Brenda Niall

Brenda Niall reviews 'My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian childhood' by Sheila Fitzpatrick

October 2010, no. 325 • 01 October 2010

Even the cover design of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s memoir gave me something to ponder. The title, which signals the father–daughter story, is linked with an engaging seaside photograph of the two of them. The father’s swimming trunks and the daughter’s bathing cap have an authentic 1940s look. Add to that a bland subtitle, Memories of an Australian Childhood, and the tough confrontations of the ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'Correggio Jones and the Runaways: The Italo-Australian connection' by Desmond O’Grady

May 1995, no. 170 • 01 May 1995

Desmond O’Grady is uniquely placed to interpret Australia for Italians and Italy for Australians. He grew up in suburban Melbourne, but as a journalist, biographer, and writer of fiction he has spent most of his working life in Rome. In his new book, Correggio Jones and the Runaways, O’Grady brings together a fascinatingly varied group of expatriates’ portraits in order to examine the ideas ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'Foreign Correspondence' by Geraldine Brooks

September 1999, no. 214 • 01 September 1999

When Geraldine Brooks went through her father’s possessions after his death, she found the bundles of letters which prompted her to write Foreign Correspondence. Lawrie Brooks had been in the habit of writing to politicians and intellectuals with ideas and questions, and he had kept all their replies. Each letter, Brooks reflects, is ‘a small piece of the mosaic of his restless mind’. Becaus ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'The Shelf Life of Zora Cross' by Cathy Perkins

December 2019, no. 417 • 22 November 2019

Just over one hundred years ago, Sydney readers were speaking in hushed tones about a shocking new book by a young woman, Zora Cross. A collection of love poems by an unknown would not normally have roused much interest, but because they came from a woman, and were frankly and emphatically erotic, the book was a sensation. It wasn’t, as a Bulletin reviewer said demurely, a set of sonnets to the ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'Before I Forget: An early memoir' by Geoffrey Blainey

September 2019, no. 414 • 26 August 2019

Unlike an autobiography, which tends to be time-bound and inclusive, the memoir can wander at will in the writer’s past, searching out and shaping an idea of self. Although Geoffrey Blainey’s memoir, Before I Forget, is restricted to the first forty years of his life, its skilfully chosen episodes suggest much more. The memoir shows how Blainey set his own course as a historian and forecasts t ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'A Steady Storm of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood 1943–1995' edited by Gregory Kratzmann

November 2001, no. 236 • 01 November 2001

From a small island, messages in a bottle floating out to sea. That was Gwen Harwood’s image for the poems she sent out during her early years in Tasmania, long before she had due recognition. Her letters, by contrast, knew their destination; they were treasured for decades by her friends, and they now make up the remarkable collection A Steady Storm of Correspondence. As editor, Gregory Kratzm ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'The Great Fire' by Shirley Hazzard

February 2004, no. 258 • 01 February 2004

London seen through a haze of smoke and fire in J.M.W. Turner’s famous painting, The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, is the evocative cover image for Shirley Hazzard’s long-awaited novel. The Great Fire comes twenty-three years after Hazzard’s brilliantly composed, witty, and ultimately tragic work The Transit of Venus. Like the earlier novel, The Great Fire is ambitious in theme and in ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'March' by Geraldine Brooks

April 2005, no. 270 • 01 April 2005

Spacious and solidly constructed, the classic nineteenth-century novel invites revisiting. Later writers reconfigure its well-known spaces, change the lighting, summon marginal figures to the centre. Most memorable, perhaps, is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in which the first Mrs Rochester, the madwoman in the Thornfield attic, is allowed a voice and a history. She tells a story very dif ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'Upstate' by James Wood

November 2018, no. 406 • 25 October 2018

Forget the author – it’s the book that matters. That’s sound advice, but there are times when it is hard to follow. James Wood’s Upstate is a testing case. A quietly reflective little novel, elegantly written, with four main characters and a minimal plot, Upstate doesn’t look like a literary time bomb. Yet because its author is a renowned literary critic, it is bound to set off disputes ... (read more)

Brenda Niall reviews 'Loving Words: Love letters of Nettie and Vance Palmer 1909–1914' by Deborah Jordan

September 2018, no. 404 • 23 August 2018

When Vance Palmer met Nettie Higgins in the summer of 1909 in the sedate setting of the State Library of Victoria, they were both twenty-three years old. Yet even to speak to one another was a breach of convention; they had not been introduced, and Nettie at least felt quite daring. An arts student at Melbourne University, she had never been far from her parents’ house. Vance had made the break ... (read more)