Bob Reece, Fremantle, WA

Nicholas Brown replies:

My point in reviewing Bob Reece’s and Susanna de Vries’s studies of Daisy Bates was that, while both books provided valuable perspectives, ‘neither offers a resolved assessment of their subject as an historical figure’. I noted Professor Reece’s aim to base his study on Bates’s letters and published writings, and accordingly placed his work alongside that of others who have similarly contextualised such writing. Rather than merely summarising Meaghan Morris’s and Russell McGregor ‘opinions’, I sought (briefly) to compare their alternative assessments to Professor Reece’s own polarity of science and journalism. This, I would have thought, is a reasonable move in criticism that seeks to do a bit more than summarise the content of a book, and a necessary dimension of his own commitment to give greater depth to understandings of Bates’s significance.

Brenda Niall replies to Darleen Bungey

Dear Editor,

The circumstances make it highly unlikely that Martin Boyd rose from his deathbed and projected himself from his hospital window in Rome shortly after being judged by his spiritual adviser and confessor to be at peace; and that a conspiracy of nuns, nurses, priest, doctor and undertaker concealed the cause of death. But the point surely is that the standard of proof of suicide should be a high one; and this was certainly not met by the author of Arthur Boyd: A Life.

Darleen Bungey (Commentary, April 2008) confuses hearsay with evidence. I have never doubted Yvonne Boyd’s recall, nor her truthfulness, but she cannot be expected to verify a story told to her sister-in-law by an unknown person, and then passed on to her.

The only known documentation of Boyd’s final hours suggests a peaceful death in bed. Unless new evidence somehow comes to light, there the matter should rest.

Brenda Niall, Camberwell, Vic.

Corroboration needed

Dear Editor,

In her reply to Brenda Niall regarding the circumstances of Martin Boyd’s death, Darleen Bungey insists on giving credence to the indirect and retrospective testimony of Yvonne Boyd. Niall’s witness, Father John Guidera, is also depending to a degree on memory, though at least it is of a face-to-face encounter very close to the time in question. Neither testimony, as it happens, can provide sure and sufficient proof of the immediate causes of the novelist’s death. But the first thing that a responsible and scrupulous scholar would do to investigate a rumour of suicide would be to consider the evidence of any available death or burial certificate and to check for any surviving hospital documentation and police or inquest reports. In sticking by her original story, the onus is still on Bungey to attempt to do this and to reassure her readers and her critics that she has made these time-consuming but rudimentary efforts.

As reported in an article on this controversy in the Sydney Morning Herald (27 March 2008), ‘Bungey asks why anyone would fabricate a report of suicide?’ It’s a question she needs to address to herself. In the absence of corroborative official evidence, a fabrication is precisely what her own story and its purely anecdotal sources will appear to be.

Ian Britain, Canberra, ACT

But did it happen?

Dear Editor,

In responding to Brenda Niall’s careful and considered questioning of the circumstances surrounding the death of Martin Boyd (Commentary, March 2008), Darleen Bungey has exercised her author’s prerogative to defend her views and her scholarship and to provide some account of her approach to the weighing of historical evidence. Those essential underpinnings of her Arthur Boyd: A Life were also called into question in Ian Britain’s forensic review (‘Undertaking a life’, February 2008). Using one of two spectacular examples, Britain’s concern was that, in relation to the death of Martin Boyd, Bungey had elevated uncorroborated hearsay into fact, namely that Boyd, ailing with cancer and close to death, had committed suicide by throwing himself from the window of his hospital room in Rome in June 1972.

Superficially, the source of this story seems impeccable. It comes from Yvonne Boyd (the widow of Arthur Boyd and the niece-in-law of Arthur’s Uncle Martin) who travelled to Rome with her sister-in-law Mary Perceval (now Nolan) to attend Martin’s funeral. We are told that Yvonne was given the details of Martin’s death by Mary Perceval on the flight to Rome and that the ‘important detail in Yvonne Boyd’s recounting of Martin Boyd’s death is that his body was found in the garden below his hospital window’. But we are not told who communicated the original story to Mary Perceval, and to date there has apparently been no statement issued by Mary of her understanding of the circumstances in which Martin Boyd met his death. Instead, Bungey assures us of her regard for Yvonne Boyd as a witness for her ‘veracity, fairness and powers of recall’. Yvonne Boyd may have confided her account to Bungey in good faith, but is that account on its own sufficient to stand without qualification or questioning?

