This six a.m. moment
in the cool-blue cool
of early morning
is not eternal.

A biographer follows the life of a chosen person or a chosen group or people, or perhaps a particular scene or epoch. An autobiographer, like a snail outed by the Sun, looks back at his or her tracks and tries to explain how he or she got this far, possibly hinting at vindication or in more extravagant mode, self-immolation. Unfortunately I am a poet, and a prose writer only to earn a living. My field is verse, but l am involved on a daily basis with literature in diverse forms, especially journalism, broadcasting, and reviewing. I believe also that I am a secret biographer and autobiographer, as so much of the poetry I write and read shadows the functions of biography.

For that reason, I shall begin by quoting from some of my own writing. I shall read a few short extracts from a poem I wrote several years ago while I worked in advertising. I was a copywriter, and the fine irony of my engagement shows in the name of my supposed expertise: I was assigned to the soi-disant Creative Department. As the American novelist Peter de Vries wrote, the energy expended in advertising is the most conspicuous example of waste in the history of the world. Thus many of us in the sad band of copywriters tried to pursue our real calling by writing our own works in the boss’s time. And we often took the life around us as subject matter.

In 1830, Georgiana Molloy stepped ashore at the remote settlement of Augusta, accompanying her husband to a new life in Western Australia. Maggie MacKellar tells us thaThree weeks later, in the month of May, when in England spring bursts from every hedgerow, Georgiana lay on a plank of wood in her tent, with an umbrella held over her to keep off the drips that leaked in through the canvas. Outside the rain poured down. There was no sweet scent of spring; instead the air was filled with the rank, harsh smell of eucalyptus. Around her the earth opened itself to welcome the winter season. Racked with contraction after contraction, Georgiana fought to give birth to her first child.

F

rank Welsh is ill-served by his publicists. His history of Australia, we are told, is the first to be written by a non-Australian. It is not: the American Hartley Grattan wrote probably the best of a number of earlier such works. Great Southern Land is trumpeted as drawing on sources from Britain, the US, South Africa and Canada to place Australia fully in a world context: in fact, it incorporates some material from British archives and fragments from elsewhere to illustrate Australia’s more obvious international links.

Luther’s Pine is a beautiful account of an old man’s encounter with his younger self. John Molony’s life has an iconic quality. His father fought on the Western Front during World War I, sustaining injury from mustard gas, before returning to marriage and settlement in the Mallee area of Western Victoria, close to Sea Lake. Sea Lake was also the home of John Shaw Neilsen. Young Molony, born in 1927, shared some of Neilsen’s ability to find beauty in an arid landscape: ‘in that poor country, no pauper was I.’

According to the conventional wisdom, Australians are not overly fond of official orations. Russel Ward’s so-called ‘typical Australian’ was ‘taciturn rather than talkative’, and John La Nauze, biographer of Alfred Deakin, noted that Australians were ‘inclined to associate sophisticated speaking with condescension or insincerity’. Alfred Deakin’s eloquence, he added, was ‘surpassingly rare’ in Australia. For Robin Boyd, it was probably just as well, for when Australians deigned to open pursed lips it revealed not only bad teeth, but ‘worse words’. The appearance of these two collections of Australian speeches – and another is due for release shortly, from Melbourne University Press – flies in the face of this orthodoxy. And it buries the myth that public cynicism towards political speechmaking – for politicians dominate both collections – has reached such stratospheric heights that we would all prefer a quiet doze than be subject even to an exuberant flight of rhetoric. Clearly, no matter how often speeches are spurned as chronic windbaggery, they retain the capacity to give meaning to the life of the nation and the affairs of state.

