AustLit

'The cover photograph on A Fuhrer for a Father shows Jim Davidson with his then wife Olga. They are the parents of the author, Melbourne writer and historian Jim Davidson. The acknowledgment reads: “Olga and her keeper, Melbourne Zoo, c 1942, courtesy of the author.” The designation of Davidson the father as his wife’s “keeper” in a photo taken in a zoo is no accident. It reflects precisely how Davidson the son viewed his father in life. This memoir is “an account of my father and his consequences”. He elaborates in his preface:

'Authoritarianism was the basic assumption on which my father ran his family and faced the world … Everything was firm, definite, unequivocal and hierarchical — in the household, as beyond it … This [story] … reveals a particularly aberrant instance of patriarchy, expressed in domestic violence towards wives and a persistent antagonism towards a gay son.' (Introduction)

'Albert Namatjira is cherished but strict copyright stifles his legacy

'In the 1940s and early 50s, Australia could not get enough of Aboriginal landscape painter Albert Namatjira. The former cameleer and initiated Aranda man from central Australia was the subject of three documentaries, his exhibitions sold out regularly and he was presented to the Queen during the 1954 royal tour.

'Yet the father of the modern Aboriginal art movement was 54 before he was quietly granted citizenship (along with his wife Robina and four other Northern Territory Aborigines) on May 13, 1957. Once he became a citizen, Namatjira could travel without government permission, drink ­alcohol legally and transact business deals for the first time.' (Introduction)

'Persia was the centre of some mighty dynasties over the millennia, including the far-flung Achaemenid Empire that Cyrus the Great establi­shed in the 6th century BC. It wasn’t until Muslim Arabs defeated a later Persian dynasty, the Sassan­ians, in AD 651, that Persians were forced to adopt Islam and abandon their fiery state religion, Zoroastrianism.

'As in all conquests that force cultural change, it wasn’t entirely successful. The Persian­s bitterly resented their new overlords and pockets of Zoroastrianism remain today, though followers are now estimated at fewer than 190,000 worldwide. Yet it was the Persians, long a highly literate people, who codified Arab­ic grammar and made the language the cornerstone of classical Islamic culture.' (Introduction)

'Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking begins: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” After the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, she examines grief the way a writer examines anything: “In times of trouble … read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.” Mark Raphael Baker, director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Monash University, began writing Thirty Days after the death of his wife, Kerryn Baker. Like Didion’s, his work is framed by a motif of magic and the quest for a kind of cognitive trick that might turn back loss.' (Introduction)