However, I can’t see it doing any of these things. What Broomstick does provide is an idiosyncratic account of some of the key events of recent decades (such as the corporatisation of universities and public broadcasters) and an opportunity for contemporary readers to revisit or reconsider some of these events. But it does not itself provide the means for doing so. While its completion in the face of a most debilitating condition is admirable and a clear indication of the author’s personal fortitude (which was never in doubt), this remains a strangely personal, even private book in the very restricted account it provides of these times and events. A reader from outside Kramer’s own circle of friends, family, and familiars is left feeling more than a little mystified, wondering about the value of the work and its commentary on pre- and post-World War II Australia.

Leonie with Tyrannosaurus rex, given to her in acknowledgement of her ferocityThe first difficulty for Kramer’s reader is the genre question, more particularly the way that the memoir form draws ‘personal reflection’ together with more public modes of commentary and reflection. Managing the balance or the alignment between these divergent domains is always an issue for memoirists, and this book traverses the divide awkwardly at best. While the Preface, written by the author’s daughters, claims that ‘the biographical information was intended only as the context for her ideas’, Kramer’s personal story frames and indeed dominates the book, providing the rationale for its ideological points of departure – ‘an account of how a child from Melbourne, whose parents had very modest means, and who lived a settled and happy childhood, came to be in a position to reflect on fifty years of public life’ – as well as the bulk of its content. The brief account of (relatively) humble beginnings as the basis for an ascent into public life as suggestive in itself of social mobility, is offered as somehow self-explanatory, and the first chapter moves quickly to provide an account of the fractious and ignominious events that saw Kramer’s departure from the position of chancellor of the University of Sydney just over a decade ago. Those readers who witnessed these events through the news media at the time will finish this account of those events not really any the wiser. Kramer’s memoir certainly provides her perspective on the events – her outrage, and her feisty determination to withstand what she saw as an unjustified and personally directed campaign – but no information or analysis that might explain or account for the dispute in new ways. A similar response might accompany a reading of the final chapter, ‘The ABC’, which covers another acrimonious and contested public fracas from two decades earlier, in the dying days of Kramer’s chairmanship of the ABC. Here again we are left with the image of a forceful figure remaining true to her principles and to her sense of the public charter of the ABC, but no new insight into the events centring on the ABC’s decision to broadcast ‘without fear or favour’ a Four Corners program ‘The Big League’, which made explosive revelations about corruption in the NSW Rugby League and links to the then ALP state government.

At the heart of Broomstick is its account of the academy, and this is its most significant shortcoming. Kramer’s criticism of the ‘business model’ that was beginning to be imposed on Sydney University during her tenure as chancellor might have held interest for those readers in academic positions in the humanities today, working with and through the dramatic changes brought about by the shift toward corporate, or indeed commercial, models as the basis for tertiary education and research. However, Kramer’s criticism is directed primarily at the agents of dissent whom she discovered around her; that is to say her opponents within the Sydney University Senate in the late 1990s. The target of the criticism is characterised, moreover, finally as a failing of the conservative premise of the university: that is, as a falling away from an imagined ideal of academic life, which is provided in the course of the book simply by Kramer’s own life story, her studies at the Universities of Melbourne and Chancellor Leonie Kramer, Nelson Mandela, and Gavin Brown, 2000Oxford, and her judgements on the kinds of abiding value provided by scholarly work.

This is not in itself necessarily a problem, but the detail and texture of that scholarly work is strangely absent from the book. While we are privy to the progress of her research on Henry Handel Richardson and on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century satire for her undergraduate and doctoral theses, there is otherwise almost no sense of what constituted scholarly work in literature in this period. Kramer offers the odd reference to a canonical writer – for instance, ‘The park [Studley Park, in Kew, Melbourne, where the young Leonie grew up] was a presence, like the landscapes in Thomas Hardy’s novels’ – but we are left to our own devices in pursuing such associations. Given that for two decades Kramer occupied the first-ever professorial chair of Australian literature, it is astonishing that Broomstick provides no mention at all of other work being done in Australian literature, nor any sense of the questions and concerns that exercised and preoccupied other scholars during this period, which saw the field itself being shaped and defined. A sturdier defence of the value of literary scholarship, and of the humanities more broadly, would have been of some interest to contemporary academics in this area, as well as general readers, but the possibility for providing this lapses in the face of general descriptions of reading and the frequently invoked importance of distinguishing between ‘quality literature’ and ‘bad writing’.

The Preface outlines the memoir’s approach in the observation that ‘After writing about her experience of Oxford and her first encounters with Europe, Leonie recognised that she had made a journey that many Australians have made before and since, not just a physical journey to the other side of the world but a cultural journey back to our roots.’ In the end, Broomstick might be seen as the casualty of its own recursive and overly circumscribed grasp of the nature of Australia’s international roots and relationships, its value resting in the domain of personal recollection rather than in the public or intellectual life of the nation.