Biography

The only surviving image of George Bass is surrounded by as much mystery as his death. It is a photograph of a painting that has now disappeared, thought to have been painted in about 1800. A handsome young man looks straight out at the viewer, with a faintly supercilious smirk. His hair is tied back and perhaps powdered – old-fashioned, I would have thought, for a young man in 1800, when Bass was only twenty-nine. Bass is known to every eastern-states schoolchild as half of Bass and Flinders, famous for their exploits in Tom Thumb – actually two different small open boats in which they explored the south coast of New South Wales at different times. Matthew Flinders proposed that Bass Strait be so named because it was Bass’s 1797–98 voyage in a whaleboat that had convinced him that it must be a strait rather than a bay, and led to their circumnavigation of Tasmania in the Norfolk, in 1798–99.

If Melbourne’s claim to be the ‘world’s most liveable city’ can be taken seriously, it is largely because of its capacity for reinvention, the adaptability of its buildings and infrastructure to an expanding population, and changes in transport, communications, patterns of work, and the general lifestyle of its inhabitants.

With the publication of Eminent Victorians in 1918, Lytton Strachey famously created a new mode of biographical writing – spare, ironic, satiric, detached. In his preface to that slim cathartic volume of portraits of four famous Victorian personalities, Strachey extolled the biographer’s virtue of what he called ‘a becoming brevity’. That preface has been called a ‘manifesto of modern biography’. In his breaking of new ground, Strachey turned his back on the sombre and dutiful ‘lives’ that had become the accepted mode of biographical homage in Victorian England.

Geoffrey Robertson, the author of The Tyrannicide Brief, enjoys the same high public profile as those old lags who constitute the élite of Australian expatriates in London: Clive James, Germaine Greer, and Barry Humphries. In his case it is as a leading international human rights lawyer, the author of Crimes against Humanity (1999) and The Justice Game (1998), and host of the popular television series Hypotheticals.

Roy Ward Baker is quoted as saying ‘realism is my forte’. But Geoff Mayer’s book reveals that over a fifty-eight-year career in film and television, Baker was much more than just a ‘realist’. Baker began as a ‘gopher’ at Gainsborough Studios in 1934, but he is best known for directing what is perhaps the definitive film on the Titanic disaster, A Night to Remember (1958). He also directed horror productions for Hammer Films, including The Vampire Lovers (1960) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967). He ended his career at seventy-two with an episode of the British television series The Good Guys (1992). It is due to this long and diverse career that Baker has not been embraced as an auteur, a filmmaker who is able to project a consistent personal vision across a range of films. However, in Roy Ward Baker, Geoff Mayer, of La Trobe University, situates Baker as an auteur, tracing the vicissitudes of his career to provide a comprehensive and intriguing study of the filmmaker and his films, as well as his industrial, social, and political contexts.

More so even than The Age, the New Yorker is a journal shaped and defined by its illustrators and cartoonists. For many decades it did not include photojournalism at all, and it only appears these days under sufferance. The cartoons contribute crucially to the ethos and style of a magazine that depends a lot on ethos and style. To think of the New Yorker is almost inevitably to think of the famous cover by Saul Steinberg that shows the cars, buildings, and people of Ninth and Tenth Avenues filling the foreground, then the Hudson River marking the edge of the real, figurative world, beyond which New Jersey, Nebraska, Japan, and the Pacific Ocean are just names on a vaguely conceived map. Parochial universalism fuelled by an ironic sophistication is the ethos of this famous image, and a thread of continuity in the work of the four New Yorker artists profiled in Iain Topliss’s fine and sensitive book.

In Brenda Niall’s biography of Judy Cassab, the art forms of the subject and the author – life story and portraiture – are nested one in the other. As the story builds, one comes to accept that certain unsparing reflections on the subject’s personality and behaviour have as their authority Judy Cassab herself. She emerges as a heroine in a decidedly modern mode.

With the greatest novels, you can plunge into them anywhere and still savour their greatness; it is recognisable on every page. You won’t need to have read the two earlier volumes of these edited diaries to recognise that same quality throughout the third – and I mean novelistic greatness, of which all the great diaries (from Samuel Pepys’s to James Lees-Milne’s) partake in important ways.

Most of a lifetime ago, I read of an exhibit at the Bell Telephone headquarters. It consisted of a box from which, at the turning of a switch, a hand emerged. The hand turned off the switch and returned to its box. If this struck me as sinister, it was because the gambit seemed emblematic of human perversity – of a proneness to self-annulment ...

Margaret, Margarethe, Grete, Gretl, Gretele are all the same person: the biographer Helen Ennis prefaces her book and arouses our curiosity with the note that she has used the names depending on the context. Margaret Michaelis was born Margarethe Gross in 1902, in Dzieditz (Austria, later Poland); when she died in 1985, in Melbourne, she was known as Margaret Sachs. She studied photography at the Institute of Graphic Arts and Research in Vienna. In the late 1920s she worked in studios in Prague, and then Berlin. There she met and married Rudolf Michaelis, an archaeological restorer and an anarchist. After the Nazi takeover, the couple fled to Spain in 1933; they separated soon after their arrival. In Barcelona, and after 1939 in Sydney, Michaelis managed her own photographic studios. In 1960 she married Albert Sachs, a Viennese-born émigré and moved to Melbourne.