Memoir

For a man who was supposed to have a shot memory, Alan Bond has a remarkable power of recall. In the mid­1990s, facing fraud charges concerning his dealings in Manet’s painting La Promenade, he – or rather, his barristers – successfully argued in court that a series of minor strokes had left him with brain damage and a memory so defective he couldn’t possibly be expected to answer prosecution questions. Those Australians who reckoned all along that he faked the forgetfulness, the shuffling gait, and the vacant stare at the television cameras outside court will doubtless be confirmed in their view that he’s a shameless liar.

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.

Australian writer Peter Robb has once again written a whole, complex, foreign society into our comprehension. This time it is Brazil, its myriad worlds of experience, its cruelly stolid immobility and exhilarating changefulness, its very incoherence, somehow made accessible to our understanding. In 1996 Robb’s Midnight in Sicily was published to international acclaim. He had set himself the task like the one the mythical, doomed Cola Pesce had been commanded to achieve: to dive into the sea of the past; ‘to explore things once half glimpsed and half imagined’; and to discover ‘what was holding up Sicily’. And he succeeded magnificently.

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.

There were seven of them, as in a folk tale. The family was too poor to put shoes on their feet. They lived in a village called New. Hard though life was, they knew it would be worse without Kindly Leader, who was carrying the land into prosperity and joy. At present, however, the seven sons had little to eat.

The heart of this book is an account of one year in the life of its author. In 1963, at the age of fifteen, Robert Hillman left his hometown of Eildon, in Victoria, and took a position as a junior in the ladies’ shoe department of the Myer Emporium in Melbourne. He didn’t last long. Before he knew it, he had booked a passage on a ship to Ceylon. He had a dream, not a plan. The dream was of a soft landing on an idyllic island of perfect women who would tend to his every need and desire. It was a dream of Eden, of a world before the Flood. In this case, the image is apposite. In 1954 Eildon had been submerged by the waters of a new dam. This project had brought Americans and money to the town; once they departed, the new Eildon was a shiny but emotionally threadbare place. The world after the flood was a punishing place for young Robert. He wanted to return to paradise.

Zoltan Torey’s Out of Darkness begins dramatically in Sydney. On a winter’s night in 1951, Torey, a refugee from Hungary studying dentistry, is on night shift at the battery factory in which he works to support his studies. When he moves a drum of acid, the plug blows off, ‘sending a massive jet of corrosive liquid at my face’. The acid eats into Torey’s eyes, blinding him for life. In addition, he swallows some acid, damaging his vocal cords. Torey describes this event twice: the second time, he emphasises how the event was experienced. ‘The last thing I saw with complete clarity was a glint of light in the flood of acid that was to engulf my face … It was a nano-second of sparkle, framed by the black circle of the drumface, less than a foot away.’ As this suggests, Torey’s prose has moments of extraordinary power.

Nancy Phelan’s Writing Round the Edges is a stylish and beautifully written memoir by one of Australia’s best-known and most prolific writers. Besides previous autobiographical works, Phelan has published four novels, a number of travel books, biographies of Charles Mackerras and Louise Mack (her aunt), as well as, collaboratively, books on yoga and Russian cooking. Winner of the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Award in 1988, she has also been shortlisted for a number of national prizes, including the Miles Franklin Award.

This memoir is selective in that its three sections – ‘Seafaring Days’, ‘With the Tide’ and ‘The Gatehouse’ – move in and out of the time continuum, omitting blocks of experience such as Phelan’s life in England during World War II and her work for the South Pacific Commission. These were covered in earlier writings. Passages crammed with anecdotes are interspersed with whole chapters devoted to particular people such as Jill Neville and Dorothy Hewett (to whom the book is dedicated), and the narratives often overlap. There is a moving chapter on the Russian funeral of her friend Paul and a number of lyrical chapters on the changing aspects of deeply loved places: Sydney Harbour and the Blue Mountains. For me, the elegant descriptions of Australian scenery, and especially its birdlife, are highlights of the book.

In October 2001, as a member of a group called Huon, I set out on my fourth US tour drumming in an ‘indie’ rock band: a low-key, non-profit cross-nation trek performing shows in colleges, small bars, even a few suburban basements. It was an extraordinary time to travel across the States, particularly since much of it was spent in a hire car with only AM radio for entertainment. AM radio in the US is riddled with amphetamined shock-jocks outdoing each other in ways to vituperate the pernicious liberal élites. Apparently, these élites had just destroyed some skyscrapers in New York. More poignant was the way Osama bin Laden had so quickly become a player with the usual pumpkins and skeletons in Halloween festivities, his name inscribed in white gothic lettering on black cardboard coffins on suburban front lawns with an express wish that he ‘never rest in peace’.