There are so many really great memoirs and (auto)biographies, and I probably don't read enough of them, so intent on mastering the art of fiction. These are a few that I've fallen over, that are worth looking for.
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"THE CLAIMANT" - Paul Terry (Aust 2016)
What a story!! It's definitely in the category of "You Couldn't Make This Stuff Up!"
Mark Twain (I mean, everyone got involved in this saga) summed it up well when he said that a fiction writer would never have dared to tell it, as they "...would have to drop out the chief characters, as the public would say that such people are unbelievable, and have to drop out some of the more picturesque incidents, as they would say that such things could never happen...".
But this is all fact, meticulously researched, and easy to read. But definitely all fact. Every weird twist and turn of it. It has the lot - heir to a rich English estate lost in a shipwreck off South America, false names, a grieving mother, snarky relatives, shifty lawyers, iffy hangers-on, a "Super Detective", and the dodgy butcher from Wagga Wagga himself - or is he really Sir Richard Tichborne returned from the dead?! Ah yes, and then there's the penis....
It was the media event of the day (it runs through the mid-late 1800s and across most of the globe), as two huge trials were involved, spread over a couple of years, one in which the Prosecutor's opening remarks took 26 days (I kid you not), and the other where the Defendant's barrister took a much more circumspect 21 days to open, with the Prince and Princess of Wales in the front row and the judge's wife up the front with him, along with favoured dignitaries, while any spare seats (it was in the Palace of Westminster - where the English Parliament sits) were sold to a lucky few. I mean, there's circuses, and then there's circuses. This one makes Barnum & Bailey look like a country bloody sideshow!!
What I particularly like is how it's structured, detailing in turn each "life" of the (possibly) three people this guy could really be, with all the vested interests pushing and shoving, and the media of the day having an absolute whale of a time taking sides. You have to read it to believe it. I have, and I still don't quite!
So, if you're into history and/or a damn good read, this is for you.
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"COUNTRY CHILDHOODS" - Geoffrey Dutton ed (Aust 1992)
This is a collection of stories, from a wide variety of Australian writers, of their childhoods in the country, both male and female, some white, some black, and some immigrant, as they lived and grew up on farms, stations and in far-flung country towns, in the 30s, 40s and 50s.
These collections - this one compiled by the late Geoffrey Dutton (bless you Geoff for buying my early stuff!) and published by the good old Queensland University Press - are an essential record of a time that has long gone but, as always for any generation, fill an essential space in human history.
Having said that, even though each contributor is a seasoned writer, some are a little on the dry side, or maybe more that they are approached in a "documentary" way. Or maybe that's just my personal taste. There's always room for some flair and colour, even if dealing with real life memories, which is why I particularly liked those of Colin Thiele and Max Fatchen, coincidentally both from my home State, not that that has anything to do with it, they were simply good reads. Descriptive without being pedestrian. And evocative with it. Well worth a buck if you turn up a copy in your local Op Shop!
And a bonus - when I opened out the cover I realised it was one of Drysdale's.....
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"LEONARDO DA VINCI" - Sherwin B Nuland (UK 2000)
Funny how we only pick up the public image bits of the lives of "famous" people from long ago. The mythical bits. This absolute genius of a guy is no exception, for me at least. This is an absolutely remarkable (and complex) 1452-1519 Renaissance Man.
Okay, I knew about the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, his designs for engines of war, those two wonderful drawings on the cover, but not much else. But he was a man obsessed with wanting to know HOW and WHY - how does this work? - why does this happen? - and not just the mechanics of stuff, but the deeper causes, especially in human anatomy. Leonardo was about three centuries ahead of his time, in biology, in evolution, in physics.
The thing is, he was really a scientist, but one with a gift for art and sculpture and design. But, sadly, so driven to just KNOW everything that he left a huge trail of unfinished projects, and even worse, unfinished records. And an unknown amount of those records has been lost. Hopefully not forever, as apparently one of the best "hordes" of Leonardo writings and drawings was found in an enigmatic old chest in Windsor Castle in the 1700s!
As a biography, I've probably read better-written ones, as it's just a bit on the "dry" side, and spends a little too much time speculating on Leonardo's sexuality (repression of which, Nuland proposes, was the energy powerhouse of the man), but he does a decent job of exploring Leonardo's amazing life, or more correctly, sifting through the large number of books already around on the man and his works. Having said all that, this book, or one of the many others, is well worth the browsing if you're into wanting to better understand the human condition.
