AustLit

'In the book of essays titled The Art of Literary Biography, Jürgen Schlaeger recounts how a German colleague visiting the Dickens House Museum in London took particular interest in Dickens’s study. There his friend watched an English schoolboy enter the room, carefully read through the words on an information sheet and then shout to his classmates: ‘Dickens’s chair! Dickens’s chair!’ Other children rushed in and began copying out the description, some of them also sketching the object itself. For a German, Schlaeger reports, this form of ‘celebrity fetishism’ was astonishing. Yet, as he explained, it stemmed from a long history of hero-worship in the English speaking world. Australians, for example, also revere their heroes through relics, with public collections preserving such items as Captain James Cook’s tea cup, Ned Kelly’s armour, Henry Handel Richardson’s ouija board and Dame Nellie Melba’s shoes. In the case of the composer Percy Grainger, we have a whole museum housing clothing, handmade machinery, musical instruments, artworks and even his toy sailing boat.' (Introduction)

'In 1791 James Boswell published The Life of Samuel Johnson LLD, a biography unlike anything that had come before it; indeed, few have matched it since.1 Written some 230 years ago, it was published to wide acclaim for its unconventional style in detailing the private life of its subject. Boswell’s subject, Samuel Johnson, was both his muse and his mentor. At the time, Johnson was the most celebrated biographer of his day. His approach was innovative and a stark departure from the usual style of the time, which focused on successes in public life and on pedigree and steered away from anything to do with the private life.' (Introduction)

'Germaine Greer is one of the few living Australians to have been the subject of two biographies, the first, by Christine Wallace, published in 1997 and the 2018 volume by Elizabeth Kleinhenz. Wallace took time out of working as a journalist to research and write her biography. After publishing a biography of historian Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Kleinhenz was inspired to turn to another source in the University of Melbourne Archives, the newly acquired archive of Germaine Greer. For her landmark biography, Wallace interviewed many people who knew Greer, including her mother Peggy, and also the friends, lovers and other feminists willing to speak to her. Wallace read all she could locate that Greer had written or was written about her; in the pre-internet days aided by her access to newspaper clippings libraries. She also searched for traces of Greer in archives including at Sydney and Melbourne universities and the Star of the Sea convent. Kleinhenz acknowledges her debt to Wallace, whom she quotes extensively. She revisits many of the same secondary sources and interviews some friends and acquaintances, including students and teachers from Greer’s school. For more than a year Kleinhenz ‘delved into’ the Greer archive at the University of Melbourne.' (Introduction)

'On 25 October 2018, Kevin Rudd headlined a function at Sydney Town Hall entitled ‘After the Crash: Australia in the World Ten Years on from the Global Financial Crisis’ (GFC). Following a panel conversation, Rudd dutifully signed copies of his new book, The PM Years, which had been officially launched just days earlier at Parliament House. Noticing my relative youth, he asked whether or not I was studying. I replied that I had just written an Honours thesis about Labor political memoirs, including his earlier work, Not for the Faint-hearted. He paused for a moment, prompting an immediate fear that I had made a faux paus. Eventually, he settled on an uncharacteristically succinct reply: ‘You poor bastard’.' (Introduction)

'Billy Griffiths begins this thoughtful, nuanced and beautifully written work with an admission: it is written by an outsider. The book is a reflection on the archaeology of Australia and its significance, but it is the product of a fringe-dwelling onlooker; a historian. In a similar spirit of full disclosure, I should warn the reader that I too am an outsider; neither historian nor archaeologist, but a philosopher of science. Worse still, an unreconstructed and unapologetic positivist. That is relevant, for Griffiths thinks of archaeology has having aspects of both a science and a humanity. Moreover, without quite saying so explicitly, it is clear that he thinks both intellectual traditions are of equal standing. Both essential; neither privileged. In contrast, in the project of uncovering and understanding Australia’s deep past—human, biological, geological, climatic—I think science, fallible though it is, is privileged. More on that shortly.' (Introduction)

'In 2016, I was one of a fortunate group of scholars who travelled to the Greek island of Hydra, to participate in a conference hosted by Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell. We gathered at the Bratsera Hotel, a renovated sponge factory located a short walk from the ferry terminal. After the fumes and noisy chaos of Athens the peace of carless Hydra with its pristine turquoise seas and mountain views was magnificent. The summer tourists were gone and we had the hotel to ourselves. Our group of scholars and writers, including Susan Johnson and Meaghan Delahunt, were entertained in the courtyard of the house that once belonged to George Johnston and Charmian Clift, a few streets up the hill from our lodgings, not far from the famous Douskos Taverna. A young Greek couple screened a documentary they had made about the two Australian writers who had made Hydra their home for nine years, as we sat outside under the grapevines in the evening. The Johnston–Clift house is almost unchanged since the 1960s but is now worth millions of euros. Hydra is close enough to Athens for daytrips and its proximity makes it highly attractive for wealthy Athenians as a weekend escape. There is not much to remind the visitor of the Australian writers, however, except that a few local people remember them, and it was a privilege to listen to their recollections at the conference. In fact, Leonard Cohen’s residency on the island, at the same time as Clift and Johnston, has eclipsed that of the Australians, with many a tourist climbing the steep hill through the labyrinth of alleyways in order to get a glimpse of the house in which Cohen wrote two of his books and lived with Marianne Ihlen. (Introduction)

