Commentary

For the second half of 2007 and the first half of 2008, I was the professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. This is an annual appointment, open across the range of disciplines that lend themselves to the study of Australia, so that my predecessor, Jim Fox, was a member of the department of anthropology, and my successor, Iain Davidson, is now working in the depart- ment of archaeology. I joined a large and vigorous department of history, which has about fifty members.

Some months before I left, the head of department asked me to prepare a course guide for my first semester of teaching. To help me, he sent a copy of one of his own recent course guides. It was quite adequate: the lecture pro- gramme, reading list and assessment procedures were all set out. But to anyone teaching in an Australian university it looked decidedly scant, the sort of handout that might have passed muster twenty years ago, before university learning and teaching committees began to insist that generic skills and key learning outcomes be specified for all subjects.

It has been an extraordinary political war. Conventional wisdoms and long-standing assumptions have flown out the window. The final choice is remarkable: a young, ‘cool’ and detached African American who abjures commitment versus a decided, indeed hot-tempered, maverick whose entire essence is commitment. Long gone is the ‘inevitable candidate’ whose gender is now represented on the opposition ticket, as a vice-presidential candidate no one came close to predicting.

I hesitated before deciding to see Summer of the Seventeenth Doll at La Boite in Brisbane this year. Revivals, even under ideal circumstances, can be chancy. The author, Ray Lawler, had reservations about the presentation of his signature work in the round, and so did I. More than fifty years had passed since he wrote it and since I saw it performed behind a conventional proscenium arch in Brisbane, with Lawler himself playing Barney. A story about manual cane-cutters would seem to my children as remote in time and place as one about stokers on a steamboat would have to me, when I first saw the play. Then, there were few, if any, mechanical cane harvesters. There was still plenty of work for rural, manual workers. These were hard, strong men who bankrolled themselves in the season in order to take their leisure afterwards in the big smoke: not just cane-cutters but also shearers, drovers, fencers, fruit pickers and contract miners in Mount Isa and Kalgoorlie and Broken Hill and other distant places.

I was always going to be a novelist. At the age of six, I wrote fiction about a Willie Wagtail, whose best friend was an ant (even then I had a good grasp on relationships). Several years later I had moved on to human protagonists, mainly young girls living at boarding school and excelling at ballet. I had no experience of either, but I had my dreams. As an adolescent I wrote stories about homelessness and drug addiction, once again from vicarious experience. Then I went to university to do a literature degree and realised that great Australian novelists were serious, learned and (then) mostly male. I still wanted to write my novel, but I decided to live a bit first.

I suppose our lives gain intensity through meetings with remarkable men and women. Occasionally, we encounter certain people whose rich inner lives mesmerise us and make us feel awkward and uneasy and out of place. Mr Manoly Lascaris had such an impact: he decentred people, made them lose confidence, made them feel physically uncomfortable, through his silence, his mundane chatter, his eccentric wisdom and the strange way he had of transforming domesticity into an exercise of virtue.

First, though, comes respect and the need to open yourself to your subject. The dialogues recorded in my book Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris (2008) are about thoughts underlying, or succeeding, particular events; they present the story of someone’s life at peak moments of mental realisation. The book is neither a biography nor a journalistic account of events and episodes. It records thoughts, ideas and conclusions in retrospect, as the culmination of the act of living and the art of thinking.

One of the National Library’s newest treasures, and probably its most significant acquisition in the past twelve months, is a small theatre playbill printed in Sydney and dated 30 July 1796. At 211 years old, it is the earliest surviving document printed in Australia. The playbill was presented by the prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, to the then prime minister of Australia, John Howard, at a ceremony held at Parliament House on 12 September 2007. It advertises performances of three plays at the ‘Theatre, Sydney’: Jane Shore; The Wapping Landlady; and The Miraculous Cure.

John Button was rare man, rare for any time, any place and in any calling. The public face – the Senator John Button, long-time Leader of the Government in the Senate, the hands-on, hard-hat minister of the Button car plan, the policy innovator and party reformer, the straight talker, unbridled political wit, notorious doodler, note writer, and scribbler of politically incorrect postcards to Senator Bronwyn Bishop (imagine it!) – that is the John Button Australia knows. His achievements have been many and they are exemplary.

Every biography holds at least three stories, all of which, though very different, are closely linked. First of all, of course, there is the story told on the page – the story of someone’s life. Just below that is the story that consists of bits left over, all those awkward jagged pieces of raw or irrelevant data that have been eliminated. Some rejected from the beginning, others taken out at the last minute after much thought. But pervading the whole, though they may not be directly part of it, are the experiences and opin­ions of the people who provided so much of the information, whose life stories are invested in the final book.