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"DID I EVER TELL YOU THIS?" - Sam Neill (2023 Aus/NZ)
I have no idea where to begin with this - easily the best memoir I've ever read, so full of life and living that it's left me with an odd sense of failure. Failure to do my own one-off allocation of time and space justice.
Written in simple, absorbing prose, it's a journey through a fascinating life, and not just about his work in film, but about LIFE. Life and people and living and doing things and seeing things and being human. And my god the man is so modest and self-effacing about it all! He tells how he's at Cannes for the festival with fellow star Meryl Streep, together doing their whole big thing for the movie "Evil Angels" (the Chamberlain dingo saga), and the media barrage is there, flashes popping, and the scrum is yelling "Meryl Meryl, over here, over here!" and "Sam Sam, get out of the way!"
The man's approach to his work is as work. He sees it as his occupation, one that he loves working at, and he shuns "celebrity" and "fame", but accepts that it has taken him to the four corners of the earth and in the company of a pantheon of people you wouldn't believe, some that became lifelong mates, some that he loved, some that he didn't love (Bob Hawke was about the rudest man he'd ever spent time with, and Charlton Heston was about the dullest!), but all of them presented in simple but insightful prose. But there's no "kiss and tell" shit, the guy's too classy for that. It's just about people, and living.
It takes us from his childhood beginnings in Ireland (yep, always thought he was a through and through Kiwi) and on into a bit of a tumble jumble early life around the world till settling in his Dad's home country of New Zealand, where Sam quickly made himself into a native, although as I see it, he's really a citizen of the world. And he's stuck to his craft, once he'd worked out what that was, after half-heartedly trying out several other livings as a young bloke, and we see him evolve into not just an actor, but a lover of people and of nature, a lover of a good laugh (and horse-riding and wine and heaps of other stuff), a bit of a Left-winger, and a hater of hypocrisies, and it ends with his recent arduous but successful battle with cancer.
If you don't find a copy of this book and absorb every page and every word, your life will be the poorer for it.
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"MARCUS CLARKE" - Brian Elliott (Aust/UK 1958)
"EMPTY CRADLES" - Margaret Humphreys (1994 UK)
If you have any sense of natural justice, and understand the basic need for every one of us to know who we are and who we "belong to" - I mean, some of these kids didn't even know their right name or their right birth date or even where they were born - you must read this book before your reading life is done. By all means watch the movie, but that - as moving as it is - doesn't give you the complete story of, what became, this woman's obsessive quest for some kind of justice and closure for these people, all of which began with her simply receiving a letter from Australia, asking for her help to trace her birth certificate.
Find a copy of this book. Take your time with it. Be outraged.
T.R.E.
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"New Chum" is a smallish oldish hardback by the Poet Laureate John Masefield, written in the 1940s but looking back to the early 1890s when he was 13-14 and just starting out on the navy "school ship" HMS Conway moored on the Mersey, it absolutely nails his love of tall-ships and the sea, and from a man who wrote about the only poetry that I could stomach in High School. "Sea Fever" and "Cargoes", stirred my creative juices no end.
This one of Bill (Swampy) Marsh is in that refreshing style of the laid-back Aussie out there in the big-sky landscape.Actually Bill and I crossed paths for a short while back in about - whoo, 1988 Bill? - when we were both in the same wine company, and great days they were too, and we'd compare notes on the crap that poor old writers have to go through to get into print. Which Bill managed far better than I did I have to admit.
"FRANCIS BIRTLES" - Biography - Warren Brown (Aust 2012)Back in 1908 (when petrol was still being supplied in four gallon cans from the shop), three optimists set out to drive from Adelaide to Darwin in a "cumbersome yet robust" four cylinder Talbot, to be the first to cross Aus by car, about 3200 kms (nearly 2000 miles) of saltpans, sandhills, spinifex, gibber-stone deserts, anthills, and snakes, but no roads. They'd tried once before but the abandoned Talbot truck was still hopelessly bogged in the sandhills up at Barrow Creek.
There was nothing much in the middle back then but the one lonely wire of the Overland Telegraph that hooked Aus up to the world, snaking across all that hostile nothingness, on wooden poles that kept being eaten by the termites. It was not a fun place. Not called 'The Dead Heart' for no reason.
In the middle of nowhere just north of Alice Springs the trio saw a figure in the distance, coming through the heat mirage shimmer, thought it must be an emu or a roo, but with a strange side-to-side gait. Turned out to be a man! On a bloody pushbike! Lean, wiry, tanned, had a swag roll, a food-bag and a Winchester, not much else. Intro-ed himself as Frank Birtles. So they boiled the billy and had a cuppa tea. Asked him how far he'd come. As you would.