'The 1940 discovery in a disused flour mill on the outskirts of Hobart of the entire archive of the local Derwent Bank, from its founding in 1828 until its closure and liquidation, 1849–54, would thrill anyone with a historical bent, then or since. Archivists, on the other hand, might gasp at the somewhat chancy handling of the collection before what remained finally reached safe haven in the University of Tasmania archives. But at least it escaped the recycled paper drive of wartime Australia that induced the indiscriminate culling of some records, official as well as private. Eleanor Robin writes about the archive’s discovery and subsequent mining by historians and others in an absorbing introduction to this biography, which seeks to reinstate Charles Swanston (1789–1850) in Australian historical memory.' (Introduction)

'On the night of 29 March 1918, Dr Phoebe Chapple saw the world explode in flames. She had been inspecting a Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps camp near Abbeville in France when the site came under fire from a German aerial bombardment. Chapple and 40 other women were sheltering in a trench when a direct hit killed eight women and mortally wounded a ninth. Chapple worked for hours in the destroyed camp, tending to the wounded in the dark. For ‘gallantry and devotion to duty’ during the attack, Chapple was awarded the Military Medal, making her the first woman doctor to receive the award. Chapple had enlisted in England with the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) in 1917 as she was ineligible to join the Australian forces. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, women doctors were seen as unsuitable for active service in England, too. Women were allowed to serve as nurses and in a number of auxiliary roles, until the unceasing swell of wounded from the Western Front prompted the RAMC to reluctantly allow women medical practitioners into its ranks. Chapple was among dozens of women doctors who served in World War I, and who have largely been forgotten by history.' (Introduction)

'When Keith Murdoch died in 1952, the Herald and Weekly Times published a  62-page encomium, Keith Murdoch, Journalist. 1 Referred to in house as the ‘Sir Keith Murdoch Tribute Book’, a limited edition of 2,500 copies was published for staff, friends and business associates.2 The brilliant and beneficent Murdoch of the ‘tribute book’—son of Scottish migrants to Melbourne, Rev. Patrick Murdoch and wife Annie (née Brown), and nephew of esteemed Australian academic and essayist Walter Murdoch—was a visionary who built Australia’s first national media empire. It barely mentioned his son, Keith Rupert Murdoch, 21 years old at the time, who seized the patriarch’s news baton and built the world’s most powerful international media empire.' (Introduction)

'There are two sorts of subjects that exercise particular allure to a biographer: those that do not want a biography written about them, and go to various lengths to thwart the efforts of a would-be biographer, and those who have written their own life story, or related aspects of that story, and for whom the telling of that story formed a significant part of their wider intellectual project. Judith Wright, as Georgina Arnott’s The Unknown Judith Wright reveals, fell into both categories.' (Introduction)

'A senior academic at The Australian National University described Pierre Ryckmans, as soon as he learned that I was writing this book review, as quiet, but having the look of a person with a strong sense of character and determination. This was the impression that Ryckmans gave to a person who had seen him on campus but not spoken to him. Nonetheless, it was an accurate portrayal of Ryckmans, and fits in nicely with the Ryckmans (also popularly known as Simon Leys, his pen-name) that Philippe Paquet captures in Simon Leys: Navigator between Worlds, an impressive biography that is both scholarly and well written. This biography is a translation by Julie Rose from the original French version, which was published in 2016.'

'A new book on the seminal Australian art historian Bernard Smith recognises that he remains one of the most interesting figures in Australian art history. Antipodean Perspective, edited by Rex Butler and Sheridan Palmer, is a guided tour of Bernard Smith’s persistent, fine-grained, analytical and expert accounts of art and its cultures. Born in 1916, Smith ascended from a bleak beginning to the pinnacle of art history scholarship in Australia. In 1955 he became a lecturer at the University of Melbourne and in 1967 he became director of the Power Institute of Fine Arts in Sydney. This text traverses Smith’s major contributions to the field during his long academic life. In it, 28 leading scholars and artists supplement carefully chosen excerpts from Smith’s books, papers, speeches, autobiography and manifesto with passages that explain how his writing influenced the course of their own thoughts and speculate on what his passages on art represent today.'