Biographies & memoirs session

This biography From Vienna To Yogyakarta has a personal association for me. I knew Herb and his family from when I was at Monash University. I shared a student house with David his son {and that’s how I met Kim, my love, who was a friend of David at high school}. Herb was Head of the Indonesian studies and Peace studies faculties at Monash and many friends studied under him. He was a friendly and welcoming man and students loved his lectures. His home was a refuge for many overseas students and friends of his children.

The narrative traces Herb’s family history beginning in Vienna, Austria and the family’s escape from Europe to Australia as Nazism threated their safety. While a student, Herb heard of the emerging democracy in Indonesia under Sukarno and in 1951 became the first volunteer from Australia to work in Indonesia. This was the start of the Volunteer Graduate Scheme now known as Australian Volunteers International. Herb was helping the Ministry of Information to register millions of Indonesians for the election and find ways of exlaining the new system.

‘Most popular and effective… were wayang (shadow puppet) performances… These used local languages and peformance styles to carry the message across the archipelago.’

This began a life time bond for Herb with Indonesia and Indonesians. He became the Australian expert on Indonesian politics, wrote books about Indonesia, and with a few other scholars initiated the Indonesian faculty at Monash University.

Through the life of Herb the author explores Australia’s relations and attitudes to Indonesia and the key events in Indonesia’s history. After WW2, Britain supported the Dutch in holding onto Indonesia. It was the wharfies in Melbourne refusing to load up Dutch ships with weaponry, troops and ammunition, that highlighted this anti-democratic colonialism. Public support for Indonesian independence grew in Australia.

Jemma Purdey doesn’t just present Herb’s accomplishments but explores the complicated relationship Herb formed with Indonesia. He loved Indonesia and its people but didn’t always agree with the political leadership. She maps his disappointments and alarm over the decline of democracy in Indonesia under General Suharto and his horror over the deaths of half a million people during a failed coup in 1965. She also explores the dilemmas Herb faced with balancing academic neutrality and political activism. Unable to resist joining in, on 8 May 1970 Herb gave an address at a graduation ceremony then invited the students and their families to join him in marching in the Vietnam Moratoruium.

Franklin & Eleanor An Extraordinary Marriage

This book is written by Australian author and academic, Hazel Rowley, about the American President Franklin D Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor. Although thoroughly researched it is not a dry academic tome, but an interesting and compelling read about two people, their families, politics and life’s trials and triumphs.

Franklin and Eleanor were related. Theodore Roosevelt (a former Republican US President) was her Uncle (her father’s brother), and Ted was Franklin’s cousin. They were both from wealthy American families.

However, Eleanor and Franklin despite their backgrounds were interested in social reform, and joined the Democrat Party. Eleanor taught history and worked for the Democratic Party behind the scenes. They were an interesting family who encouraged their secretary, body guard, and close assistants to become an extended and supportive family. They were inclusive in both public and private life. The book follows Franklin’s poiltical trajectory that culminated in FDR becoming President in 1933. As president he had to steer the nation through the Great Depression and World War Two.

I don’t want to say too much about the book for those who will read it, but a couple of things that stood out for me.

I was amazed at how while the nation knew that he had contracted polio in 1921, FDR, Eleanor and an incredibly tight support team kept the extent of his disability hidden. In reality FDR couldn’t walk without help, needed support standing, and needed a personal nurse to manage his daily routine of washing, getting into his wheel chair and so on. And yet he was portrayed as a strong, charming man in the media.

Another part made me see parallels with recent politics in the US. In 1929 Great depression began, New York Stock Exchange collapsed. By March 1930 uneployment up from 1.5 million to 3.2 million; President Hoover kept saying the market would regulate itself. There was no unemployment relief, no bank deposit insurance. FDR believed strict government regulation was needed to discourage reckless banking and business practices. He believed in a minimum wage, an 8 hour day, old age pensions, farm relief, and unemployment relief through public works. When he became President in 1933, One of his first acts was to legalize the sale of beer. The reopening of the breweries gave work to half a million men. It ended 13 years of prohibition.

Black Swan – A Koorie Woman’s Life Eileen Harrison & Carolyn Landon

Black Swan, a Koori woman’s life by Eileen Harrison is an autobiography written with assistance from Carolyn Landon who co-authored Jacksons Track (with Daryl Tonkin). I took this with me on holiday just before Easter–when we camped at Lake Tyers, Gippsland in the bush. What a beautiful lake full of jumping fish, pelicans flying overhead and bats squeaking at night. I began reading and realised I was staring across the lake at the very land where Eileen had grown up.

