Author Archives: hilary
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Memoirs of a Young Bastard – Introduction
Posted on June 5, 2012 by hilary in My BooksAbout the Burstall Diaries Tim Burstall began keeping a diary in late 1953 when he was twenty-six, married with two small sons. The Burstalls and four other young families were building their mudbrick houses around a large dam on a hillside on the edge of Eltham, a ruggedly beautiful semi-rural area to the north-east of Melbourne. The husbands went to their jobs each day in the city and the wives worked at home looking after children, growing food, watering young fruit trees, milking goats, making ends meet. Tim Burstall set himself the discipline of writing 500 words a day and kept it up for three years, 368,000 words in all, observing, reflecting, story-telling and producing one of the most evocative and certainly the most comprehensive Australian diaries of modern times. Friends remember him quoting Isherwood: ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking… Some day all of this will to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.’ * But diarists are not passive recorders. Burstall turned his gaze mercilessly upon his immediate neighbours and wide circle of friends and acquaintances, the artists, writers, philosophers, musicians, academics at the parties and in the pubs of the day. …
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Silences
Posted on May 2, 2012 by hilary in Blog Posts, Work in ProgressA short unspoken history of this part of the coast Once upon a time, a long time ago, in the 1950s and 60s when photos were black and white and scarce, there was a beautiful place by the sea, unknown and unsmart, where old bathers and dirty sandshoes were all anyone needed, plus a jumper or two when the sun went down. There was a post office and a store and a pub and six fortunate families who practically lived on the beach throughout the summer. And it was here, when the tide was right some evenings, that the six fortunate families netted fish. Fathers and big kids waded out and filled the net to overflowing with mullet and salmon and sea bream and much else besides. The rest of us piled driftwood on the fire. And after the feast of fish the catch was divided up. # It all sounds too good to be true, but I know it was true because I was there – in this unspoiled enclave, Protestant probably, Anglo-Celtic certainly, blissful and blinkered. # Then sometime in the 1960s, when cars improved and the road was better, the day trippers began - and so …
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Semifinal 2 – Tournament of Books: My Brilliant Career vs The Fortunes of Richard Mahony
Posted on November 17, 2011 by hilary in Blog PostsVS This is torture. Two dead white women whose books feel like friends — and I am already deep in subjectivity. They sort of map my life. Once a fierce nineteen year old like Miles Franklin’s Stella/Sybylla, I was determined not to get snagged in convention or my mother’s life. I once loved a brilliant Mahony of a man whose life and death followed something of the same dark passage. I was sent to wander the National Gallery once in search of paintings for the paperback covers of The Fortunes of Richard Mahony — which in 1969 had just been declared by the UK company good enough to wear ‘Penguin livery’ — as they called it back then. Both books are now in Penguin Classics and are slugging it out in a tournament that feels more like kick-boxing than tennis. Judging literary awards can be a snitch, choosing what gets published, no problem. A tournament is something else again. There’s staying power, performance, the roar of the crowd on the day. What the books are about matters and though written more than twenty years apart by very different women who didn’t much admire each other, they have much in common. Both …
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My friend, Diana Gribble, died the other night …
Posted on October 7, 2011 by hilary in Blog PostsWritten for The Drum, ABC. Since then the tributes have poured forth from people who knew her well, and from some who didn’t but had benefitted from her gifts – her ability to make things happen, to set things to rights and to cut to the chase. Di’s risk-taking has been mentioned a good deal – and that I can vouch for. We had taken a risk on each other, after all – two young women back in 1974. Both feminists fond of men, with a shared a passion for reading and typography, but backgrounds and experiences which were poles apart. When Diana and Jack’s wedding made a big splash in the Age’s social pages, I was a bohemian young mother in the Dandenongs with an artist husband and no running water or electricity. When we met again over a campaign to interview every Federal Politician about where they stood on issues of abortion and equality, I was a novice editor and Diana was working for an advertising agency. We signed an old-fashioned partnership agreement to form an entity to do whatever came along that appealed to us, promising to be “true and honest with each other at all times”. Risk-taking was …
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Certainties
Posted on April 27, 2011 by hilary in Blog PostsMy euphoria after the people’s uprising in Tunisia and Cairo and the stirrings in Syria lasted for weeks. Then, during the long run up while the UN was deliberating over the no-fly zone for Libya, I was visiting the fiord country in a remote part of PNG where the villages are accessible only by boat and few people have access to radio transmitters. But mad bad Gaddafi was a name that resonated. PNG has a long tradition of zealots bearing news of change from other worlds. So when I found myself being asked questions about the Arab world, drawing a map in the dust to show where north Africa is, and holding forth about how Cairo had been inspired by Tunisia and how Libya was in an uproar, I was tentative. But the questions I was asked went to the heart of the matter. Why did the rulers not share the oil money? Why did the people not tell the rulers what they needed? Why did the rulers shoot their own people? Port Moresby is more expensive than Sydney. With the building of the PNG Liquified Natural Gas pipeline from the Southern Highlands, have come the condominiums and marinas and …
