The particular contribution of biography, as a way of examining the past, is that when fully imagined it can move about and, in the manner of a cubist painting, offer a number of perspectives almost simultaneously. A good example is provided by Hocking in her account of Whitlam deciding to go to China in 1971. First we are given the international setting; then the discussion within the Labor party about the wisdom of approaching the Chinese; then – a move calculated to reveal the character of the biographical subject – Gough’s decision to ‘crash through’, taking the bit between his teeth and rejecting the views of his advisers. There follows the terrible wait for a Chinese response: Hocking could have shifted to the foreground here, as she has elsewhere, giving us a glimpse of how the Whitlam family handled tension. But we move on to the visit – and another dimension, as Gough walks into the Great Hall of the People and, seeing all the journalists there, suddenly realises that instead of there being a private exchange with the Chinese leadership, every word is to be reported. Later, there is a puzzling laugh from Zhou Enlai when the unlikelihood of a Nixon visit to China is mentioned; and then, just as Gough and his party land in Tokyo, we are back on the plane of international relations again: a Nixon visit is announced. Here the biographer tells the story by constant deft movement, offering a fuller view in the round than could be achieved quite so effectively in any other genre or by other kinds of analysis. This is done through a succession of radical shifts in perspective, brought together in a seamless narrative.

How is such seamlessness achieved? Not just by writing an all-encompassing, inflected narrative, but also by attention to telling detail – Zhou Enlai’s laugh – and successfully incorporating it. Compression is as much a tool of the biographical imagination as cinemascopic range; making one thing stand for many, or summing up a minor player in a phrase. Indeed, epigrams can be useful: ‘He had the manners of a cavalry officer, and looked like the horse.’ 

I have written two biographies. The first, Lyrebird Rising (1994), traces the story of Louise Hanson-Dyer, who emerged in her thirties as a patron of the arts in Melbourne, notably in music; she was also the ‘Mrs Dyer’ who will be familiar to some readers as the promoter of the poet Shaw Neilson. By 1927, aged forty-three, she felt she had exhausted Melbourne’s cultural possibilities, so first went to London, and then Paris. There she consolidated her interest in early music by founding Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre – Lyrebird Press – to publish neglected works from the eighteenth century and earlier, some of which had never been published. Soon she was making recordings, and in 1950 the first long-playing records in Europe. In 1962, when she died, Oiseau-Lyre was arguably the most prestigious classical record label.

My second biography, A Three-Cornered Life, is of a more conventional figure, the historian W.K. Hancock. Yet while his expatriatism took the more usual form – beginning with a Rhodes Scholarship – what is most striking about Hancock is (to use one of his key words) his ‘span’. He is remembered for his seminal account of our country, Australia (1930), and perhaps for Discovering Monaro (1972), a pioneering regional study in environmental history. But he also wrote on nineteenth-century Italy, an incisive three-volume analysis of the contemporary British Commonwealth, a two-volume biography of the South African statesman Jan Christiaan Smuts, and various other works. To write a full biography of Hancock involves an exploration of the late British Empire and of how a boy who grew up in Gippsland came to relate to it.

Both books, while they trace the progress of a life, are also explorations of an ambience: the life as a periscope, looking at a distant, now vanished landscape. In the case of Hancock, it was when I was at the Australian National University that I suddenly realised that, being familiar with England, South Africa and Melbourne, I shared a similar quadrilateral with Hancock. I might be ideally placed to write the life of someone often described as Australia’s most distinguished historian.

There was also another motivation. David Malouf once said that he found he could not write imaginatively about any incident until it was at least fifteen years old. Presumably by then its true contours had emerged, while vital surrounding material, having receded, was nonetheless sufficiently close at hand to be summoned up again if needed. In a similar fashion, as one becomes older there is sometimes greater curiosity about things which, in one’s youth, were at their end or in decline. What were they like – and what impelled them – when they were in their prime?

Sometimes seeking to recover an ambience – a set of cultural patterns – can seem like joining up the dotted lines. Lyrebird Rising starts this way:

This book began a long time ago. Perhaps on that day in 1978, when I was discussing articles for the Australian Dictionary of Biography with Geoff Serle, and offered to do the one on Louise; or it may have been when, as a student in 1961, I bought my first Oiseau-Lyre record; or even at that moment in 1951 when, talking to the boy sitting next to me, I was quelled by the baton of the music master, Roy Warren, who continued to conduct with his other hand until the song had finished, whereupon he slowly turned his head to deal with me. It was my first encounter with professionalism. Much later, I found that Warren had been a baritone who had sung for Louise. By then I had learned that the ‘Mrs Dyer’ to whom my mother and aunt would allude in wonderment over cups of tea together was not some boring society lady but, improbably, the force behind the records. Oiseau-Lyre was not simply a highly appropriate name chosen by the stylish French; it was, as should have been evident at the beginning, an Australian venture in another hemisphere.

