Documenting a Life
The Australian Dictionary of Biography: Creating History (or No Room for 'Rosebuds'?) / Chris Cunneen
I have always wanted to start a biography the way Orson Welles began his great film Citizen Kane - with the last word, and the death, of the subject I am writing about. You will remember that Charles Foster Kane's dying word was 'Rosebud '. A reporter then set off on a search for the meaning of that word in the life of his subject. But writing as I have for the past 20 years in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the idea of starting a biography with the death of the subject, rather than the birth, has been absolutely impossible. There is no room for 'Rosebuds' in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
Among the commonest forms of biography practised in Australia is the biographical miniature. The abbreviated life is often one of the most frequently read of literary works. These range from the Who's Who entry or the short biography on a compact disk label to newspaper obituaries or articles in collected works such as encyclopedias. The particular form of mini-biography that I have had most to do with is the Australian Dictionary of Biography (commonly known as the ADB). My aim in this paper is to give you a little of the inside story of writing for this national work of biographical reference.
The ADB is by 1996 a venerable institution. Next week, in Tasmania, the fourteenth volume is being launched, continuing a series that began 30 years ago with the publication of Volume 1. Each volume contains about 670 articles. The large entries are some 6000 words in length, but there are only a few of these in each volume of the ADB. Most articles are much shorter than that, the briefest are only 500 words in length.
A national biographical dictionary has three main functions:
It is first and foremost a reference work;
It is secondly a collection of interesting information about selected individuals;
Finally, it is a construction of national identity.
The ADB's function as a work of historical reference is the most important determinant in decisions about who is included and the format and style of the articles. A volume of the ADB is not designed as a book to be read cover to cover. Although I know of some very dedicated readers who do enjoy doing this, most people will pick up the book in order to refer to one article or even a single fact. Most commonly the reader is in search of an answer to a particular question, such as who was 'Bishop' Charles Leadbetter? (Theosophist) or where was Peter Finch born? (London) or on what date did Azaria Chamberlain go missing? (Sunday 17 August 1980).
In selecting the people to be included in the ADB, our committees (we have them in each State) have to take into consideration which names are most likely to be looked for in the future. In many cases the inclusion is obvious. In a hundred years time, future students of history will, for example, obviously want to look for biographical articles on the prize-winning author Tom Kenneally, or Prime Minister John Howard, or soprano Joan Sutherland, or pop star Johnny Farnham, or the newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch.
Yet, despite this concentration on the famous, a great number of those who would not normally be considered as belonging to the elite are also included. State committees are constantly searching not only for important figures to include but also for representative, ordinary people. I can give you many examples of names that few of you will know. For example, I wrote the article in Volume 12 on Arthur Stace. A couple of years ago there was an excellent film about this Sydney identity, better known as 'Mr Eternity'. Volume 14 includes an entry on Margaret Kay, an Aboriginal woman from the north coast of New South Wales who spent most of her life working as a housemaid for a wealthy white family after having been removed from her family as a young girl.
The amount of time required to research an ADB article is not at all commensurate with the word length. For example, to prepare an entry on a prolific novelist the ADB contributor would be expected to have read all, or as much as possible, the writer had produced in order to be able to make a succinct and accurate assessment of his or her work. Just imagine how difficult it is to write about politicians - the author must read pages and pages of their parliamentary speeches! For many of the articles in the ADB there are plenty of written and published sources. Sometimes there are whole collections of correspondence, like the Barton or the Deakin papers, held in such libraries as this one, for which we biographers are very grateful. Other written or published works, such as Who's Who entries or newspaper obituaries are often of use. However, in the case of the ordinary person, documentary sources are very scarce. Birth, death and marriage certificates, and wills can provide vital clues which need to be followed up. If a person has attained some public position, such as being appointed a justice of the peace, it may take hours of searching through newspapers or government gazettes to find the evidence, but it is worth it. I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent searching through electoral rolls.
In researching a life for the ADB, all our contributors are encouraged to contact the family of the subject. In many cases I have done this and have been helped with scrapbooks, photograph albums and such precious family memorabilia. I will never forget the day I called at a fibro house in southern Sydney to speak to the son of Chris McKivat, for an article published in Volume 10. There were no letters or official documents, but out from the sideboard came the family's treasured press clippings about the career of one of Australia's finest Rugby Union and Rugby League footballers. And, most precious of all, I was allowed to hold for a few brief moments the gold that McKivat won at the London Olympics in 1908.
Remember that not all 'documents' are written or published. In the case of McKivat, that Olympic gold medal was an important source. There are other examples of non-published material. In working on people in more recent times, I have been helped by tape recordings and films. In fact, I have been involved with the National Library of Australia Oral History program as an interviewer. The tapes and transcripts of this program will be an invaluable source for future writers.
ADB articles are often the beginnings of full scale biographies. For example, Volume 8 had an article on the writer Miles Franklin written by Jill Roe. Since then Professor Roe has published a two-volume book of Franklin's letters and is now working on a full-length biography. Often the ADB has invited an author who is in the process of writing a full biography, as in the case of Allan Martin's Henry Parkes, in Volume 5. Sometimes, we have asked someone who has already written a big book to write a shorter version for the ADB.Brenda Niall wrote Martin Boyd for our Volume 13. Occasionally, the ADB has not asked the author of a published biography to write an entry, in order to obtain a new interpretation.
