Documenting a Life

Keynote address
Documenting a Life: Contemporary Interest in Biography / Brian Kiernan


I hope it will seem appropriate to the theme of this seminar, 'Documenting A Life', and the National Library of Australia in which it is taking place, that this opening address should attempt to illustrate the essential role libraries play in making the biographies of most subjects possible by acquiring and preserving all the sources - the manuscripts, diaries or journals, letters, photographs - which biographers draw on.

My most recent experience of biography has been with David Williamson, whose papers are held at the National Library and will continue to go there. They were deposited under an enlightened taxation incentive scheme that encourages writers to donate their papers to libraries in return for tax relief related to the value of the papers, as determined by independent and expert assessors. Under this scheme libraries throughout Australia, State and university, have been progressively acquiring writers' papers. Future biographers of this generation of writers (and other kinds of subjects, of course, but I'm writing of the kind of subject I know most about) will have much more complete and conveniently centralised collections on which to draw than in the past.

When Williamson's papers, or the first batch, were acquired by the National Library for what was reported as the largest sum yet paid under the incentive scheme, a commercial radio station's talk-back commentator rang me, live to air, to ask if it wasn't preposterous that the taxpayers' money was being squandered on Williamson's school exercise books, bills, letters, etc.

Well, I knew what had been acquired by the Library, and what follows is part of the answer I would have made to that commentator if I had been allowed time. Those Williamson papers had to be one of the fullest collections of any prominent, living, Australian writer's papers, ever - for all I knew, the fullest. How was I so confident of that? Well, I had just spent two years or more, on or off, roughly sorting them for my biography of Williamson before they reached the expert cataloguers at the National Library.

Reminiscent of Brenda Niall's seminar paper titled 'The Trunk in the Attic', I vividly remember asking David Williamson if he had kept copies of any early unperformed plays or drafts of his well-known plays, and the day that he opened the closet in his attic study leaving me to sort the contents of the many cardboard cartons inside. There wasn't literally a trunk, but the first container I opened was a piece of luggage: his Globite primary school case. It contained what would become, for a day, notorious evidence of government profligacy: his exercise books, family photographs from his childhood, diaries, a 21st birthday key, Barry Humphries's 'Wildlife in Suburbia' on 45 rpm vinyl, and other assorted memorabilia. The cartons contained bills and receipts, letters to and from innumerable individuals, and draft after draft of plays and film script - some unfamiliar, others very familiar, like the first handwritten drafts of The Removalists and Don's Party.

Now that they and numerous other drafts of Williamson's plays are in the National Library, we rightly regard them as part of the national estate, preserved for posterity, and impossible to put a price on as (like so many other treasures held by libraries) their true value is an intrinsic cultural one. Yet, at the time they were acquired by the Library, it would not have been impossible to determine their market value - even in an international market (hence the assessors). I told the talk-back radio host that I thought the Library, and the nation, had acquired a bargain. I got the impression that was not what he wanted to hear.

Let me momentarily dwell on what he saw as the real point of contention: those derisory bills or receipts which were included among the papers (because, it seemed at first, Williamson had kept everything). However, even a bill might provide a biographer with useful detail. A bill could establish, for example, what mode of transport the fresh young graduate in Mechanical Engineering from Monash University drove to his first job, at General Motors Holden, Fisherman's Bend - a Ford Prefect (little wonder he found it considerably disfigured when he went to collect it from the car park after work one day!).

Here is another example of the information value of seemingly trivial personal documents. In Williamson's play Money and Friends there is a most lugubrious character, Stephen, the orthopaedic surgeon, who is always expecting the worst, including the collapse of the sundeck of his holiday house at Crystal Inlet (south of Sydney, and therefore not to be confused with Pearl Beach where the Williamson's have their beach house). When I was updating my biography for the second edition, I came here to look at more recent papers which had been deposited in the Library and found an engineer's report dispelling Mr D.K. Williamson's fears that the deck of his Pearl Beach house was in imminent danger of collapse. That had to be noted, because the playwright himself had famously observed, 'The biggest clod in all my plays is always me'.

So even the equivalents of those legendary, and derided, laundry bills, can yield details, however trivial in themselves, which biographers hope will add some colour and vividness to accounts of their subjects' lives. Speaking from my own experience, the researcher of documents quite often does not appreciate the possible significance or usefulness of everything the first time around. As patterns emerge (and just as often fade) or questions arise, one frequently circles back to documents scanned earlier which did not then seem pertinent to constructing a narrative (a life story) out of such miscellanea. Of course, what the biographer most hopes to find - in diaries or letters, most likely - are records of those moments in which the subject most seems to reveal his or her inner self. Williamson's schoolboy diary was a considerable disappointment on this score. But there is a journal he kept when on tour of China with Kristin, his wife, as members of an Australian Labor Party delegation in 1976 (not long after China had become open to the West). He recorded visits to all the monumental sites and the primitive factories, an attack of Beijing tummy, acrimony within the delegation and Kristin's flirtation with a member of it.