Both of these books, though, are about expatriatism, and the British-Australian milieu is primary to each of them. We tend to forget that, as late as 1960, the AMA (Australian Medical Association) was still styled the BMA; the Church of England was precisely that, not yet the Anglican Church of Australia; and young would-be academics heading off to Oxford and Cambridge were expected to do an undergraduate degree all over again. It was only at the end of the decade that Australian theatre was established on a permanent continuous basis; and a little later again that we developed an Australian film industry.

An underlying question is, what light do these lives shed on the incompleteness of Australia – i.e. the incompleteness of its cultural infrastructure – a condition which lasted until the last third of the twentieth century? And what effect did this have on them? Keith Hancock, while likening himself to a ‘deserter’, for much of his life experienced a real tension between ‘country’ – Australia – and his ‘calling’ as an historian, which, in those days, he felt could best be followed overseas.

For a long time, those Australians who worked outside Australia were regarded as no longer kosher: but they, too, as is now realised, made their contribution, and it is often interesting to see the extent to which their Australian origins shaped their concerns, even when working abroad. As the postmodern world has made international travel almost commonplace, the emphasis has switched to integrating them into the national story and the national effort – even as government policy. Expatriates are no longer seen as suffering from their own peculiar form of bipolar disorder.

There is often an important component missing in biographies – place. It can be used to set the tone. In A Three-Cornered Life, Hancock’s unusual mobility – he lived in a dozen places – compelled me to set the scene each time, for most chapters bring forward a new set of characters and a new set of problems. So a distinctive note has to be found at the beginning:

Adelaide, which had been waiting for Keith Hancock for two years, was in 1926 a city of some 300,000 people. Flat and rectilinear – and then the third largest Australian city – it was a place which, mindful of its non-convict origins, had become rather self-satisfied. The ‘City of Culture’ it liked to call itself; but in that area more than most it had become inert. The Art Gallery rested comfortably with the notion that it was one of the finest in the Southern Hemisphere, a comparison as imprecise as it was impressive. Meanwhile the neighbouring Museum displayed recent acquisitions in a glass case that had lain undisturbed for twenty years. They would remain so for another fifty.

This emphasis on Adelaide’s relative stagnation in the 1920s is deliberate. The place afforded a complete contrast to All Souls College, Oxford, where Hancock had just been, hobnobbing with Cabinet ministers and opinion leaders as well as the academic great. Moreover, Hancock’s concern that Australia might have run out of steam is better understood when one examines his immediate context, and his reaction to it.

With many biographies, the first chapter is often problematic. This is less so with creative writers, although there it can take the form of the early life having been alchemised, not only in fiction, but also in non-fictive accounts. Mary Lord, for example, showed how, even allowing for street renumbering, it was plain that Hal Porter had not lived in one of the grander houses in Bellair Street, Kensington. It was as though the Watcher from the Cast-Iron Balcony had no balcony from which to watch.

More usually, with historical subjects, there may be a dearth of material about their early lives. There may indeed not be enough to draft the opening chapter until well on with the project. This was the case with Louise Hanson-Dyer, who was a late developer, making little impact in Melbourne before she was thirty-five, and none in the wider world before she was forty-five. Practically nothing of her correspondence – either way – had survived from earlier times.

In some respects, though, I was in luck. One of Louise’s brothers survived into his nineties, and, of course, was sharpest in recollecting his early life. And what also survived, I found when I got to Paris, was Hanson-Dyer’s library. Apart from the musical component – valued at $5 million when it recently came to the University of Melbourne – there was the general collection of books. I soon realised that there was a seam to mine here: not only for clues about Louise’s tastes, and influences upon her, but also as to whom she knew. So I set to, perched on a stepladder with a tape recorder, reading inscriptions and marginalia. These, plus a lot of surviving photographs – an often undervalued resource – gave me sufficient flesh to put on the bare bones of her early life. Nevertheless, since it was essentially private – despite having been lived in the glare of publicity, given her politician/entrepreneurial father – I telescoped the first thirty-six years as ‘The Education of Young Louise’.

With Hancock, there was the reverse problem. He wrote both an autobiography, Country and Calling (1954) and an autobiographical set of essays, Professing History (1976). I decided to write the biography as much as possible independently of them: noting Hancock’s interactions (and therefore possible sources) and also his reaction to events, but treating everything mentioned there with a measure of scepticism. Just how profitably that can be done, incidentally, can be seen in Ann Blainey’s recent biography I Am Melba (2008), which, taking nothing on trust, illuminatingly examines all sorts of questions concerning the great singer, as if the five other biographies – and a plush-and-velvet autobiography – had never been written. Since Hancock was a rather more truthful character, there is very little direct overturning of his narrative in mine. Nevertheless he did make omissions and elisions, and so the emphases in the life accounts are often quite different.

