Ann Nugent reports on the Library’s biography conference, held late last year How to describe this two-day conference? I thought of a rich cake crammed with fruit and laced with brandy; but it was more than that. A performance work of movement and voice? Better, but still an insufficient analogy for the National Library’s conference on biography and autobiography, aptly named The Secret Self. I’d been expecting good quality papers delivered by leading writers. After all, that was promised in the program. What I experienced was much more, a wonderful probing of life-writing which involved me intellectually and emotionally. Sir James Gobbo, Chair of the National Library of Australia Council, opened the conference to a standing-room only audience in the Library’s Theatre. Because of ill health, the opening paper by Professor John Ritchie (General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography) was read by his colleague and friend Ian Hancock. The paper raised questions about the nature of biography, the distinctions that might be made between fact and fiction, and the ethical issues that should be considered by writers of biography—issues that were taken up by subsequent speakers. Ritchie’s paper advised biographers ‘to write like angels’ and ‘get on with the story’. However, he also suggested that biographers should respect that ‘their subjects are more intelligent than themselves.’ This questioning of the godlike omniscience of biographers proved another continuing thread in the conference. The 18 speakers and panelists were mainly Australasian writers, many with several published titles to their names. The five main speakers drove in the stakes: biography, literary biography, political biography and memoir, and autobiography. Panel sessions added variety and depth to the program. Michael King, author of Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame, enigmatically titled his paper ‘Of Biscuit Tins and Coral Reefs’. King detailed many of the hazards that can beset the biographer of a living subject, particularly if they are as sensitive to public gaze as Janet Frame. In his view there are facts about the subject that a biographer should not yet reveal. So, he said, metaphorically speaking, he had a biscuit tin (a reference to the burial in a biscuit tin of what was presumed to be Thomas Hardy’s heart). King’s ‘biscuit tin’ is a box file of sensitive materials embargoed during Janet Frame’s lifetime. Questioned about the legitimacy of revealing or not revealing facts, King replied, ‘In the long term everyone has the right to know everything; in the short term we need to be sensitive to the feelings of others.’ Thus, over time, he believes the ‘compassionate truth’ of the biography is supplanted by the ‘dispassionate truth’ of the wider variety. Wrestling with the Angel was written in consultation with Frame, but it is not an ‘authorised’ biography. However King believes that, as the primary biography of Frame, his book sets in motion a continuous process of biography writing. The process builds on past biographies rather like the accretion that takes place in the ‘coral reefs’ of his paper’s title. The family was immediately to the fore in the panel session that followed. Peter Rose (poet, and editor of the Australian Book Review) led us to consider the ‘literary and moral ambiguities’ in his newly-released Rose Boys—the ‘boys’ being Peter’s father, the legendary Australian Rules footballer Bob Rose, Peter’s brother Bobby Rose junior, and Peter himself. Young Bobby’s football career was tragically cut short by an accident in 1974 that left him a quadriplegic. Peter Rose’s intimate memoir deals frankly with the consequences of that accident for the family. He describes the book’s counter-pointing of his brother’s story with his own as a dance between the writer and his family. Twenty-five years after the accident, Bobby Rose junior died what his brother describes as ‘a hard death.’ Peter Rose writes and speaks with shattering candour.
