Biography

Much critical historical interest in Edward John Eyre has centred on the apparently radical contradictions in his life. Known variously as ‘the enlightened defender of Aboriginal rights in Australia, but also as the reviled “butcher of Jamaica” in England and the Caribbean’, Eyre’s notorious career began in the late 1830s and included exploration and colonial administration in Australia, New Zealand and the West Indies, reaching both its apex and nadir while he was governor of Jamaica during 1864–65. Historians have puzzled over how a man who displayed a marked respect for indigenous people during the period from 1839 to 1845, as an Australian explorer, Resident Magistrate and later Protector of Aborigines at Moorunde, could have acted in such a barbarous way as governor of Jamaica after riots broke out in 1865. There have been several biographies and numerous piecemeal studies of Eyre’s colonial career. In Edward Eyre: Race and colonial governance, Julie Evans expands past approaches, attending to the play of power between London and the colonies (amply canvassed earlier in relation to the Morant Bay Jamaica rebellion by Catherine Hall, and extended here), the contradictory constructions of ‘race’ in colonial contexts (derived in part from the postcolonial critiques of Patrick Wolfe) and the distinctly different colonial cultures in which Eyre worked. She aims to confound and refigure the ‘common correlations between race, resistance and repression in the colonies’.

In his introduction to Chappelli Speaks Out, Ashley Mallett relates how he realised early on in the project that he would need to step outside the bounds of traditional biography in order to do justice to his old mate. His variation on the genre, not entirely revolutionary, is to insert passages of direct quotation into the body of the text, literally allowing Ian Chappell to address the reader.

Major historical figures generally attract multiple biographies. Napoleon and Nelson have, reputedly, amassed more than 200 biographies each – with successive waves of interest reflecting the constant need for reinterpretation. But at some point we must strike a declining marginal utility as we tally the titles – biography as running soap opera appears a postmodern accoutrement. In Australia, we have not yet managed to produce a biography of each prime minister – then along comes another on the ‘Little Digger’ Billy Hughes (1862–1952), without doubt one of our most colourful political leaders and written-about subjects. If not 200 titles, then there is certainly a small bookshelf full of respectable studies and serious essays on him, not to mention his own books and the many cameo appearances he makes in political memoirs and other works of his generation. So, do we need another interpretation? Indeed, does this ‘short life’ of ‘King Billy’ offer a new interpretation? Why did Aneurin Hughes – his namesake but no relation, and more on that later – commit to this laborious project?

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir are both mythical figures. They are also a mythical couple, a symbol of lifelong intellectual and personal commitment to each other and to commonly espoused causes. Of the two, Beauvoir is probably the more widely read today, because of her foundational role in the development of feminism, and the relative accessibility of her writing. In comparison, Sartre’s work, with the exception of his elegantly self-mocking autobiography, Les Mots (1966), is more difficult. His opus is as eclectic as it is voluminous – covering philosophy, prose fiction, theatre, political essays and literary criticism – and it is often dense. With Beauvoir, the reader is always in the presence of a person; with Sartre, we witness above all a mind at work, a brilliant intelligence grappling with whatever problem or issue it has decided to take on. In both cases, their work had a profound impact, mirroring and inspiring fundamental changes in thought and mores. Sartre and Beauvoir shared a philosophy – which went, somewhat loosely, under the name of existentialism – that held that human individuals and societies had the capacity to determine their own destiny, free of the weight of history and tradition. In the wake of World War II, and in the context of the ideological stalemate and nuclear threats of the Cold War, this philosophy of possibility and freedom offered an alternative to the ambient pessimism. It promised not passive resistance but transformative action by and for a humanity willing to create its own future.

As Nicholas Jose observed in the November 2005 issue of ABR, the face of South Australian novelist Catherine Spence, currently featured on our $5 note, circulates much more widely than any of her books. Like those of several other nineteenth-century Australian women writers, Spence’s novels were revived in the 1980s but are now once again out of print. So this new edition of her autobiography, extensively annotated and accompanied by letters and a diary never before published, is especially welcome.

Henry Handel Richardson, author of iconic Australian novels The Getting of Wisdom (1910) and The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney (1917–29), has not fared well at the hands of her biographers. Axel Clark’s account of her early life, though kindly and well intentioned, could not seem to avoid the unfortunate conclusion that Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (1870–1946) was a rather unpleasant person. At the age of four, Clark tells us, she was ‘unusually showy and forward’, and it was all downhill from there. As a girl, she was ‘overly insistent and overbearing’; as she grew older, she became self-aggrandising and embittered.

The first volume of the Australian Dictionary of Biography appeared in 1966, the sixteenth in 2002, by which stage the series included persons who had died prior to 1981. This one-volume Supplement includes those who were for one reason or another omitted from the main volumes. It is an impressive achievement. There are 504 biographies, written by 399 authors. Almost all are well written and carefully researched, with up-to-date lists of sources. The editor and his associates have had the Herculean task of melding all these biographies into a work of reference in which the entries have a consistency in the type of information presented, while at the same time allowing for the individuality of each subject and author. In this, they have succeeded admirably. The volume has the air of authority.

In reading a biography of Frank Hardy, it is almost impossible to separate the man, as subject, from the work for which he is famous, the novel Power Without Glory (1950) based on the life of John Wren. If I did not want to reach for my gun every time I hear the word ‘icon’ these days, I would say that this novel still has iconic status in Australian culture. The title is a pithy reworking of Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory (1940), about the ethics of a Catholic priest in southern Mexico. Like Greene, Hardy was driven by a quasi-religious commitment, but for him it was a lifelong commitment to the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) rather than to Catholicism.

Australia has never been so prodigal of great men that it can afford to let even one slip into oblivion; yet George Hubert Wilkins (1888–1958) is now hardly a household name. In a life of ceaseless activity, he was a photographer, naturalist, meteorologist, geographer, aviator, submariner, war correspondent, religious thinker, and writer, but he was best known as a celebrated polar explorer. His first biographer, John Grierson, a professional writer, dealt adequately enough with the many lives of Wilkins in 1960, at a time when his subject was still well known. Four decades later, Simon Nasht, a documentary film-maker, offers the Australian reading public an expanded version of Grierson’s biography. Nasht has the advantage of a growing library of polar studies, and his book appears at a time when climatology and extinction of species are subjects of scientific and popular concern.

As an unknown young artist, Margaret Olley gained instant fame as the subject of the enchanting portrait by William Dobell that won the Archibald Prize in 1948. With Olley’s Mona Lisa smile, the warm, summery colours of her dress and her extravagantly flower-laden hat, Dobell created an enduring image. An embarrassed Olley did not welcome the publicity. This was not the way she wanted to enter the world of art. ‘I also paint,’ she told reporters defensively. Today, her vibrant interiors and still lifes have made her famous in her own right.