Biography

Could it be that there is less to Julia Gillard than meets the eye? She is a woman of fierce intelligence, Australia’s best parliamentary performer, and one of the sharpest wits in Canberra. I met Gillard a couple of times early in her political career, when she was shadow minister for immigration, and engaged her in a lengthy discussion about refugee policy. This was not long after the Tampa affair, when Labor was searching for a way back from the wilderness of electoral defeat and the party was bleeding internally from wounds caused by rank-and-file anger at its response to John Howard’s handling of the asylum seekers issue. I found Gillard to be charming, engaging and funny. She was well briefed, open to argument and ideas, but questioning and critical. I had the sense even then that her feet were firmly grounded in the reality of electoral politics: that no policy proposal would pass muster if it might constitute a serious obstacle on the path back to power in Canberra.

George Barrington was a fascinating man, and Nathan Garvey is his latest ‘victim’. Barrington’s life was a source of almost daily fascination to eighteenth-century contemporaries; some mystery still surrounds him. His birth date remains equivocal – was it 1755 or 1758? Church records don’t survive to help here, but it was probably the former. Were his parents artisans to the Irish gentry – a silversmith and mantua-maker – or less skilled workers? Even his name is a matter of antiquarian enquiry. The fact remains that George Barrington, the gentleman Prince of Pickpockets, well-known convict traveller to Botany Bay and putative author, appeared to the world in various celebrated guises and captured popular attention. He occupies an ambiguous place in the world of crime, history and fiction.

Anne Manne’s publisher invites us to include So This Is Life in the classical canon of autobiographies of Australian childhood – Hal Porter’s The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony and Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father. In Australian letters there has been a long tradition of autobiographical writing of childhood; this produced some of the earliest critical writing on autobiography – by Richard Coe and Joy Hooton, for example. But I remain unconvinced by the MUP blurb, for Manne’s essays do not take us back to Porter or Gaita at all. Rather, they suggest the rich and dreamy vignettes of David Malouf’s autobiographical 12 Edmondstone Street or the precisely observed rural domesticity that is captured in Olga Masters’s Cobargo stories. Daisy, Lily and Ivy, Manne’s great-aunts, all unmarried, who live together in the formerly grand but now decaying two-storey house where ‘absolutely nothing happened’, recall Masters’s ‘home girls’; Manne’s affective memory of her grandmother’s linen cupboard recalls the childhood perception and memory work that Malouf captures so powerfully.

[I]magine that a dictator had decreed that all publications in the future must be signed ‘Anon’, on pain of imprisonment. This would clear the ground of all but the most dedicated and necessary authors, allow trees to breathe more freely, and diminish the carbon imbalance. It is worth thinking about.

Billy Thorpe’s story is the perennial one of an Australian artist dissatisfied with domestic success. In this account of the late pop star’s career, Jason Walker bypasses discussion of Thorpe’s music per se to present him as ‘truly Australian … a battler, a doer [and] a self-promoter’ who lusted for international recognition. While it vividly recounts Thorpe’s life (1946–2007), including enough sex, drugs and equipment fetishism to delight boyish music fans, the real strength of Billy Thorpe’s Time on Earth is its profile of Thorpe’s careerist, provincial psyche and the lengths he went to in search of adoration.

John Calvin has not had a good press among the general or even the educated public. Marilynne Robinson caricatures the popular view: ‘an eighteenth-century Scotsman, a prude and obscurantist with a buckle on his hat, possibly a burner of witches, certainly the very spirit of capitalism.’ Even Les Murray, who of course knows a lot of ‘religious stuff’, in a recent poem (‘Visiting Geneva’), addresses ‘John Calvin, unforgiver / in your Taliban hat’. The reasons are, no doubt, complex. Calvin has mistakenly been given sole responsibility for the fate of Michael Servetus. His relationship with Geneva has been misunderstood. Predestination has been seen as the centrepiece of his theological system, when it is questionable whether one can speak of a ‘system’ at all.

To many Australians, the Queen Mother, who died in 2002, was largely an unknown quantity. The wife of George VI and mother of the present monarch, she periodically visited this country to cut ribbons, open hospitals and wave to schoolchildren who had been bussed to sporting grounds and given flags to wave. But Australia loomed large in her private life, as evinced in this well-researched ‘official biography’ by William Shawcross, who enjoyed unfettered access to previously inaccessible royal documents. As an historical document, the book has no peer and for years to come will be an absolute necessity for political and royal researchers and biographers of the period. For such a substantial tome, it is an impressively compelling read.

Brenda Niall has the knack of lucid multi-focus, a great thing in a biographer. That organisational deftness, an ability to keep the tangled loops of people’s lives spooling freely through her fingers while she projects a rich and dramatic context for them, was evident in her group study of The Boyds (2002), and it is the structural virtue in this new work, The Riddle of Father Hackett.

Evelyn Juers’s wide-ranging and suggestive study of Heinrich Mann (older brother of Thomas) and his second wife, Nelly Kroeger-Mann, opens with a vivid extended anecdote, recounting a meeting between the couple and Bertolt Brecht at a fruit market in Los Angeles, in the summer of 1944. Members of the community of European exiles in Los Angeles had flocked to the market because a farmer ‘was selling berries … Not just strawberries, blueberries … [but] also … gooseberries’. Jokingly translating the English word into Gaensebeeren (the actual German is Stachelbeeren), Brecht is caught handing out ‘a great mound of amber fruit’, giving Heinrich and Nelly ‘a translucent gem to taste’, and wittily punning ‘that he was no gooseberry fool’.

Gough Whitlam’s 1972 policy speech, delivered before a crowd of thousands at the Blacktown Civic Centre in a scene that bore a closer resemblance to a pop concert than to a political campaign, is seen as the ultimate articulation of the Whitlam Labor government’s radical program for change. If its chief political architect was Whitlam, its amanuensis was Graham Freudenberg. With Whitlam’s election as leader of the Australian Labor Party in 1967, Freudenberg eagerly joined his staff as press secretary, a position he had previously and less happily held with Arthur Calwell, who was leader from 1960 to 1967.