A life story is a narrative waiting to be excavated. The complication, of course, is evidence; there are always going to be gaps. The Oxford biographer Enid Starkie, who managed to write dreary lives of Rimbaud and Verlaine (prim Englishwoman meets Gallic tearaways) proceeded in her books like one of the early navigators past an unknown coast: where there were gaps in the evidence, she traced a gulf, and where there was a cluster of documents, a cape. Not very satisfactory.

I had a particular problem in the Hancock biography with Theaden, his first wife, and the determining marriage. It had to be written about, not only from a sense of justice, but also because if people knew anything about Hancock’s private life, it was that he had a difficult marriage. The prime problem for me was that he destroyed their correspondence when Theaden died. Fortunately, some of her letters to other people had survived; much could be recovered. The difficulty was that there were points, important ones, at which I knew little. So the silences and the remaining articulations were arbitrary, bearing no relation to their relative importance. Another difficulty was that she took little part in Hancock’s career, except to advise behind the scenes. It became plain that what was needed was a special chapter on the marriage, from go to whoa. That way the bumps would be evened out, and necessary speculation could be subsumed in shaping the material, elucidating Theaden’s dynamic. By placing the chapter just after the point at which she died, it would function as a gloss, a necessary commentary on Hancock’s own story. By adopting this method, Theaden emerges as a far stronger presence in the biography than she would have had her story, such as we know it, been incorporated as the book proceeded. 

A biography should be like a life, and reflect its rhythms. Unlike life, written time should never drag; indeed the pace must, from time to time, quicken. Sometimes even great biographers, such as Richard Ellmann, fall into the fallacy of ‘equal time’. He duly recounts the Trieste episode of James Joyce’s life, the period in that polyglot port which proved so generative. But one feels that too little space has been given to it, unlike the later period in Paris, when, apart from his writing, Joyce did little else but measure out his life in coffee spoons. With Hancock, I give one short chapter on his period at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London. But to one episode that arose from it, the mission to Uganda in 1954, I give another quite lengthy chapter. The reason is that this was an intricate political drama, with Hancock at the centre, patiently negotiating, with the result that Uganda was edged towards self-government, emerging a little later as the first independent East African state.

A related issue concerns breaking up the work into chapters. With Louise Hanson-Dyer, I had two parallel, omnibus chapters on the 1930s, one on her press and the music, and the other on everything else. I intended to extend these until the outbreak of war in 1939. But then I realised that, in having fled France temporarily at the time of Munich in 1938, for Louise closure and new beginnings had come earlier. In 1938, her first husband died and she married her second – who would become a partner in her life’s work – while she also began both a massive scholarly series and Oiseau-Lyre recordings. It would be better, I decided at the eleventh hour, to have a short chapter covering these events, then have it cut short by the cataclysm of the war.

I remember interviewing the man who managed recording for Oiseau-Lyre in London. He was puzzled by the way Louise Hanson-Dyer had taken to him from the word go. Well, I said, you’re a Scot: she went to a Presbyterian Ladies’ College, lived in Edinburgh for a year, and later, her first husband was Scottish: she knew the ambience and trusted Scots. So Jimmy Burnett, the Scotsman, indicates the importance of recurrences – however much to the subject, even more so to the biographer. For they can reveal the basic dispositions of the personality.

In the early years of the ANU, Hancock had to deal with two destructive men: the academic Lord Lindsay and the journalist-historian M.H. Ellis. In both cases he came up against people who would not compromise, having the paranoid’s sense of incorruptible purpose. Hancock, trusting and Christian, was corroded by these ‘two exhausting quarrels’. For the biographer they are instructive, for they reveal his basic values. The recurrence makes that plainer.

Life is full of recurrence, and a biographer can use it constructively. In Lyrebird Rising, since I used him in two separate contexts, I decided to introduce a character twice, the second time with no allusion to the first. This built up the musician E.G. Whittaker, as he met Louise Hanson-Dyer at Spencer Street station, and also presented him as a blank sheet on which could be inscribed their relationship. Such a separation of contexts is, of course, quite lifelike – how many times are we reintroduced to people ourselves? 

A related problem concerns the telling of the story of a character who enters the narrative. Historians usually do so the moment that person appears; but this may not be the ideal time. Much has been written about Hancock’s rupture with the ANU in 1949, and Vice-Chancellor Sir Douglas Copland’s part in it. Copland’s background is not recounted by me the moment his name comes up: gradually, as in life, we draw closer to him. His appointment is indicated, then his difficulty in getting to the ANU from war-torn China; some correspondence is analysed, and then the vital discussion with Hancock on a park bench in London. It is at this point that I give Copland’s background, to build him up as the contestant; that is where it is needed, for he triumphs over Hancock, who after all is borne along by the velocity of the book.

A biographer may not be a creative writer in the usual sense of the term, but he or she must be a discriminating processor of factual material, drawing from a wide variety of sources and levels in order to make the subject live. Moreover, owing to gaps, the biographer’s hand is often incomplete, yet must be played as effectively as possible. To change the analogy: what one hopes for is an accurate yet imaginative portrait of the subject. It must never be a still life.