Memoir

In October 2001, as a member of a group called Huon, I set out on my fourth US tour drumming in an ‘indie’ rock band: a low-key, non-profit cross-nation trek performing shows in colleges, small bars, even a few suburban basements. It was an extraordinary time to travel across the States, particularly since much of it was spent in a hire car with only AM radio for entertainment. AM radio in the US is riddled with amphetamined shock-jocks outdoing each other in ways to vituperate the pernicious liberal élites. Apparently, these élites had just destroyed some skyscrapers in New York. More poignant was the way Osama bin Laden had so quickly become a player with the usual pumpkins and skeletons in Halloween festivities, his name inscribed in white gothic lettering on black cardboard coffins on suburban front lawns with an express wish that he ‘never rest in peace’.

What is resilience? And why is it an important subject for research? Anne Deveson – former royal commissioner, noted documentary maker and social justice activist – explores these questions in her latest book. Human resilience is linked to courage, love, defiance and stoicism, and enables us to come through suffering with integrity. It requires hope and produces strength and action, while its absence results in weakness and victimhood, even despair. But no one seems sure exactly what it is. Deveson’s book opens with a quotation from Jeanette L. Johnson, suggesting that resilience may be ‘the poetry of life’ and that as yet ‘there is no language to share it’. That does not stop Deveson from trying to contribute to its dissemination.

Many of us, as we get older, become curious about relatives we hardly or never knew. Perhaps, if we have children of our own, we become more aware of the biological ties that bind us to those relatives and seek self-illumination through the lighting of the shadowy places in our ancestry. This process is beautifully implied by Peter Singer’s title, Pushing Time Away, a phrase taken from a letter written by his maternal grandfather, David Ernst Oppenheim, to his maternal grandmother, Amalie Pollak, in which Oppenheim declares: ‘what binds us pushes time away.’

Singer never knew his grandfather, but was prompted to discover him on learning that Oppenheim ‘wrote about fundamental values, and what it is to be human’. For Singer, who apparently rather surprised his family by deciding to be a philosopher, this was a spur to enquiry. Moreover, ‘[t]he handful of people who knew my grandfather are getting old’. If anything, indeed, bound Singer and Oppenheim together, it had to be found now, or not at all.

Edmund Campion’s latest book, Lines of My Life, is an elegant hybrid, part meditation, part gossip (of edifying kinds), part political testament. Its genial tone is suggested by the source of the title, which comes from Psalm 16: ‘the lines of my life have run in pleasant places’. Not that this is at all a self-satisfied book. Campion begins his ‘Journal of a Year’ in New York in September 2001. He had gone there to conduct research on Thomas Merton, an American monk and writer. This took him to the great public and university libraries of the city. In one of the moments when Campion pauses to praise, he says that ‘libraries are our richest cultural asset, their custodians singular servants of our intellectual lives’.

In 1980, a nine-year-old Aboriginal girl in Darwin, Nova Peris, watched the Moscow Olympics on television and told her mum that she was going to be an Olympic athlete. Alone at home in Melbourne, Raelene Boyle was also watching those Games on the telly, bawling her eyes out and desperately trying to get drunk. Raelene was twenty-nine years old, a veteran of three Olympic Games, with three silver medals. She’d qualified to run in Moscow also, but by then frustration, confusion and disillusion had set in. For athletes, mid-life crises come much sooner than for most of us.

In a number of guises, the question ‘why’ reverberated throughout my reading of Whatever the Gods Do: A Memoir. This book opens with Patti Miller describing her sadness at the departure of ten-year-old Theo, who is leaving for Melbourne to live with his father. We soon discover that the author has been Theo’s substitute mother for the past seven years since the tragic death of Dina, his birth mother and Miller’s friend. Dina suffered a brain haemorrhage when Theo was two years old. She spent thirteen months in a virtually immobile state before her death at thirty-eight. Why the vibrant, attractive Dina should have been struck down when she had so much to live for is a legitimate question, but, of course, an unanswerable one. Why Miller should choose to write about her own life through this incident is also worth asking. Few are more qualified than Miller to address the reasons for, and benefits of, life-writing: she has run ‘life stories’ workshops around the country for more than ten years. In her bestselling manual Writing Your Life: A journey of discovery (1994), she identifies various motivations for, and rewards of, life-writing, including healing and self-understanding, recording family and social history for future generations, remembering happiness and sharing one’s wisdom.

Anyone who remembers the amiable host of the ABC’s television show Backchat, which he compèred for eight years from 1986, will not be surprised to learn that Tim Bowden has written a breezily readable memoir. Its pages seem to turn of their own volition. In the foreword, Maeve Binchy daringly asks: ‘Who are the right people to do a memoir?’ Actually, it’s probably not so daring, as Binchy had no doubt read Bowden’s chronicle and knew he qualified as one of the ‘right people’. Two criteria leap to mind. The writer needs to exhibit a character and personality you’d be happy to keep company with for 300 or so pages. In addition, the reader – this one, anyway – wants a complementary sense of the times of the life in the foreground.

Renée Goossens, born in 1940, is the youngest daughter of the composer and conductor Sir Eugene Goossens. Married three times, he had three daughters with Dorothy Millar, and two more with his second wife, and Renée’s mother, Janet Lewis. His third marriage, to Marjorie Foulkrod, was childless. It is characteristic of this memoir that Renée Goossens remarks early in the narrative that she never met one of her half-sisters and that it was decades before she met the other two. Her life seems to have been marked or scarred by a series of disappearances on the part of significant family members and by unexplained absences.

These two unusual books reflect on aspects of the prisoner-of-war experience in Singapore, Thailand and Burma during World War II that have not been much canvassed in Australia. One Fourteenth of an Elephant, Ian Denys Peek’s sometimes irascible ‘memoir of life and death on the Burma-Thailand Railway’, relates the experiences of a member of the Singapore Volunteer Armoured Car Company. Peek was British and had grown up in Shanghai, but was not taken into captivity there as was novelist J.G. Ballard (who recalled the experience in Empire of the Sun). Peek and his brother Ron were at the fall of Singapore. Soon afterwards began their movements between a series of hospital and labour camps along the railway. Peek’s story – his first book, published sixty years after his capture and told in the first person – gives a British perspective on a fate that he shared with thousands of Australians.