These two works claim to represent far more than the cream of the Australian rhetorical crop. Implicit in their very appearance is the view that not only does the nation have a distinctive rhetorical tradition but one that is worth preserving and celebrating. As their titles suggest, these are the speeches that have ‘made’ Australia and ‘shaped our nation’. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief: Australia at last, has a rhetorical pantheon of its own. Yet the publication of these two volumes at this particular point in the nation’s history invite both exploration and explanation. Why now? What has happened to overturn Australians’ suspicion of grand phrases and great visions? I suggest that it is not a new-found appreciation for stirring rhetoric but the sense that until now something has been lacking in Australian culture, and that the absence of an appreciation for the spoken word and its capacity to inform an understanding of the nation’s past has been interpreted by some as a mark od immaturity in national life. It is as if Australian’s inability to claim a distinctive nationalism of their own has for too long obstructed an appreciation for those words that told a different story: of a nation that has embraced mostly incremental, rather than radical, change. When Gough Whitlam argued in 1973 that Australia had a past that was ‘deficient in turbulent events in the civil convulsions and upheaval that provide for older civilisations a focus for nationalistic fervour and popular emotion’ it was cause for confidence rather than concern.

This underlines the importance of Sally Warhaft’s claim in her finely crafted introduction to Well May We Say: The speeches that made Australia, that while Australia might on the surface be a land beholden to the more economical forms of expression, nevertheless it may well conceal a ‘cautious yearning’ for words and rhetoric. It is this very caution that defines the Australian difference. Unable to claim for themselves a Lincolnesque or Churchillian stream of rhetoric, Australians have more often preferred the practical to the providential. But they have, on occasion, found the right words to persuade, cajole harangue and even to move.

Since both these collections claim to be the vocal barometer of national life and progress, it might well be asked to what extent the speeches included here reflect the changing dimensions of Australian nationhood. On that score, it is instructive to note that few of the speeches featured are taken from ceremonial occasions such as Australia Day or Empire Day, and that there are only two from the 1988 Bicentenary celebrations. No politician’s speech from the Centenary of Federation makes the grade, but several lectures given by public intellectuals do, suggesting that the political class failed to communicate the significance of the event or to ponder its meaning for the future. Clive James’s Anzac Day address of 1988 is included, but Paul Keating’s eulogy for the Unknown Australian Soldier on Remembrance Day 1993 is not – a puzzling omission.

The lack of ceremonial rhetoric featured here is in itself suggestive. Australia, at least until the 1960s, was far more adept in using its commemorative occasions to proclaim its Britishness. Even Anzac Day was seen as a means of celebrating the nation’s worthiness as a valued and trusted member of the British race which had answered the blood call of sacrifice. But with the collapse of Britishness as a defining idea in Australia’s political culture, no new means of defining the nation immediately sprang forth to fill the void. Australia Day speeches in the late 1960s and early 1970s were notable for their almost total inability to project a new version or myth of the Australian identity. Perhaps this explains why few speeches here deal with the demise of the British race patriot ideal and the emergence of multiculturalism as the orthodox way of defining national community: the language in the midst of this transition was awkward and jumbled. And those hoping to find key speeches that chart the changing way in which Australians have viewed the world, and the region of which they are a part, will have to look elsewhere. Apart from involvement in war, discussion of, and debate over, the nation’s place in the world docs not feature prominently in either collection.

