Autobiography

'I knew I was bright, but not special’, writes Zoë Caldwell early on in her pithy, telling memoir. Still earlier (indeed, in the first paragraph), she says that she knew, even from an early age, she was destined to perform: ‘ … to stand in front of people, keeping them awake and in their seats, by telling other people’s stories and using other people’s words. I knew this because it was the only thing I could do.’ There is a bit of self-deprecation in these words that is at loggerheads with what we have come to expect from actors’ memoirs, which are, more often than not, scribbled sentences rather than thoughtful paragraphs, and which tell us more about vanity, greed, self-indulgence, and the patience of the haunted ghost-writer than they do about the actor as a professional or a person. Actually, such books are like sets on some early television shows: bricks-and-mortar, but really canvas and plaster with wooden backing, which wobble every time somebody walks past. What they are not is true autobiography.

Telling one’s own story comes naturally: we are all in some sense autobiographers. There is nothing new in the urge to seek a pattern in a life while living it, to advertise an ego, to explain, confess, justify, understand – or simply to say ‘I was there’. What is new is the comparative ease with which the urge can be accommodated and the ‘self-life’ made into text.

The current interest in the narratives of ‘ordinary people’ is attested by the extraordinary success of Albert Facey’s A Fortunate Life. It may also be seen in some recent and important scholarly enterprises such as the nineteenth century Australian women’s diaries published by Lucy Frost in No Place for a Nervous Lady or the oral histories from which Janet McCalman constructed inner urban Richmond in the depression years as Struggletown.

Roy Strong was appointed director of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in 1967 at the age of thirty-two. Today it would be astonishing to head one of the United Kingdom’s national collections at that age; five decades ago it was outrageous. Only Kenneth Clark at thirty was younger when he became director of the National Gallery. Strong’s ascent to the NPG has stayed in his mind as the fulcrum of his professional life.

In one of the most haunting phrases contained in Inside Outside (1992), the Australian Jewish autobiographer Andrew Riemer comments on the persistent sense of loss that still shapes him, many years after his entry to Australia as a child immigrant. He writes, ‘exile seals your eyes, allowing you to see only what your longings and your sense of loss will permit’. Earlier, Riemer reflects on his longing for a vanished world, ‘a country of the mind, fashioned from powerful longings and fantasies’. With the undercutting of his own position, so characteristic of his writing, he writes: ‘Perhaps I am merely describing the human condition. I have come to learn that this sense of displacement, of not belonging ... is shared by many …’ And yet, he adds, the experience of migration ‘brings that predicament into sharper focus than might otherwise be the case’.

Dawn Fraser had a hundred or so pages of fair prose in her and she put them in this book, her autobiography. The trouble is that the book is 400 pages long. But that’s not a bad result. If a David Malouf or Helen Garner lined up for an Olympic swimming final, you’d expect them to sink.

The intellectual and other cultural divides between New South Wales and Victoria that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century are among the most intriguing features of Australian history. Evidence of their continuing influence on law and politics in more recent times provide the most significant aspect of this autobiography by Sir Garfield Barwick.

On the 7 January 1934 in the Dutch town of Hilversum, a child was born and named Jopie Houbein. From her earliest days she felt that neither her face nor her name really fitted her. On the outside she was white, but all her feelings of kinship went out to people of alien races – a Chinese trader, travelling gypsies, school-friends from the East Indies, even a child disguised as St Nicholas’s black helper. One of her early fantasy playmates was the beautiful Indian actor Sabu, the Elephant Boy.