'Brenda Niall has turned her biographer’s eye to a personal subject—her grandmother, Aggie. She tells the story of a fiercely independent and intelligent woman who braved a new country as a single woman, teaching in a country school, before marrying a Riverina grazier, whose large powerful family was wary of the newcomer with ideas of her own.
'Aggie dealt with hardships and loneliness after the early and drawn-out death of her husband, and brought up her seven children to be happy—all with a calm determination. But it was the memory box and her longing for the sea that captured the imagination of her granddaughter. ' (Publication Summary)
'For one of Australia’s foremost biographers, the impulse to tell life stories has never gone away'
'Brenda Niall's biographies characteristically begin with simple and enigmatic stories, whose significance becomes clearer as the book develops. This sympathetic exploration of her grandmother's life takes its point of departure in two of her possessions. The first is a wooden box made for Aggie Maguire by her brother as they sailed from Liverpool to Australia. In 1940 she gave the box to Brenda.' (Introduction)
'Brenda Niall has touched on aspects of her own life in many of her admired biographies of writers and artists, such as the Boyd family and the Durack sisters, and Melbourne’s Irish Catholic Father Hackett and Archbishop Mannix. Time – and perhaps the deaths of central people – has pulled her focus in close to tell the story of her maternal grandmother, Agnes Gorman, and through her the extended family, in Can You Hear the Sea?' (Introduction)
'In Can You Hear the Sea? Brenda Niall, author of biographies of Martin Boyd, Judy Cassab and Daniel Mannix, trains her eye on her grandmother, Agnes “Aggie” Maguire. ' (Introduction)
'Brenda Niall has touched on aspects of her own life in many of her admired biographies of writers and artists, such as the Boyd family and the Durack sisters, and Melbourne’s Irish Catholic Father Hackett and Archbishop Mannix. Time – and perhaps the deaths of central people – has pulled her focus in close to tell the story of her maternal grandmother, Agnes Gorman, and through her the extended family, in Can You Hear the Sea?' (Introduction)
'Brenda Niall's biographies characteristically begin with simple and enigmatic stories, whose significance becomes clearer as the book develops. This sympathetic exploration of her grandmother's life takes its point of departure in two of her possessions. The first is a wooden box made for Aggie Maguire by her brother as they sailed from Liverpool to Australia. In 1940 she gave the box to Brenda.' (Introduction)
'The burgeoning of social media has forced a rapid transformation in how life writing negotiates the public and private. American writer Maggie Nelson describes public performances of intimacy that may be “fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous or steamrolling or creepy”. It’s hard to evade the recording eye: phone cameras, security footage, online commentary.' (Introduction)
'In Can You Hear the Sea? Brenda Niall, author of biographies of Martin Boyd, Judy Cassab and Daniel Mannix, trains her eye on her grandmother, Agnes “Aggie” Maguire. ' (Introduction)
'For one of Australia’s foremost biographers, the impulse to tell life stories has never gone away'