In the panorama of Bungey’s ambitious biography of Arthur Boyd, the death of Martin, however it occurred, amounts to little more than incidental detail. But, if true, it is a revelatory detail about one of the other famous Boyds and it is a fact that deserves to be treated with care. That surely is the point of the concerns raised first in passing by Ian Britain and secondly, in greater detail and authority, by Brenda Niall, who is Martin Boyd’s biographer and who has also written a widely admired collective biography of members of the Boyd family.

In defending herself, Bungey resorts to a sharp and vindictive attack on Brenda Niall, whose own scholarship and findings she seeks to undermine. The imputation is that Niall, presuming ‘to know the mind of Martin Boyd, but also the mind of God’, has a moral or philosophical distaste for suicide that has prompted her to reject outright the possibility of such a death for her biographical subject. In her published criticism of Bungey’s account in ABR, Niall wondered why, in their several conversations together, Bungey had chosen not to discuss the circumstances of Martin’s death. Now, in her defence, Bungey offers the ingenuous explanation that, since Niall had published her Martin Boyd: A Life (1988) without reference to the suicide story, she believed she knew nothing about it. The implication here is that Bungey therefore saw no point in testing the idea – startling, if true – and the evidence with one of the leading experts on the complex Boyd family story. Instead, Niall’s calling into question Bungey’s suicide story is dismissed as ‘a plaintive and defensive attack’ by a biographer who had somehow missed an important piece of evidence. In a saccharine tone, Bungey declares her understanding of ‘how annoying it must be to write a full biography of a person and learn later of information that may have been available’.

Bungey compounds her criticism of Niall with her scornful dismissal of the idea that any reliance should be placed on the letter written from Rome by Father John Guidera to the Australian academic and critic Dorothy Green in the immediate aftermath of Martin Boyd’s death. Guidera was not a deathbed witness, but he had sat by Martin’s bed ‘a couple of hours’ before death had claimed the writer ‘very peacefully’, if also ‘quite suddenly in the end’. In her recent reviewing of the suicide theory, Brenda Niall, on a ‘lucky guess’, had thought to check in the Dorothy Green Papers in the National Library in Canberra to check if Green (who had long been interested in Martin Boyd) had received any accounts of his death. Bungey suggests some dereliction in Niall’s original research efforts. Why was the Green archive ignored twenty years previously? The answer is that Green herself was still alive (she died in 1991) and that her papers were yet to be added to an institutional library. But more than that, twenty years ago was there in fact any question that Martin Boyd had died in any other way than ‘very peacefully and quite suddenly’? Niall surely was not required then to speculate on a possible but in any case unlikely suicide.

In her efforts to discredit Guidera’s brief post hoc account of Martin’s death and Niall’s interpretation of it, Bungey stands guilty of a sleight of hand. Guidera’s ‘a couple of hours’ after visiting the dying Martin is exaggerated into ‘several hours’, quite a different estimate of time.

Does any of this matter? Bungey suggests not. Suicide is a relative commonplace and therefore, she implies, not especially remarkable, even though there will be those like Brenda Niall who, ‘for religious reasons’, might wish to suppress the fact. But here is the unfairness of her criticism of Brenda Niall, who called into question Martin Boyd’s ‘suicide’ for a range of legitimate concerns about evidence and proof, not of morality and certainly not of her own religious belief. Niall’s test is, did it happen? Yvonne Boyd’s uncorroborated testimony may raise doubts but – especially when interrogated – it does not offer proof. Bungey’s defence, rather than laying to rest the critical and factual concerns of Ian Britain and Brenda Niall, exposes her own research and scholarship to doubt.

For the record, I should declare here an interest of my own. I was taught many years ago by Brenda Niall in my Arts course at Monash University and I collaborated with her in the compilation of The Oxford Book of Australian Letters (1998).

John Thompson, Rushcutters Bay, NSW

JASAL online

Dear Editor,

It was pleasing to read in the April issue Georgie Arnott’s review of ‘Spectres, Screens, Shadows, Mirrors’, a special issue of JASAL: The Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. It will be of interest to ABR readers to know that this and all other issues of JASAL are freely available from the National Library’s Open Publish website. The JASAL web address is: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/index.

JASAL provides coverage of all aspects of Australian literature from leading national and international scholars.

Paul Genoni, co-editor, JASAL