Cirrus@Austlit

'Women’s biography is a lively genre in Australia today. Among others published in the last decade, there have appeared biographical works about significant women in colonial history (Elizabeth Macarthur, Caroline Chisholm, Jane Franklin), visual artists (Olive Cotton, Nora Heysen), criminal women (Kate Leigh, Dulcie Markham), literary figures (Aileen Palmer, Judith Wright), and feminists (Vida Goldstein, Germaine Greer, Eilean Giblin).' 

 (Introduction)

'Every generation claims the right to reinterpret the past from the present standpoint, which is why we see continual upgrades or modern iterations of an historical figure. Styles change, as do emphases, even when source materials do not. Why though, do some historical figures continue to ignite the curiosity of biographers? Certainly, an exceptional life story helps but sometimes it comes down to the richness of the archive. In Elizabeth Macarthur’s case, she possesses both.'

 (Introduction)

'Liam Byrne’s biography of James Scullin and John Curtin was launched online in July 2020 by the ACTU1 Secretary Sally McManus and former Labor treasurer Wayne Swan. It was an exciting time to launch a book about the labour movement and its fledgling parliamentary wing. Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveller listed pandemics among the catastrophes that had upended the status quo of gross inequality over the course of history. Could COVID-19 be such a catastrophe? McManus, together with former ACTU secretary Greg Combet and other labour leaders, had worked cooperatively with the Coalition Government and business in responding to the pandemic. Optimistic progressives were wondering if the unfolding crisis might provide an opportunity for fundamental reform, such as John Curtin and Ben Chifley had seized for the period after the Second World War. Stuart Macintyre’s account of the postwar reconstruction, Australia’s Boldest Experiment, was on the reading list of Labor parliamentarians.' 

 (Introduction)

'The seemingly never-ending public fascination with spies and espionage has produced two books that could not be more different. One is a family drama that verges on soap opera, the other, a scholarly study that points an accusatory finger. The subtitle of Sandra Hogan’s book, With My Little Eye, gives an accurate flavour of what is to come: ‘The Incredible True Story of a Family of Spies in the Suburbs’. It is over the top and yet true. Also over the top and more polemical and controversial is John Fahey’s Traitors and Spies. (Introduction)
 

'Geoffrey Blainey (b. 1930) has had a most unusual trajectory for a historian. It  started conventionally enough when he enrolled in 1948 in Max Crawford’s history department at the University of Melbourne. He was one of several stellar students of that immediate postwar generation, and topped Manning Clark’s third year history course. At age 20, he then astonished everyone by taking on a full professor, R. S. Parker, in the country’s leading journal in the discipline, Historical Studies, as to whether Australian Federation was primarily motivated by economic considerations. His progression rapidly diverged from his fellow students in other ways. Instead of the usual career path as a tutor, followed by further study at Oxford, he embarked on a commissioned history of Mount Lyell Mining & Railway Company, published in 1954 as The Peaks of Lyell. That set his course for more than a decade, and a further six commissioned histories followed. Only in late 1961 did he become a teaching academic, beginning with a brief (and very successful) stint at the University of Adelaide followed by long-term employment at his alma mater, where he rose to become dean of the Faculty of Arts.' (Introduction)

'Once at a poetry reading at Manning Clark House I was asked who my favourite Australian poet was. Without much hesitation I answered ‘David Campbell’, and was promptly shown a repaired floorboard that David Campbell had once danced through, drunk on whisky. On any other day perhaps I might have answered with a different poet, but it is indicative of David Campbell’s current standing that many poets I know nominate him as their favourite, or near-to-favourite Australian poet. This alone makes the publication of this biography of him especially welcome.'

 (Introduction)

'Good for the Soul: John Curtin’s Life with Poetry is many things at once: an extended act of (great-grand) filial piety, an important supplementary work of biography, as well as a blow-by-blow literary/historical account of a great man’s unusual and consuming interest in poetry and the uses to which to put it. With so many different intentions it would be difficult and probably unfair to judge it by the criteria associated with any one of them.' (Introduction)

'For such a significant political leader, Don Dunstan (1926–99, premier of South Australia 1967–68 and 1970–79) has waited a long time for a comprehensive and balanced biography' (Introduction)

'Historians and biographers have been grappling with the question of how to write feminist biography for some time now. In 1994 Barbara Caine noted that ‘biography is at one and the same time antithetical to some of the basic aims and approaches of women’s history—and the avenue that seems most helpful for those seeking to understand the actual historical experiences of women in all their complexity’.1 For some, biography’s traditional focus on ‘exceptional’ people with public lives has sat awkwardly with the democratic ideals of feminist history. But it is an evolving genre that presents an attractive option for those seeking to recover women of the past and interrogate historical feminisms—especially for popular audiences.' (Introduction)

'Separate biographies of two brothers appearing roughly contemporaneously are rare, and with both of them making a strong case for why each of their subjects, Isi Leibler (1934) and Mark Leibler (1943), should be regarded as the pre-eminent Australian Jewish leaders of their generation. The brothers’ sense of competition as they championed Jewish causes together, as rivals, separately and in different lands, inevitably framed the question of who has contributed more while obscuring the value of their joint efforts and the overall worth of the duumvirate. On antiSemitism, Zionism, Soviet Jewry, Cold War analysis, and international diplomacy, particularly centred on the United Nations (both as a proactive forum for raising issues or as an anti-Israel collective in need of reform), their legacy has been farreaching, transcending parochial communal issues to speak of larger concerns. Indeed, they are both regarded as influential Jewish leaders internationally. Isi, who died in 2020, was an independent and acute observer of Israeli politics, earning his right to criticise by picking up sticks and living in Jerusalem since 1998; Mark continues to speak out on Indigenous rights and recognition, and is an ever-present voice fighting anti-Semitism and its anti-Israel proxy. (Introduction)

'Since his retirement from the University of Sydney, Adrian Mitchell has remained busy writing biographies of a wide range of people. Some of them have been well known, like the early explorer William Dampier, others little known, such as the late nineteenth-century landscape painter George Collingridge de Tourcey. The subject of his latest work, nineteenth-century Australian poet Henry Kendall, falls somewhere in the middle. For many years his poems, especially ‘Bell Birds’, were widely known and recited by generations of schoolchildren. Now he and his work are largely forgotten.' (Introduction)

'Arguably the hoariest of historical clichés is to proclaim a once famed figure as now forgotten, and hence in need of revival. Such has even been asserted of John Monash. Graham Berry, premier of colonial Victoria, is a truer example. He even missed out on a street name in Canberra’s suburban Wanniassa and Calwell, despite their nomenclative theme being Victorian politicians. Hal Colebatch’s 2014 biography of Dick Hamer, the best biography so far of a Victorian premier, is now followed by this fine study of Berry by Sean Scalmer.' (Introduction)