As a result of compression, short ADB articles have recognisable idiosyncrasies. Its style was once parodied by the late Barry Andrews in an entry he titled Lap, Phar. Let me offer you a few sentences to show you the short-hand that we use:
LAP, PHAR (1926-1932), sporting personality, business associate of modest speculators and national hero, was born on 4 October 1926 at Timaru, New Zealand, the second of eight children of Night Riad and his wife Entreaty, née Prayer Wheel ... A spindly, unattractive youth with chestnut hair, Lap was educated privately at Timaruk ... after James E. Pike [q.v.] commenced employment ... the business flourished. A small dapper man who dressed flamboyantly in multi-coloured coats and hats, Pike's nervousness caused him to lose weight before each speculation with Lap ... Lap died in mysterious circumstances in Atherton, California, on 5 April 1932, and was buried in California, Melbourne, Canberra and Wellington.
As you can see by this, in the hands of practised writers, the mini-biography provides scope for those authors with a keen eye for detail. A single, telling incident can throw light on a whole life. Abbreviation is absolutely necessary in a work that has to say all that is necessary about a life in barely 500 words. I like to compare the short ADB article with writing a sonnet or modelling a ship in a bottle. Just as there is exhilaration in complying with the strict restrictions of sonnet or bottle form, in comparison, say, with an epic poem or a large-scale model, so there is equal satisfaction in compressing a life into a single ADB column, instead of an 80 000-word book, or miniaturising a ship in a bottle.
In a miniature biography, a chronological ordering of events is important. There is little room in the ADB for modish biographical ploys such as playing about with time or dialogue between author and subject. A reader who wants to know what date John Curtin died (5 July 1945) will expect that fact to occur towards the end of the article, not, as in the case of Orson Welles and Citizen Kane, in the very opening scenes of the film.
In mini-biography the jokes have to be succinct. I managed to sneak one into my article on zoologist Hubert Clark (Volume 8), who specialised in sea stars and other marine invertebrates that crawl about on the sea-bed. He was an American, an intensely religious Congregationalist and a Republican. Not much scope for humour there, you might think, but in one report referring to his scientific trawling expeditions in the sea he wrote that his favourite sport was 'dredging under pleasant conditions on good bottom'. Geoffrey Blainey, in his article on a dour banker, Frederick Grey Smith, [Volume 12] used a gem of a sentence to describe his subject, a fine example of the art of the miniature: 'In the banking chamber he was a man of few words: "No" was the most frequent.'
A typical volume of the ADB will have articles written by some 400 individual authors. To bring some stylistic unity, and to merge the different idiosyncrasies of 400 authors takes a fair amount of editorial intervention. Not all of our authors appreciate the role of an editor. Many of our contributors become so enthusiastic about their entry that they beg to be allowed more than their 500-word allocation to describe their hero or heroine. The ADB simply cannot do it. For example, if we were to allow only two articles to be each 250 words over the proposed length, we would have to cut out one entire entry of 500 words. Compression must result, and we are pretty professional about it. Sometimes it means cutting out a long anecdote, sometimes it means merging two sentences into one, but mostly it means removing the 'background' that may be relevant in a more lengthy account of a person's life and times, but which is not strictly biographical.
However, as editors we on the staff of the ADB are ever conscious of the problems of style that a miniature biography poses. The need to ensure that sentences flow, that not too many begin with the same word, that present participles break up the regularity of the past tense is constantly in our minds. Sometimes if we alter a word that an author has used, it is to avoid inelegant repetition. Our founding general editor, Douglas Pike, was said to have 'acquired a distaste for adjectives and adverbs'. Well, if you look through more recent volumes you will see the occasional adjective has survived, but that many are excised in the process. And most articles are, in fact, improved by being tightened, leaving a more distinctive image of the person being described.
Should the biographer aim to bury Caesar rather than to praise him? There is an element of celebration in the ADB. Some of you will recall the injunction of Ecclesiastes: 'Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us'. Many of our authors set out to honour the great men and women of our past. In modern biography, on the other hand, practitioners often disown such sentiment. The ADB, in contrast, includes far more entries that are positive rather than negative. Should this be so? Remember that the people in the ADB are the fathers and mothers of our nation. They are often credited with the hopes and values that Australia represents. On the one hand, if they were presented as being flawed, that would perhaps reflect poorly on us, their heirs. On the other hand, we should not suppress unsavoury facts. The ADB tries to steer a steady path between the extremes.
If any national biographical dictionary is to be susceptible to the accusation of treating its subjects too gently, it will be the Australian one. After all, in the early volumes of the ADB there are many entries on men and women who came to this country as criminals. In my opinion, although the evidence of criticism should be made specific, the ADB is not an appropriate place for debunking our national heroes and heroines. The entry on Ned Kelly, (Volume 5) published over 20 years ago, describes baldly the shooting of the three policemen and Aaron Sherritt, but does not portray Ned as a murdering psychopath. Instead, in the final paragraph the author credits him with 'courage, resolution, independence, [and] sympathy with the under-dog'. The ADB contributor, (Judge Sir John Barry, who was himself included in the ADB in Volume 13) believed that the legend of Kelly appeals to something that is 'deeply rooted in the character of the "average" Australian'.
Let me conclude by reminding you of the triple role of the ADB: to be a work of reference, to include interesting individuals, and to construct some sense of national identity. When next you pick up a volume, I hope you will reflect on the requirements of the form and on the special attributes of miniature biography that each article represents. And, if the entry you read contains no single-word explanation of a person's life ... If you can find no 'Rosebud' ( remember the last scene of Citizen Kane, which showed the crucial document - it was a sled - burning without the reporter ever seeing it) remember, too, that Rosebuds can be elusive.
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