Sally Warhaft is all too aware of the near-Herculean task in convincing Australians that their history has provided word, to cherish, savour and instruct. But her collection is rich in its diversity and judicious in its selection – an impressive achievement. Her selection is divided into nine themes: Nation; Australia at War; Politics; Great Debates; Indigenous Affairs; Attacks; Scandals and Controversies; Ideas and Inspiration; Openings and Commencements; and Last Words and Farewells. All the usual suspects are heard: Henry Parkes’s ‘Crimson thread of kinship’, Andrew Fisher’s ‘Last man and last shilling’, Robert Menzies’ ‘Forgotten people’, Harold Holt’s ‘All the way with LBJ’ and Malcolm Fraser’s ‘Life wasn’t meant to be easy’. It is useful to have these classics in one volume, each with mostly perceptive introductory remarks, which provide brief details about the speaker and the context in which the speech was made. But, as always, unexpected or forgotten gems shine brightest. Robin Boyd’s hope for a ‘first-hand Australian failure rather than a second-hand success’ may have been answered by the adventures of Barry McKenzie, but his call for the cultivation of uniquely Australian ideas and cultural pursuits in the late 1960s is reflective of a broader mood amongst the nation’s elites at the time: that the time for the nation’s cultural liberation had finally come. Keating’s last speech as prime minister is that of a political leader reluctantly letting go the levers of power, a recessional in which the artist had one last chance to point his ‘big picture’. On that note, Hugh Mackay’s 2003 assessment that Australia needs both a ‘guiding story’ and a leader ‘explaining us to ourselves’ seems curiously obvious to the treatment meted our by the people to Keating as the last national storyteller, political o According to the conventional wisdom, Australians are not overly fond of official orations. Russel Ward’s so-called ‘typical Australian’ was ‘taciturn rather than talkative’, and John La Nauze, biographer of Alfred Deakin, noted that Australians were ‘inclined to associate sophisticated speaking with condescension or insincerity’. Alfred Deakin’s eloquence, he added, was ‘surpassingly rare’ in Australia. For Robin Boyd, it was probably just as well, for when Australians deigned to open pursed lips it revealed not only bad teeth, but ‘worse words’. The appearance of these two collections of Australian speeches – and another is due for release shortly, from Melbourne University Press – flies in the face of this orthodoxy. And it buries the myth that public cynicism towards political speechmaking – for politicians dominate both collections – has reached such stratospheric heights that we would all prefer a quiet doze than be subject even to an exuberant flight of rhetoric. Clearly, no matter how often speeches are spurned as chronic windbaggery, they retain the capacity to give meaning to the life of the nation and the affairs of state.

These two works claim to represent far more than the cream of the Australian rhetorical crop. Implicit in their very appearance is the view that not only does the nation have a distinctive rhetorical tradition but one that is worth preserving and celebrating. As their titles suggest, these are the speeches that have ‘made’ Australia and ‘shaped our nation’. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief: Australia at last, has a rhetorical pantheon of its own. Yet the publication of these two volumes at this particular point in the nation’s history invite both exploration and explanation. Why now? What has happened to overturn Australians’ suspicion of grand phrases and great visions? I suggest that it is not a new-found appreciation for stirring rhetoric but the sense that until now something has been lacking in Australian culture, and that the absence of an appreciation for the spoken word and its capacity to inform an understanding of the nation’s past has been interpreted by some as a mark od immaturity in national life. It is as if Australian’s inability to claim a distinctive nationalism of their own has for too long obstructed an appreciation for those words that told a different story: of a nation that has embraced mostly incremental, rather than radical, change. When Gough Whitlam argued in 1973 that Australia had a past that was ‘deficient in turbulent events in the civil convulsions and upheaval that provide for older civilisations a focus for nationalistic fervour and popular emotion’ it was cause for confidence rather than concern.

This underlines the importance of Sally Warhaft’s claim in her finely crafted introduction to Well May We Say: The speeches that made Australia, that while Australia might on the surface be a land beholden to the more economical forms of expression, nevertheless it may well conceal a ‘cautious yearning’ for words and rhetoric. It is this very caution that defines the Australian difference. Unable to claim for themselves a Lincolnesque or Churchillian stream of rhetoric, Australians have more often preferred the practical to the providential. But they have, on occasion, found the right words to persuade, cajole harangue and even to move.

Since both these collections claim to be the vocal barometer of national life and progress, it might well be asked to what extent the speeches included here reflect the changing dimensions of Australian nationhood. On that score, it is instructive to note that few of the speeches featured are taken from ceremonial occasions such as Australia Day or Empire Day, and that there are only two from the 1988 Bicentenary celebrations. No politician’s speech from the Centenary of Federation makes the grade, but several lectures given by public intellectuals do, suggesting that the political class failed to communicate the significance of the event or to ponder its meaning for the future. Clive James’s Anzac Day address of 1988 is included, but Paul Keating’s eulogy for the Unknown Australian Soldier on Remembrance Day 1993 is not – a puzzling omission.