We get back to the hotel at 7.30 & the key to our room (603) is still lying on the reception desk along with a lot of others. Kristin hasn't returned. I go to the room and alternate between anger, anxiety and apprehension. Surely the Peking fiasco is not happening all over again - this time for real. I undress to my pair of black and red Coles underpants & look at myself in the mirror. I've been doing a lot of looking at myself in the mirror in the last couple of days. I glance at X often hoping that he'll look more haggard, more ugly, less lithe & energetic but every time I look - even when his hair is completely unkempt & he's been up late the night before - he looks depressingly and irritatingly magnetic ...
X is damnably attractive & long sessions in front of the mirror only serve to make me more depressed. I do look better when I take off the revolting lurid black & red underpants. I resolve to take more care buying clothes. I'll need to overcome a deep seated aversion to clothing stores developed in my gangling teens when clothing salesmen would nod their heads morosely, pass me on to the most junior assistant and on occasions laugh when I'd walk into a clothes store. Just as I'm about to go to bed Kristin knocks at the door.

How does a biographer deal with such self-exposure? Discreetly summarise, paraphrasing the anxieties or insecurities ? Or try to probe deeper into these (to psychologise the subject)? What I did was to quote it, because appropriately for the biography of a dramatist, there is self-dramatisation here. Williamson can be allowed to present himself, to himself, at this moment, in a journal written (as he thought then!) only for his eyes.

This was the recourse I took with another kind of document: not to paraphrase summarily, nor to attempt a probing (intimidating when your subject was also a lecturer in Social Psychology) but to allow him to present himself in a moment of experiencing quite different emotions. The other kind of document was a fax, a relatively recently introduced form of communication which has the immediacy of a telephone call without the inconvenience of the party at the other end being able to interrupt. For biographers writing now or in the future, about subjects in the age of faxes, a rich hoard of documents is promised, at least of those sent (because the message can be thrown into a supermarket carton along with everything else) though those received on fade-prone paper will need to be photocopied or otherwise preserved.

Williamson acquired a fax machine in August 1990, mainly to communicate with his agents in Hollywood (and even Hollywood producers preferred to scrawl hasty fax notes rather than to dictate formal letters). But soon he found another use for the machine. On Saturday 25 of that month, The Australian's colour magazine carried a page on which six playwrights nominated their three favourite playwrights. None mentioned Williamson and the next morning he composed a fax and sent it to each of the six participants in this page-filling exercise:

My name is David Williamson. You haven't heard of me. I'd like to tell you about a strange dream I had the other night. I dreamt that I was a respected Australian playwright. I dreamt that for twenty years I had attracted large audiences to the theatre to see plays I had written which were well structured, funny, incisive and said something fairly pertinent about Australia and the human condition. I dreamt all of you were asked what playwrights you admired and none of you mentioned me, not even in a condescending footnote. I felt shattered at the injustice, then enraged, then desolate as I wondered what in the hell all that twenty years of effort meant.
... In a bizarre fit of self delusion I actually felt that you might feel that I'd made the Australian play a more solidly accepted phenomena [sic] in a theatrical ethos which didn't particularly prize it when I started writing, and in having done so made it a little easier for everyone ... I thought that the one good thing was that now I know how you do feel about my work and I won't embarrass any of you by behaving as if I am your artistic equal. Then I said fuck the lot of you and woke up.

You'll notice the way this has been carefully built up to the punch line, just like all those speeches Williamson has given his comic characters, speeches which allow them unwittingly to reveal their insecurities and contradictions to the audience. By quoting it in my biography, rather than summarising and analysing it, I was allowing him to reveal himself (most of all as a compulsive writer) to my audience.

But while I have talked about the essential contribution libraries make to biography, by supplying the data ( although I have given mainly examples of how the seemingly trivial can be found to yield not only information but also enlivening or revealing detail) biographers, as they go about sifting and resifting this miscellaneous data, can also assist in the identification and processing of papers. For example, I found that an unpublished Henry Lawson manuscript in Melbourne's La Trobe Library was lacking pages and that these were in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand's national library. I made the connection not by serendipitously finding myself in Wellington after having examined the manuscript in Melbourne, but even more serendipitously by coming across photocopies of the Wellington pages in the University of Sydney Library.

Another less complicated, and more relevant instance is my finding in the University of Melbourne Archives that an untitled, unsigned playscript among Betty Burstall's papers relating to La Mama (the theatre where The Removalists was first performed) is an early full-length play which Williamson had sent her and which they had both completely forgotten.

These are minor examples of those much grander 'discoveries' we often read about; like those of a new Shakespeare poem in a library at Oxford or a discarded chapter of Huckleberry Finn.

Although such discoveries are always being made, the papers on which they are based were never lost. I see this seminar implicitly acknowledging the inestimable role that libraries play in preserving documents of all kinds, the full significance of which may await the discoveries of the future biographers and scholars.


Return to Documenting a Life | NLA Seminars | Past Seminars | Online Seminars

About This Site | Copyright | Privacy | Accessibility | Site Map | Site Search | Content A-Z | Contact Us