Frank thought about it - well, let's see - I started out in Sydney, then Armidale, Brisbane, Rockhampton - ah, cut across the Gulf Country after that - then Tennant Creek, and into Darwin. Now I'm heading for Adelaide. A whole new level of silent gobsmackedness over tea!But for Frank Birtles this was just the swan song of his already many years of long distance pushbiking. He took one look at the Talbot and thought yep, cars are the new go. Went on the do stuff that boggles the mind, set all kinds of long distance overland records, culminating in 1928 by driving from London to Melbourne.
This is a GREAT read. Do yourself a massive favour and find a copy.
It's 1915, him and his mate are 17 and at a good English Public School, decide it would be "ripping fun" to join the then Royal Flying Corps, and bluff their way into WWI. The wood-and-cloth-and-wires thing (a Farman 'Longhorn') on the right is what he did his basic training in, and still not yet 18, Cecil Lewis gets his wings but can't go to France till he has 60 hours flying time up, when the average life expectancy for combat pilots over the battlefields was just 3 weeks.
This memoir - written in 1936 with the help of diaries and flight logs - is a very "male" book, laced with technical aircraft stuff and plenty of action narrative, but well written and easy to read, all the while very factually dealing with the death and carnage, and the daily expectation every pilot had that each sortie would be their last.
By the time he was 19 years old Lewis was a seasoned Senior Flight Leader, with the Military Cross, having done time artillery spotting, aerial photography, sent back to England with frayed nerves but re-assigned as a Test Pilot for 3 months (one of his mates had even gone insane under the relentless pressures of combat), then Lewis was sent back to the Front to a new squadron equipped with the new single seater SE.5 fighter, to engage the enemy one-on-one.I have no idea how anyone gets through all that, and you would expect that clutching to some notion of a protective God would be needed, but Cecil Lewis was something of a philosopher and a bit of a fatalist. He writes -
"I did believe I had a soul, a speck of radio-active divinity, a drop of the Life Force, within me. But it was only on loan, so to speak. When I had finished with it, that drop went back into the bucket, into the agglomeration of surplus vital energy we, for want of a better term, called God. I did not believe in reincarnation, the same drop inhabiting another body; the odds were against it. Besides, the drop merged back into the whole; it was not an entity that could be fished out and popped into another body. The Life Force was a blind instinct : God was not a conjurer."
Somehow Lewis came out the other side of WWI, spent time in China, married the daughter of a Russian General, was a founding member of the BBC, and then a Squadron Leader in WWII, had two more marriages (his first wife said he was a "compulsive philanderer"), wrote many books - the last one in his nineties - and lived till 1997. His friend George Bernard Shaw said of him - "This prince of pilots has had a charmed life in every sense of the word. He is a thinker, a master of words, and a bit of a poet."
Not everyone's book, but a fascinating insight into the beginning years of a life that would be lived to the absolute hilt!
"A LONDON DIARY" - Quentin Reynolds (USA/UK 1941)I'd forgotten how good this book is, another of those small treasures we found on a throw-out table somewhere long ago, for $1.25 by the look of the pencil work on the flyleaf.
This is the Angus & Robertson edition that was published in Australia in 1941, on genuine Austerity paper that is just a lick short of being cardboard, and bound in the plainest of hardback covers. It FEELS like the war! And looks it, spine now a bit tattery and the "gold" embossing well faded by time and much handling. Just love it. A book with character, inside and out.
Quentin Reynolds was a US war correspondent based in London during The Blitz, and he wrote a series of daily letters to his father, these being Oct to Dec 1941, when blitzkrieg rained down every night and a good steak was hard to find. But Reynolds' writing here isn't about the big war, but the small one, the human stuff that happened to him and his mates, and his interaction with air wardens, waiters, fellow Fleet Streeters, gunners, pilots, sailors, secretaries, the nightly civilian huddle in the Underground stations, and every day and night "lived in the moment" in the truest sense, while nagging his connections in the Ministry to let him on a bombing run or a submarine sortie or both.
If you're into good writing, the war experience, small "h" history, and 1941 anecdotes and characters dodging High Explosives, do yourself a favour and find a copy of this.