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Great days
Posted on February 14, 2011 by hilary in Blog PostsHosni Mubarak looking strangely like Silvio Berlusconi (who also doesn’t get it) has handed over power. Once the middle classes – especially when thousands of doctors and the elderly – joined the young, it was probably all over. But earlier that evening it had looked like a dangerous stalemate. I made the mistake of watching the remarkable Peter Watkins film made in 2000 of the 1871 Paris Commune and the role of the media - and went to bed listening to all night radio full of dread of a mighty massacre. Then it was all over. Western leaders seem to be welcoming the change in tones both avuncular and hesitant. An Egypt directing its own affairs, influencing the rest of the Arab League to do the same, is a whole new world. The Western media, especially those whose journalists weren’t in Cairo or Alexandria, has largely erupted into worried negativity, evidence of just how far the caricatures and fear of Islam has penetrated since 9/11. The Muslim world is not all the same.Turkey is not Saudi Arabia.Yemen is not the Lebanon. Indonesia’s transition to democracy was peaceful. Eqypt is more secular, more educated, more cosmopolitan than we often recognise. It is also …
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Youth lash out
Posted on February 2, 2011 by hilary in Blog Posts, OtherIt seems to me there are a few hopeful signs – Egypt especially – and here a generation of young Australians who can’t wait to get out there, lining up to study international relations and cross-cultural complexities, volunteering, learning second and third languages, galvanised by the thought that they are going to have to sort the place out. This is the same generation of students I met in the West Bank a year ago, who said they were impatient with the ideologies of their parents and grandparents, kids with their text bookbooks on their iPhones so they could study when held up at checkpoints. In Egypt, 30% of the population is under 20. And recently the Gazan Youth’s Manifesto for change went around the world: “F*** Hamas. F*** Israel. F*** Fatah. F*** UN. F*** UNWRA. F*** USA!” the manifesto begins, with the verb spelled out fully. “We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference.” Gaza’s youth lash out at the institutions maintaining the seeming status quo on the hopelessness …
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Lesley Hazleton: On reading the Koran
Posted on January 11, 2011 by hilary in VideosLesley Hazleton sat down one day to read the Koran. And what she found — as a non-Muslim, a self-identified “tourist” in the Islamic holy book — wasn’t what she expected. With serious scholarship and warm humor, Hazleton shares the grace, flexibility and mystery she found, in this myth-debunking talk from TEDxRainier. A brilliant introduction to the Koran and what it does not say. It’s just nine minutes of your time.
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National Biography Award Talk & Podcast
Posted on December 1, 2010 by hilary in Blog Posts[i]excerpt[/i]…
Tonight, because I am in the Friends Room of the splendid Mitchell Library, talking to people who can be assumed to be interested in biographical writing, it seemed like a fine opportunity to talk a little about some of my time away from here when I was writing a complex biography.
Talking about the book at all is hemmed around by stop signs and no-go areas – most of them in my head, some of them the normal restraints of confidentiality and privacy, some of them might sound a little paranoid to you, like an episode from Spooks, but I was in a world of security concerns, where emails are vetted regularly, at least for keywords, where computer files sometimes seemed to come and go – and formal communications are always coded and oblique.
A few years ago, I was solicited for the task of writing a biography of a well known public figure in Amman – a man greatly respected all over the Arab world and in Europe. He is not at all well known in Australia, which is a pity because we could do with his insights, but it does make talking about the project slightly easier. I don’t need to name him but will try to ensure he gets a copy of this paper. He doesn’t ‘do’ emails, his staff do. And it’s a world of multiple agendas.
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Timid Minds
Posted on November 1, 2010 by hilary in Blog PostsCAL / Meanjin Essay ‘Cringe’, wrote A.A. Phillips, is ‘a disease of the Australian mind’. This was an unpleasant enough notion in the Australia of the 1950s, then a remnant colonial monoculture with no separate language to hide behind. Now with our cosmopolitan aspirations and liberal assumptions, it seems unthinkable. Arthur ‘Angell’ Phillips, critic and schoolmaster, had been commissioned by Clem Christesen to write ‘The Cultural Cringe’ for Meanjin in 1950. Clem did not much like the essay when it came in but ran it anyway, and eventually conceded that the reader response had been gratifying. Alliteration always helps and the phrase soon entered the language though some, like the member of the Commonwealth Literary Fund when asked to support publication of The Australian Tradition, a collection of A.A. Phillips’ essays, wanted ‘The Cultural Cringe’ dropped. Australian culture, he argued, needed bolstering not admonishing. [1] But A.A.Phillips was no reprimander. His assessment was affectionate but very much to the point. Menzies’ Australia was an insecure, often sycophantic nation, its cultural baggage a complex mix of adulation and hostility. Intellectuals headed to Oxford or Cambridge almost as a matter of course. The centrifugal pull of the great British metropolis was irresistible …
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