The second panelist, Margaret Barbalet, asked ‘to what extent are fictional works disguised autobiography?’ —a question addressed by other speakers at the conference. In part-answer to her question, Barbalet recounted her own childhood in remote Tasmania, where she was engrossed by language and the natural world. Central in her childhood was her beautiful scientist-turned-housewife mother. But in case we should confuse her family with her fiction, she warned that she always wrote about real places, but not about real people. Yet one wonders—her questioning of the passivity implicit in iconic feminine beauty of the Grace Kelly type hinted at the complexity of her relationship with her own mother. Barbalet said she intends to write a family memoir, but ‘I can’t write it yet—I don’t want to write it for quite a while.’ What standing should be given to the genre of ‘biographical fiction’, in which the writer fictionalises the gaps in the record? In his ‘experimental’ biography The White: Last Days in the Antarctic Journeys of Scott and Mawson 1911–1913, poet and critic Adrian Caesar calls into question the sexuality and the sexual relationships of the two explorers. Caesar mounted a spirited defence of his approach, arguing that the boundary between fiction and non-fiction is not clear. However he would not, he said, write ‘imaginative interpretations’ of a ‘living person or a person not already on the public record’. In a later panel session titled ‘Stories of the Family’, Louis Nowra discussed the background to his family memoir The Twelfth of Never, published in 1999. Nowra was born on 12 December, and this was also the day that his ‘beautiful and intelligent mother’ became gloomy each year. Here the family memoirist becomes psychological archaeologist, probing the sub-conscious origins of the sombre twelfths of December. It’s all there, a father who terrorises his children, a daughter who shoots her father, racism, the many lovers—all of it dredged from the contradictory memories of family members and his sister’s historical ‘facts’. (Little wonder that Frank Moorhouse, guest speaker at the Conference dinner, remarked that there’s ‘no greater curse than finding out that you have a writer in the family’.) Sharing the panel with Nowra were Sandra Phillips and Keiko Tamura. Phillips, an Indigenous rights worker, facilitator and editor, brought an Aboriginal perspective to the proceedings. Commenting on contemporary Aboriginal narratives she warned that ‘it is unsafe to assume that we can all understand each other because we are using the same alphabetical markings [English].’ Keiko Tamura gave another cross-cultural perspective. In her recently published Michi’s Memories: The Story of a Japanese War Bride she tells the story of a Japanese woman shut out by language and culture from the prevailing Australian society. Her aim in telling Michi’s story was, she says, ‘to give voice to the extra-ordinariness’ of the war brides’ stories The next session switched to political biography. Neal Blewett, former Minister in the Hawke and Keating Governments, made a distinction between what he called ‘political memoirs’ and ‘political biography’. In political memoirs, the ‘secret self is masked by the public persona’. Blewett said Paul Keating’s The Inside Story and Robert Tickner’s Taking a Stand: Land Rights to Reconciliation are impersonal books—and meant to be—that tell little of the writers. In contrast, Bill Hayden’s Hayden: An Autobiography, Tom Uren’s Straight Left and Susan Ryan’s Catching the Waves: Life In and Out of Politics, are seen by Blewett as tending towards autobiography, because the writers pay more attention to the non-political (including childhood), and they are more reflective about their public lives. To the larger-than-life: The Hawke Memoirs, says Blewett, are egotistical; they harangue; there is no introspection. Tellingly, there is no reference to Hayden’s fall. Yet Hawke’s book, in Blewett’s opinion, is ‘the best and most readable provided by any Australian Prime Minister’. Graham Richardson’s Whatever It Takes is dismissed as ‘the most indiscreet of all these works’. In Blewett’s taxonomy, John Button’s As It Happened provides a bridge between political memoir and autobiography. Blewett praised Button’s book as ‘the best written of all these books’—entertaining with anecdote, and with a subtle ‘perhaps too subtle presentation of self’. ‘Perhaps,’ says Blewett, ‘the affectation of having no mask is the greatest affectation of all,’ a comment that he admits could be applied to his own ‘memoir’, A Cabinet Diary: A Personal Record of the First Keating Government. Blewett accepted John Dawkins’ comment that he (Blewett) is ‘a shadowy figure in his own diary’—no ‘secret self’ to be found here. It was stimulating to hear such intelligent and intricate analysis of these books by a speaker who knew both the texts and their authors, and who himself had been privy to the political events which had motivated much of the writing—notably the overthrow of Bill Hayden by Bob Hawke, in 1983.