Eileen tells of growing up with her ten siblings at the Mish (the mission at Lake Tyers) and paints the life of family, community, school, fishing expeditions and playing in the bush. She also tells her story of being profoundly deaf. Eileen is a respected artist, based in Warragul now and her life story is enriched by the inclusion of some of her paintings of place and self, often inspired by the designs she learned from her Nan Carter’s basket making. Carolyn has also related Eileen’s personal journey to events in Gippsland history and to the Victoria wide government policies which affected aboriginal people, often with disastrous consequences – the moving of aborigines from across Victoria to Lake Tyers, their isolation and their need to obtain permission for travel and work; then there being pushed out of Lake Tyers and having no base, no home and the problems which result from displacement. Some good news came when a struggle for land rights resulted in the land title for the Lake Tyers settlement being given to the residents in 1973 — the first time this had happened in Australia.

Eileen showed some of her paintings at Stockyard Gallery in Foster during NAIDOC week in 2012.

An Australian in China – G. E. Morrison

George Ernest Morrison wrote this book about his journey in 1894 from Shangai to Rangoon. It is a travel journal with observations about Chinese culture often tinged with humour. He travelled partly by boat up the Yangtze and rode and walked the rest about 4,800 km. He wore Chinese clothes on the journey but being tall stood out anyway and was often the centre of attention and sometimes called a ‘foreign devil’.

Apart from particular journey, Morrison doesn’t seem to have written much in the way of memoirs for publication, and yet his life was full of adventure. He was born in Geelong in 1862 and seems to have been attracted to long journeys. I was amazed by the brief introduction in this edition {my own copy} by David Bonavia which mentions that he walked from Geelong to Adelaide in a school vacation at the age of 17.

During his studies as a medical doctor he canoed down the Murray from Albury to the mouth (2640 km); In 1882 he walked from Normanton (north Queensland) to Melbourne. In New Guinea he nearly died. He walked deep into the jungle, where he was speared twice. He travelled with one spear head still in him through the jungle to the coast then by sea to Cooktown in Queensland where the surgeons were not equipped to remove the spear. He then went to Melbourne and his father put him on a ship to Scotland where the spear was removed. He then finished his medical degree in Scotland, before embarking on this China trip. After this trip he became correspondent for The Times in Beijing and became known as Morrison of Peking. So you can see he had plenty to write about if biography had been his bent, but most of his writing efforts went into journalism, letters and diaries. There’s a few biographies of Morrison and quite a few spin off books. When I have time I want to read Cyril Pearl’s biography, Morrison of Peking, which I hope will shed more light on his travels as a young man and life in Beijing.

Or this one by Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin The Man who died Twice.

ANU holds the George E Morrison lecture annually. In 1970 Kevin Rudd spoke at the 70^th lecture. Linda Jaivin spoke at the 73^rd lecture about the period Morrison lived in Beijing. Her novel A Most Immoral Woman is based on letters and documents she researched on the affair between Morrison and Mae Perkins, daughter of a California millionaire.

Recently I came across this one. One of those ‘in the footsteps’ type books. There's probably more spin-offs I haven't seen yet....

Self-Portrait by Morris Lurie

Just to finish. I read this short and sweet story by Melbourne author Morris Lurie. A four page Self-Portrait. Here’s a taste.

‘He was a reader, my father, of westerns, only of westerns, loved those westerns, a fresh two every Saturday afternoon grabbed from the lending library round the corner, the covers ablaze with heroic men in flapping chaps blasting their six-shooters at one another or into the air over stampeding herds, my own tastes culturally not all that far removed, Nabokov, Beckett, Bellow, bookshelves crammed with all the right trash, Borges, Bathelme, Edmund Wilson (the whiskey drinker), Hemmingway (the shooter), a genius and a poet each and every one, as of course every writer is, whether galloping after a stagecoach hurtling to the cliff with a crinolined woman wailing inside or dipping his sponge finger into his cocoa to summon up the gentle past, my father’s reading different from my own only in that he did his in the bath — how he used to grab at my books to take them to the tub! —while I prefer my literature basically dry. ‘

(‘Self-Portrait’ in My Life as a Movie and other gross conceits, Morris Lurie.)