The lack of ceremonial rhetoric featured here is in itself suggestive. Australia, at least until the 1960s, was far more adept in using its commemorative occasions to proclaim its Britishness. Even Anzac Day was seen as a means of celebrating the nation’s worthiness as a valued and trusted member of the British race which had answered the blood call of sacrifice. But with the collapse of Britishness as a defining idea in Australia’s political culture, no new means of defining the nation immediately sprang forth to fill the void. Australia Day speeches in the late 1960s and early 1970s were notable for their almost total inability to project a new version or myth of the Australian identity. Perhaps this explains why few speeches here deal with the demise of the British race patriot ideal and the emergence of multiculturalism as the orthodox way of defining national community: the language in the midst of this transition was awkward and jumbled. And those hoping to find key speeches that chart the changing way in which Australians have viewed the world, and the region of which they are a part, will have to look elsewhere. Apart from involvement in war, discussion of, and debate over, the nation’s place in the world docs not feature prominently in either collection.

Sally Warhaft is all too aware of the near-Herculean task in convincing Australians that their history has provided word, to cherish, savour and instruct. But her collection is rich in its diversity and judicious in its selection – an impressive achievement. Her selection is divided into nine themes: Nation; Australia at War; Politics; Great Debates; Indigenous Affairs; Attacks; Scandals and Controversies; Ideas and Inspiration; Openings and Commencements; and Last Words and Farewells. All the usual suspects are heard: Henry Parkes’s ‘Crimson thread of kinship’, Andrew Fisher’s ‘Last man and last shilling’, Robert Menzies’ ‘Forgotten people’, Harold Holt’s ‘All the way with LBJ’ and Malcolm Fraser’s ‘Life wasn’t meant to be easy’. It is useful to have these classics in one volume, each with mostly perceptive introductory remarks, which provide brief details about the speaker and the context in which the speech was made. But, as always, unexpected or forgotten gems shine brightest. Robin Boyd’s hope for a ‘first-hand Australian failure rather than a second-hand success’ may have been answered by the adventures of Barry McKenzie, but his call for the cultivation of uniquely Australian ideas and cultural pursuits in the late 1960s is reflective of a broader mood amongst the nation’s elites at the time: that the time for the nation’s cultural liberation had finally come. Keating’s last speech as prime minister is that of a political leader reluctantly letting go the levers of power, a recessional in which the artist had one last chance to point his ‘big picture’. On that note, Hugh Mackay’s 2003 assessment that Australia needs both a ‘guiding story’ and a leader ‘explaining us to ourselves’ seems curiously obvious to the treatment meted our by the people to Keating as the last national storyteller, political oblivion.

Rod Kemp and Marion Stanton’s task was equally Herculean, but in a different sense. In contrast to Warhaft, whose broad selection is premised on the basis that ‘radio, television and reporting devices have…become a sort of Hansard of the everyday’, Kemp and Stanton have attempted to extract the most significant speeches from that voluminous body that is the parliamentary Hansard. Their approach is almost necessarily chronological, spanning debates from the Immigration Restriction Act, through arguments over free trade or protection, conscription for military service during World War I, the Petrov affair, the Vietnam War, human stem-cell research and Iraq. Those fearing the emaciation of the editorial scalpel will find comfort in the knowledge that the full transcript of each speech appears on a website specifically established to support the publication. But it is ultimately for the reader to decide how to use such a collection. Simon Crean’s welcome to President Bush on his visit to Australia in November 2003 deftly balanced Labor’s longstanding support for the alliance with its disagreement over coalition military action in Iraq, and drew direct lineage from Labor Leader Arthur Calwell ‘s magisterial speech in May 1965 outlining Labor’s opposition to the commitment of Australian troops to Vietnam. Not surprisingly, speechwriter Graham Freudenberg had a hand in both speeches. Similarly, readers are left free to compare the liberal internationalist arguments employed by Bob Hawke to commit Australian forces to the ousting of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1990 with those of John Howard in 2003: a decision to join a war motivated by the Bush doctrine of universalist unilateralism that was justified by an appeal to the ‘national interest’ – defined primarily in terms of Australia’s alliance with the US. Bill O’Chee’s response to Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech reflects the vast gulf that still exists between those who accept multiculturalism as the national orthodoxy – note his reference to ‘our Anzacs’ – and those who cling to the idea of ‘One Australia’, a phrase that John Howard had made his own in the late 1980s.