"THE ROAD FROM COORAIN" - Jill Ker Conway (Aust/USA 1989)
"I CAN JUMP PUDDLES" - Alan Marshall (Aust 1955)There's a phrase - "...a classic of Australian (American, English, French, etc etc) literature..." - that gets splashed around possibly way too much when the blurb people get carried away with filling up the back cover of a new release. But with this one it's justified, reprinted many times, and made into a TV mini-series.
There's nothing deeply meaningful about this book, just a simple story, told well, of a 11-12 year old boy from the bush just before the First World War, who contracted polio and as a result totally lost the use of one leg and partially of the other, finished up on crutches. But he never lost his spirit or his driving determination to not be limited by this, did it on hands and knees if he had to, to be in it with his mates.
I bought my copy for a whole dollar a week or so ago, at a small church Op Shop just off the main drag in Goolwa - a great town and an historic old inland port on Lake Alexandrina (where my forebears once had a thriving brewery!) - and a decent day-tripper destination.
I reckon I got a serious bargain with this book. It's only a 1961 cheapie paperback reprint, designed by the look of it for First Year (Yr 8) High School English, and bound in that old way of a series of batches of eight double pages sewn together with fine cotton - some now starting to hang loose! - before being stuck into the cover. But it gives it a sort of homely feel.
But the best bit is that it was held by a girl who took her English seriously, as she's left all these little pencilled notes for me all through it in the margins! - okay, not for me, but for herself, part of her own grappling with English and grammar. And how do I know it's a girl? - the writing is way too small and neat and sharp to be any boy that age. And it makes every page turn an anticipation of what word or expression she ran into that she needed to clarify before the next lesson. If you're out there somewhere Miss... Mrs... Ms..., I loved your notes and I hope you're still as caught up in great reading. And jotting in the margins.
Alan Marshall (1902-1984) lived a childhood in a time and a place where a man was measured by his way with horses, his physical ability, and his capacity to earn an honest quid, and Alan's father was all of those things and more, but was a caring man with it, and gave Alan every reason to look up to him and aspire to be the same. Even when burdened with crutches. This is a very satisfying read.
Yep, definitely a great read if you're into fascinating characters well-portrayed, and simple but evocative writing that covers this author's childhood from about 8 to when she enlists in late 1939 at 17 in the Army's nursing corps.
As I said, I found this well-travelled paperback last year, on an Op Shop shelf in Camperdown, deep in country of Victoria, a very fitting home for it as it's set in the heart of their big sheep-wheat lands. And I just love these kinds of finds, a $2 bargain that's seen a lot of history and a lot of hands. They smell like a book!
Patricia Jean Adam-Smith (1924-2001) was a half generation older than me, but I've bumped into some of the country and some of the characters that populate this autobiography - much lauded in it's day, along with its sequel Goodbye Girlie", which I must now find.
Patsy and her older sister, railway kids in the Great Depression, with parents who moved around a bit, saw hard times, times long gone but kept alive here in her simple narrative prose.
If you'd like to have a quick look at her childhood heartland, as it is today anyway, now with only the wheat silos and the railway right-of-way left as a hint of what it was like in the 1930s, Google Map "1720 Waaia-Bearii Rd, Waaia, Vic", and have a look around.
Any Australian who aspires to writing and reading great material, is a total mug if he/she doesn't read this book. Anyone from other parts of the world who aspires likewise should do themselves a serious favour and read this book. That is, if you are into LIFE and what one person can do with a life. I've been around for yonks. It takes a lot to impress me now that I'm finally grown up and become a mature person and all that bumph. But this lady impresses the hell outa me!
This is the autobiographical sequel to "Hear The Train Blow" that she wrote in 1964 (I did it a few weeks back - it's down below there somewhere still) and covers her adult life. And what a life it was!
This lady was one of those people that "irrepressible" was coined for, gregarious and full of energy and curiosity and creativity, a networker of the supreme order, and all of it flowering in a time when Aus women were kept narrow and suppressed and close to the sink.
Painfully naive and with little exposure to life outside of the small-town bush of her childhood, she volunteered (putting her 17-and-a-bit age up) for Army service in 1941, as a Nurse's Aid, during which she drifted into a marriage with a war-damaged man much older than herself, mainly because she simply didn't know how to get out of it, and in her own words "...too young among the hysterical excitement of the times, and he too prematurely old, worn out by a long war." Which resulted in divorce, two children she had to literally buy from him, and a deep aversion to marriage and religion. And a hunger for life that was - well, irrepressible.
Patsy wrote this near the end of her life, but not before being the sole or joint writer of 30 books. How she went about them is all too good for me to spoil here, you need to indulge yourself first hand.