Brenda Niall

Brenda Niall reviews 'After Fire: A biography of Clifton Pugh' by Sally Morrison

February 2010, no. 318 • 29 September 2022

Think of John Brack, or Fred Williams, and without effort or prompting a painting will come to mind. These names conjure up Brack’s urban figures with their blank yet expressive faces, or Williams’ minimalist landscapes. Instantly recognisable, they could have been painted by no one else. Yet their makers have never been celebrities. Brack’s Collins St, 5p.m. is more widely known than Brack ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'In the Half-Light' edited by Jacqueline Kent

August 1988, no. 103 • 24 August 2022

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 intere ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'Dear Prime Minister: Letters to Robert Menzies, 1949–1966' by Martyn Lyons

January–February 2022, no. 439 • 20 December 2021

Letter writing thrives on distance. Out of necessity, in the early years of European settlement, Australia became a nation of letter writers. The remoteness of the island continent gave the letter a special importance. Even those unused to writing had so much to say, and such a strong need to hear from home, that the laborious business of pen and ink and the struggles with spelling were overcome. ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'Into the Wadi' by Michèle Drouart

April 2000, no. 219 • 01 April 2000

‘I remember only peripheries, not centres,’ Michèle Drouan says in her memoir of marriage to a Jordanian and life with his family in a village near Jordan’s borders with Syria and Lebanon. Her perspective is deliberately oblique. Elegantly shaped, and or the most part gracefully written, her story bypasses the obvious cultural divisions. Political, religious, and sexual tensions are given m ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'The Ghost at the Wedding: A true story' by Shirley Walker

July-August 2009, no. 313 • 01 July 2009

Some stories deserve to be told more than once. Retold, they cannot be the same. Even when the teller is the same person, the shift in time and experience will make the story new. In The Ghost at the Wedding, Shirley Walker returns to the material of her autobiography, Roundabout at Bangalow (2001), in order to focus more closely on the saddest and most powerful memories therein: those of the youn ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'Pomegranate Season' by Carolyn Polizzotto and 'Till Apples Grow on an Orange Tree' by Cassandra Pybus

June 1998, no. 201 • 01 June 1998

Two autobiographical works, both by women historians, are presented in the elegant small format which often says ‘gift book’ and may suggest more surface charm than substance. In fact, there are at least as many contrasts as resemblances between the two, and although the mood is quietly reflective, there is no easy nostalgia. ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'B.A. Santamaria: Your most obedient servant: Selected Letters 1938–1996' edited by Patrick Morgan

March 2007, no. 289 • 01 March 2007

Among countless unused fragments of information from my convent schooldays, I remember the correct forms of address for churchmen of all ranks. For the pope, it was Your Holiness; for a cardinal, Your Eminence. Next came Your Grace and My Lord, for archbishops and bishops. Then the cumbersome Right Reverend and Dear Monsignor, followed by Dear Reverend Father, which sufficed for a priest. Few of ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard' by Shirley Hazzard

December 2020, no. 427 • 25 November 2020

When Shirley Hazzard was invited to give the 1984 Boyer Lectures, it was an astonishing break in tradition. Her twenty-three predecessors included only one woman, Dame Roma Mitchell, a supreme court justice who was later governor of South Australia. Except for architect and writer Robin Boyd, and poet and Bulletin editor Douglas Stewart, Hazzard was the only creative artist on the list. All her pr ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'Oh Happy Day: Those times and these times' by Carmen Callil

November 2020, no. 426 • 22 October 2020

Scanning my bookshelves, I see a dozen or more of the distinctive green spines of Virago Press. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the Virago imprint was a guarantee of good reading by women writers whose works were rediscovered and sent out to find a new public. I had read Margaret Atwood, Rosamond Lehmann, and Elizabeth Taylor for the first time in hardcovers; Virago made them new. Kate O’ Brien’s ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'Islands: A trip through time and space' by Peter Conrad

June 2009, no. 312 • 01 June 2009

‘There was a man who loved islands. He was born on one, but it didn’t suit him, as there were too many other people on it, besides himself.’ So begins D.H. Lawrence’s bleak little fable ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’. Lawrence’s islander wants control, sole possession, mastery of people and place. When his first island, fertile and beautiful, fails him because of the vast expense of mak ... (read more)