One virtue of Australians’ traditional cynicism towards politics and political language is that it has pricked the bubble of pretension that habitually adorns American politics, especially the presidential campaign variety. But such cynicism goes too far when it detracts from the importance and influence of ideas in Australian national life. These collections are a powerful antidote to that particular cringe.

With biography and memoir, it seems that readers are buying a certain kind of truth –call it authenticity, the authority of fact. Yet all reading is escapism, even when we are escaping to what we consider true; even in non-fiction, we seek some of fiction’s satisfactions. This is the challenge: to find a theme and structure that will shape the story without sacrificing a sense of intransigent reality.

For a man who has as much claim as anyone to the title of ‘greatest Australian’, John Monash has remained a somewhat distant figure in the national imagination. Certainly, he is far less well known than that other pretender to the title, Donald Bradman. But the publication of a new biography by Roland Perry should put some balance back in Monash’s ledger.

Bring back Carmen. Bring back Cheryl. Bring back Natasha. I would even have accepted a bit of Bronwyn as a relief from the relentless maleness of this year’s federal election campaign. The female politicians who were household names less than a decade ago – Carmen Lawrence, Cheryl Kemot, Natasha Stott Despoja, Bronwyn Bishop and Pauline Hanson – have been disgraced, marginalised or relegated to the backbenches. Replacements do not appear to be imminent, in part because the still-pitiful number of female parliamentarians are rarely allowed to shine. In the campaign, for instance, talented female politicians such as Julia Gillard were kept tucked away, despite the fact that what might be called women’s issues – especially childbearing and rearing – were central to the platforms of both major parties.

People often assume that actors and performers are extroverts, and that their work is a natural extension of an outgoing personality. But while, indeed, there are quite a few extroverts in the business, many who work in the performing arts are more likely to be introverts, for whom communicating with an audience is a form of expression that gives meaning to their lives.

These three memoirs all speak of difficult journeys. Jo Buchanan’s Wings of Madness tells the story of her son, Miles, whose brief but notable career as an actor was cut short by drugs, alcohol and psychotic depression. It is billed as ‘a story of faith, human resilience and eventually, a happy ending’. In Finding My Voice, on the other hand, Peter Brocklehurst (with some help from Debbie Bennett) recounts how only in middle age did he find the career he really wanted, as a tenor. It is, Nick Columb assures us in his foreword, ‘inspiring and uplifting’, about a journey that is ‘wondrous’. And in Little Black Bastard, Noel Tovey, from the vantage point of his seventy years, reviews a remarkable life that took him from a childhood of deprivation and homelessness to a successful international career as an actor, dancer and director.

Why is it that Indonesia’s northernmost province has received so much less Australian attention than East Timor? Aceh is of course further away, and no claims are made about local people supposedly helping our soldiers during World War II. Another reason is the uniquely emotive issue of the deaths of the five Australian journalists in Timor in 1975. A suspicion arises that the main reason is that the East Timorese are Catholics while the Acehnese are Muslims. Many Australians, especially church activists, could feel something in common with oppressed fellow-Christians in a nearby territory.

When I was at school, I was infected by the idea that writing was a genteel art. Set to read The Prince for its political insights, I was captivated by a single image: Machiavelli coming in from the fields of an evening, washing the sweat from his body, slipping on his silken robe, seating himself at his desk – and writing. That picture leapt straight from the page into what passes for my soul. I knew that was where I wanted to fetch up: at that desk, in my silken robe, writing. The glorious lucidity of Machiavelli’s prose also confirmed my suspicion that books were magical extrusions into the muddy mundane from a calm, blessed place where people could think important thoughts even talk about them, without being told to please, please shut up and feed the cat.

Despite predictions that globalisation would homogenise cultures, ethnicity continues to split states asunder. Democratic theorists fear that consensus, equality and social capital are retreating before competition, materialism and resentment. The 2004 federal election campaign became a festival of individualism as alternative governments courted voters not with visions of a richer community but with promises of greater disposable household income after health and education costs.

Literature reflects social fragmentation with readers’ worlds splitting into narrow, isolated and specialised publics. Where once a canon of western novels purported to depict and analyse human nature, the postmodern trend is to reproduce narrow experiences. When each unique story is a valid piece of a fractured mosaic, it is a challenge for readers to situate stories within a general discourse about humanity.

