Memoir

For some long-forgotten and surely misplaced medical reason, I was forced as a child to take spoonfuls of vile white poison called Hypol. It may have had some sinister connection with cod-liver oil – I no longer know or care. I mention this arcane information because Robert Macklin’s memoir War Babies, is the first example know to me of Hypol’s appearance in a literary work. I don’t recall anyone else mentioning ‘the Rawleigh’s man’ from whom my mother, not liking to send this hawker away without a sale of any kind, would buy jelly crystals.

Bring back Carmen. Bring back Cheryl. Bring back Natasha. I would even have accepted a bit of Bronwyn as a relief from the relentless maleness of this year’s federal election campaign. The female politicians who were household names less than a decade ago – Carmen Lawrence, Cheryl Kemot, Natasha Stott Despoja, Bronwyn Bishop and Pauline Hanson – have been disgraced, marginalised or relegated to the backbenches. Replacements do not appear to be imminent, in part because the still-pitiful number of female parliamentarians are rarely allowed to shine. In the campaign, for instance, talented female politicians such as Julia Gillard were kept tucked away, despite the fact that what might be called women’s issues – especially childbearing and rearing – were central to the platforms of both major parties.

With biography and memoir, it seems that readers are buying a certain kind of truth –call it authenticity, the authority of fact. Yet all reading is escapism, even when we are escaping to what we consider true; even in non-fiction, we seek some of fiction’s satisfactions. This is the challenge: to find a theme and structure that will shape the story without sacrificing a sense of intransigent reality.

People often assume that actors and performers are extroverts, and that their work is a natural extension of an outgoing personality. But while, indeed, there are quite a few extroverts in the business, many who work in the performing arts are more likely to be introverts, for whom communicating with an audience is a form of expression that gives meaning to their lives.

‘Wildflowering’, a term coined by Judith Wright, describes the activity of searching for wildflowers in the bush. In letters between the poet and her friend, wildflower artist, writer and activist Kathleen McArthur (1915-2001), ‘the language of flowers’ becomes part of the mutual exchange of their friendship and epitomises the interactive and intimate relationship they maintained with landscape. Over the years, these women took the knowledge and love of their places into political campaigns to preserve the fragile ecology of an ancient coastland against the ravages of development and commercial exploitation.

What the hell is Bob Ellis? Discuss. Ellis might put it like this himself. Chances are he’s asked the question of a street window once or twice in wonderment and mock self-mockery. He’s earned it. From the back-cover blurbs down the years, one has got, by way of label, ‘l’enfant terrible of Australian culture’ (The Inessential Ellis, 1992), ‘a kind of dusty national icon’ (Goodbye Babylon, 2002) and now, in a disappointing regression to understatement, ‘a political backroomer’. We can assume, I think, that these are self-descriptions. Another, from the text of Goodbye Babylon, puts it this way:

Michael McGirr has an eye for coincidence. ‘The first bypass,’ he notes, ‘was performed on the Hume [Highway] in 1967, the year the world’s first coronary bypass was successfully performed in Cleveland. Though he does not press the point, the comparison is more than a mere curiosity. The conversion of highway to freeway - the steady accumulation of bypasses over the last forty years that has produced by accretion what is now a straight and soulless run between capitals - has also had the effect of preserving and even revitalising the towns along the way. These towns, no longer on the main drag, have to varying degrees weathered the impact of the surgery, recovering iden­tities that had once been obscured by the clogged-up road that ran right through the middle.

Who there amidst them in the distance
Like something not belonging stands

(Pushkin, Eugene Onegin)

In the wonderful way of the ‘marvellous’ and ‘ravishing’ language that was Robert Dessaix’s ‘first Amour’, the Russian for the phrase ‘not belonging’ is just one word, lishnii. Generally translated as superfluous, it gained currency through Ivan Turgenev via the title of a novella, The Diary of a Superfluous Man, which he wrote in 1850. In it, a dying thirty-year-old intellectual recalls the brief and only period of happiness in his life, the three weeks when he was blissfully in love, which ended when the knowledge was forced on him that to his beloved he was – superfluous. Though he does not cite this little known work, an examination of lishnost (the noun) is the crux of Dessaix’s study of not quite belonging.

Shooting the Moon is Louis Nowra’s second memoir, the follow-up to The Twelfth of Never (1999), which presented its author as a survivor of an intensely dysfunctional family. Nowra’s mother killed her father; his grandmother suffered from mental illness. Not surprisingly, The Twelfth of Never is a study of violence, madness, and self-alienation. It is also immensely entertaining, an odd disjunction that we often see in Nowra’s work.

For The Love of Good Food is an account of Serge Dansereau’s apprenticeship and training in Canadian hotels, of his progress to being executive chef of the Regent in Sydney and of his current status as chef-owner of the Bathers’ Pavilion on Balmoral Beach, Sydney. Very important on the way was Dansereau’s use of the Regent’s buying power to drive the growth and supply of Australian quality produce. His book is all about food, ego, kitchens and Sydney, and it is full of engrossing professional detail. I read it as if it were a novel. Remember Arthur Hailey’s big novels on dry subjects, with dull titles and tens of millions of sales? Hotel and Airport sales were not driven by plot or character or the quality of the prose; there wasn’t even much sex or shopping. What drove sales was our desire to know how things really work on the inside. We are a nosy lot.