Memoir

We expect memoirs to be true – it is one of the main reasons we read them – but we have also grown accustomed over the years to the idea that, while the memoir may be true in spirit, events may not have happened exactly as described. Indeed, it is not unusual for the memoirist to include some prefatory remarks to that effect. Such caveats seem fair; we have come to see them as no more than acknowledgments of the way things are.

Eva Marks was nine years old and living in Vienna when Kristallnacht forced her family to leave Austria. Although her parents separated early, there was no shortage of money during her first nine years. Her mother ran a successful business manufacturing exquisite accessories for fashionable women, which involved occasional travel. At these times, Eva was left in the care of her grandmother and her two aunts, who were as independent and strong-willed as her mother. An only child, only niece and only grandchild, she was greatly indulged, although conscious that she lacked siblings and happy parents.

When Australians working in diplomatic posts share anecdotes, the best usually come from the consuls. They recount travellers’ tales of love and loss, dissipation and disaster, adventure and misadventure from Australians perpetually on the move – at least until the pandemic. It’s the consuls’ job to help those who are injured, robbed, kidnapped, arrested, or otherwise distressed abroad.

As chance would have it, this review was written following the retirement, aged forty-one, of Roger Federer from top-tier competitive tennis. Federer’s decision might be regarded as tricky for Geoff Dyer, since his latest work of essayistic autofiction leans heavily on the notion that while Federer, one of the giants of the sport, is forever about to retire, he never actually does.

The Tasmanian childhood recounted by Heather Rose sounds idyllic, to the point of being suspect, a too-perfect vision of wholesome family life. ‘We do not own a television. Books and games, music and friends, the radio and the outdoors are our entertainment,’ she writes. In this paradise of neighbourly trust, ‘no-one locks their doors. We are welcome in everyone’s houses.’ Rose remembers her mother as a domestic goddess: ‘Along with a career, four children and a husband, she bakes and cooks, sews, preserves, sings, embroiders, gardens, arranges flowers, decorates cakes, and makes kayaks and pottery’, while also contriving to be ‘slender, elegant’, and beautiful. At this point, you might wonder if the title – Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here – is not, as you first assumed, meant to be ironic. But how long can this flawless, nostalgic reverie be sustained?

One of the puzzles of Australia’s diplomatic service is the comparative lack of informative memoirs by senior diplomats. Of the sixteen heads of Foreign Affairs mentioned in this book, only three apart from Richard Woolcott – Alan Watt, Alan Renouf, and Peter Henderson – have written memoirs (although John Burton wrote much about international conflict management, and Stuart Harris – more an academic than a public servant – has written about many international issues, especially economic ones). Some senior figures have contributed columns and articles, but many other senior and respected ambassadors have written nothing. Perhaps this is one reason for the lack of a profound appreciation of international affairs in Australia, which Woolcott so deplores. This book, however, is a substantial contribution to the literature, situated firmly in the realist tradition, and is probably the best memoir to date from a former Australian diplomat.

According to Andrew O’Hagan, writing in a recent London Review of Books: ‘If you want to be somebody nowadays, you’d better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can’t prove they’ve been nobody all along.’ The journey from Nobody-hood to Somebody-hood is central to June Dally-Watkins’s recent autobiography. Indeed, O’Hagan’s pithy insight could almost have been the Sydney socialite and queen of etiquette’s mantra.

On the night of 13 September 1993, flight lieutenants Jeremy McNess and Mark Cairns-Cowan were killed when their F-111 crashed at Guyra, in northern NSW. Written by Jeremy’s mother, The Thirteenth Night dwells on the complex fatality of that night, which permanently changed several life stories in an instant. For his mother, who had coped with his exceptionally difficult childhood, winning through in his early teens to a remarkably close relationship, Jeremy’s death was and remains a dark frontier. Beyond lay a strange and cold country. Totally disoriented at first by devastating grief, she found the courage and stamina to pursue the true story of the accident’s cause for five years in the face of institutional defensiveness and media ignorance. This book began as a story for the family, but it is an important book for other readers on several counts.

What could compel a woman to murder a complete stranger? This is the obvious question posed by Sandra Willson’s execution-style murder of Sydney taxi driver Rodney Woodgate in 1959 following the traumatic end of her lesbian relationship with a fellow trainee psychiatric nurse. It is something that Willson grapples with in her searing memoir, which she wrote over several decades. Posthumously edited by historian Rebecca Jennings, it joins one of a small group of books that provide a first-hand account of the criminalisation and institutional repression of lesbianism and gender non-conformity in mid-twentieth-century Australia.

That the boy depicted in Shannon Burns’s nightmarish memoir survived to write it at the age of forty reflects no credit on society or on those around him. His persistence seems remarkable, given the world he entered.