One photograph in this beautifully produced book is indelible. It is Paris, 1885, and against a painted show backdrop, Billy, young Toby and his mother pose with their boomerangs and a miniature dog. The disoriented, troubled eyes of these north Queenslanders look you right in the face. The sharp-focus dog, a taxidermist’s crea­tion, paradoxically strikes a more animated stance than the living humans. This macabre depiction of people as ‘types’ led Roslyn Poignant to investigate an historical epic of dynamic performers.

In another era, Arnold Zable might have been a librettist instead of a novelist, like Oscar Hammerstein or Arthur Laurents. His latest novel, Scraps of Heaven, opens with an overture, that borrows a great deal from the books of old Broadway musicals: an early morning scene in the back lanes of 1950s Carlton, filled with the incidental music of milk carts, the syncopated slap of wet laundry and then a woman singing, ‘Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think’.

Charmian Clift, this novel’s muse and model, was born the same year as Elizabeth Jolley. If she had lived to see the 1980s, that decade would almost certainly have given her a new lease of life as a writer. It was an idyllic time for Australian women writers; second-wave feminism brought in its wake a different kind of readership, a generation of adventurous publishers, and many opportunities for women writers to use new kinds of voices to say new kinds of things.

The 1980s offered these possibilities to women writers in their fifties and sixties, as well as to younger ones. Thea Astley’s writing, re-energised, took new directions; Olga Masters began to write superb fiction in the aftermath of her long career as a journalist; Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River (1978) made her name far more widely known than it had been hitherto; and publishers began to accept, for the first time, the fiction that Jolley had been writing and fruitlessly sending to them for years. Picture Clift in this company.

The Heart Garden was the subject of considerable controversy even before its launch, ruffling art world feathers and propelling the Heide set once again onto the front page of an Australian newspaper. Janine Burke has a knack for provocation, which must delight her publishers, and this new biography of Sunday Reed makes bold claims that challenge some of the orthodoxies of Australian art. No doubt the book’s sensual and charismatic subject, Sunday Reed, and her famous artist friends Sidney Nolan (her lover for some nine years), Albert Tucker Arthur Boyd, Joy Hester and Charles Blackman among others, can also claim credit for the continued public interest. After all, their libertine proclivities make contemporary Australian society seem dull by comparison.

            All good people agree
            And all good people say
            All nice people like Us, are We
            And everyone else is They
                                                                   Rudyard Kipling

In the foreword to Duncan Graham’s The People Next Door: Understanding Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, a former president of Indonesia, describes the ‘on and off’ relationship between Australia and Indonesia as vulnerable to the winds of ‘narrow-minded nationalism’. For Wahid, there is significant opportunity for exchange between the two countries if we develop greater levels of engagement: ‘Visit us more ... trust us more ... Remember you are near us. Overcome your fear of Indonesia.’

‘Did you hear about the old man who turned 100?’ asked Sir Donald Bradman in a cheerful note to the journalist Johan Rivett in October 1968. ‘They asked him what it felt like. He said wonderful – I haven’t an enemy in the world. The buggers are all dead.’ That’s our Don: twenty years retired and still thinking in hundreds, eh? This century, it turned out, was one he could not overhaul: he was ninety-two when he died on 25 February 2001. But the job was done; the buggers were all dead. Bradman remains, to use Christine Wallace’s words from her new book The Private Don, ‘the best-ever player in the best-loved sport in the most sports-loving nation in the world’. Wallace’s book attests another quality: he remains a sporting media property without compeer.

Childhood is a fertile territory for writers. Almost all first-time authors hoe it, and some continue to do so for the rest of their careers. Given the chance, most people cannot resist the impulse to reminisce about the horrors and delights of being a child.

What is that makes children resilient? This is the central question of Pamela Bone’s book. It has become common wisdom that parental violence, separation from a mother, sibling rivalry, neglect and sexual abuse can do permanent harm, or can at least affect a child for the rest of his or her life. Some children never recover and are never able to lead normal lives. But other people emerge, if not unscathed, then at least able to function.