Richard Freadman
Richard Freadman is Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University and Adjunct Professor in the Swinburne University Department of Psychological Sciences where he specialises in the use of life writing in healthcare settings. His volume of short stories, High Noon at Starbucks, was published this year.
This intensely vivid and moving book makes a fine contribution to the burgeoning literature of Australian Jewish autobiography. There are currently about 200 such titles. They vary enormously in standard and kind – from small print run, self-published chronicles written for authors’ families, to the work of high-profile professional writers such as Lily Brett, Morris Lurie and Arnold Zable. Th ... (read more)
On 4 August 2020, a gigantic explosion in the Beirut docks devastated much of the city and the local economy. In this powerful and beautifully written memoir, Theodore Ell writes that while opaque causes must have been at work, the event itself was ‘senseless, random and barren’. He adds that the account he had given of the disaster in his Calibre Prize-winning essay, ‘Façades of Lebanon’ ... (read more)
Literature is rich in ethical implication, but do we incur ethical responsibilities when we write about it? Arguably we do. Literary authors seek to convey something to others, and to convey it in literary form. Perhaps, then, our accounts of literature should respect its literary qualities, not least when we bring literature into interdisciplinary contact with other discourses? Otherwise, we risk ... (read more)
Jacob Rosenberg completed the manuscript of The Hollow Tree shortly before his death in October 2008. Born in Lodz in 1922, he lived there until he was deported to Auschwitz, where he lost his entire immediate family. He was later a prisoner in the Woflsburg and Ebensee concentration camps. In 1948 he and his wife, Esther, emigrated to Australia, where they raised a family and built a successful c ... (read more)
In one of these beautifully crafted prose poems, the speaker, recalling his childhood self, says that ‘I was gradually learning my own name, though there are times when the knowledge escapes me still, and another reveals itself’. This suggests complex trajectories of the self in time: self-knowledge comes ‘gradually’, but at times cedes to another, more profound, self-transcending form of ... (read more)
Herz Bergner arrived in Melbourne in 1938, having left Warsaw after Hitler’s rise to power. Already a published Yiddish short story writer, he joined a group of progressive Yiddish-speaking writers and thinkers who often gathered at the Kadimah Library in Carlton. As information about the Holocaust began to reach these shores, Bergner argued passionately for an increase in European immigration t ... (read more)
In February 1974, Robert Rose, a twenty-two-year-old Australian Rules footballer and Victorian state cricketer, was involved in a car accident that left him quadriplegic for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. The tragedy received extensive press coverage and struck a chord with many in and beyond the Melbourne sporting community. Robert was a brilliant all-round athlete with an impeccabl ... (read more)
H.G. Wells, in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), describes Henry James as ‘a strange unnatural human being’ who ‘regarded his fellow creatures with a face of distress and a remote effort at intercourse, like some victim of enchantment placed in the centre of an immense bladder’. Literary friendship and acquaintanceship, including the ways in which writer-colleagues portray one anothe ... (read more)
Zachary Leader, respected biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow, and editor of this volume of commissioned essays, defines life writing as 'a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed'. This formulation reflects the book's method, which is to provide a 'sampling' of various periods, genres, issues in and appr ... (read more)