If our thirst for political biography had not been quenched by Neal Blewett’s talk, the next panel was sure to be sufficient. Professional political biographers—Shaun Carney (biographer of Peter Costello), Christine Wallace (biographer of John Hewson and Germaine Greer), and David Day (author of John Curtin: A Life, and Chifley)—all gave inside takes on writing the lives of political figures. Day Two of the conference brought back the family—never far from the surface. Most fascinating were the echoes that emerged between the life being written and the biographer’s own life. Nadia Wheatley, biographer of Charmaine Clift, dealt with the actual ‘crossings’ between her own life and that of her subject. Wheatley knew Clift well, and for seven years (1972 to 1979) had been the lover of Clift’s son, Martin Johnston. Wheatley warned against the biographer’s ‘over-identification’ with the subject, of ‘doing in biography with the subject what the writer does with a character in fiction’. After all, Charmaine Clift had already been fictionalised as a character in her husband George Johnston’s Clean Straw for Nothing. Acknowledging that filling in the gaps and breaking the silences is the duty of the biographer, Wheatley admitted that this became more complex when the biographer had been intimately involved with the subject and her family. Wheatley recounted her dilemma in relation to redefining Charmaine Clift’s own childhood, and Clift’s relinquishing of her first daughter for adoption. Wheatley said that sensitivity to the feelings of the family prevented her revealing this information until after the death of Clift’s sister, Margaret. By that time, 21 years after Wheatley had started the biography, Clift’s daughter had publicly identified herself. In the next panel session, Helen Garner related that one critic reviewing her novel Monkey Grip said that all she’d done was to ‘publish her own diary’. ‘I did,’ confessed Garner, ‘but I cut out the boring bits and changed the names.’ Garner went on to give a good defence of the craft of diary writing. The diary she contended ‘does not write itself’. This statement brought to the foreground a continuing theme of the conference—who, or what, is the ‘I’ of the personal narrative. Garner described the process of finding the ‘I’ as a ‘crystallisation of persona’—whereas Robert Dessaix suggested that in seeking the ‘I’, the writer ‘auditions voices and chooses the one that performs best’. One of the most affecting segments of the conference was given by Ruth Cracknell when she read from her Journey from Venice, a moving tribute to her dead husband. She wrote the book she said, ‘because I was compelled to write it … to say “look at him and marvel”.’ Fellow panellist Andrew Riemer confirmed a similar ‘compulsion to write’ as the motivation for his book of memory, Inside Outside—Life between Two Worlds. The last speaker at the conference, Robert Dessaix, gave a very polished performance—disarmingly so. Dessaix’s paper, titled ‘Portrait in the Mirror: Approaching Autobiography’, focused on the construction of what Dessaix termed ‘first person stories that say “I”.’ At first Dessaix wooed his audience with his wit. The laughs came easily. Then the tone changed, and almost without our realising it, laughter gave way to a quasi-religious hush. Dessaix invited us into his confidence, and we were mesmerised by his glistening web of words. Quite early in his talk, Dessaix had described the work of New Zealand choreographer and dancer, Michael Parmenter—how through monologue and movement, Parmenter bared his AIDS-affected body to his audience—leaving himself ‘utterly vulnerable’. Dessaix did not bare his body—he bared his soul, or so we thought. ‘I’m not being post-modern,’ he assured us. ‘I ask for your trust while I’m telling you stories’ and ‘you’re invited into the secret places’. Place—we were back to Barbalet’s emphasis on place. But Dessaix was leading us deeper still: ‘I want to come home when I write,’ he confided. And, ‘I want to take my readers with me and so’, beguilingly now, ‘I write.’ But then the revelation: ‘What I keep hidden longest is the spiritual things’—followed by the confession, ‘I still don’t know how to do it’ (that is, write the spiritual things)—and finally an act of faith, ‘that for me is the most sacred place’. The personal ‘I’ and place intersect. We had passed through the mirror. The conference had come to its close.The Secret Self conference papers are to be published in the first issue of Meanjin in 2002. As well, the Library’s Oral History Collection recorded all sessions of the conference. Both records will provide rich resources, but neither could match the experience of participating in this idea-packed, conversation-provoking and thoroughly enjoyable event. ANN NUGENT is a Canberra-based freelance writer |
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