ‘To descend into hell is easy. But to return – what work, what a labour it is!’ The quote is at odds with the life story Holden constructs in this brave, explicit, and extremely well-written book ...

A laughing man, according to Flaubert, is stronger than a suffering one. But as Craig Sherborne’s extraordinary new memoir of childhood and youth shows, the distinction isn’t that simple. There is much to laugh at in Hoi Polloi, but this is also a book suffused with pain and suffering ... 

Henry Pollack, the founder of Mirvac, one of Australia’s largest and most successful property development companies, started life in Lodz, a booming Polish textile town. Born in 1932, he belonged to a well-to-do family and became a bookish boy. He writes about his youth with vivid openness, describing not only events but his feelings, thoughts and youthful ideals. With this memoir, written towards the end of his life, Pollack comes close to being the writer he dreamt of becoming as a boy. Memories of his childhood have a fidelity and clarity that may well be the result of a life lopped and restarted at the age of sixteen; those early years are preserved as if in a time capsule.