2002 Melbourne, Australia

Conference Report

15-19 July 2002, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

Report by Margaretta Jolly, University of Exeter

The theme of generations was an inspired one as the focus for this gathering of life writing scholars, practitioners and activists. Lying at the heart of so much life writing and certainly prominent in the contemporary memoir boom it had not yet been treated to a major conference, especially one of such international scope. Papers treated classic mother/father-daughter/son struggles from canonical life writing (Rousseau, Goethe, Svevo, Darwin, Nabokov, Woolf, Stein et al) to contemporary (Martin Amis, Lorna Sage, Paul Auster, Wayson Choy, Eva Hoffman, Lisa Appignaesi, Robert Dessaix, Dorothy Allison, Hong Ying, Moshe Shamir amongst others). Generational conflicts were viewed through prisms of shame, assimilation in diasporic, race and class contexts, transgenerational transmissions of trauma, therapeutic practice and detective work. Especially interesting was Tom Couser’s sensitive discussion of parental narratives of euthanasia and disability, focused through a recent father’s memoir about deciding to kill his paraplegic son and Maggie Kirman’s exploration of donor conception and identity in narratives from donors and recipients of Artificial Insemination. Several speakers used their own histories to think through inheritance, including Jewish-Australian refugee histories, Australian Aboriginal pasts, memories of a Chinese family in 1950s Hong Kong and of migration from Eastern Europe.

If much auto/biography puzzles over relationships of inheritance and descent, intergenerational relationships also often drive the turn to writing, story-telling or video memoir in the first place. Many speakers reflected on generation as an aspect of the creative process in both oral and written narratology. Topics included genre blurring in Drusilla Modjeska ‘s writing, obituaries as auto/biographies, netography, fictional truth in stories in the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Centre, video memoir and video biography, Victorian women’s collective biography and hagiography, feminist letters between mothers and daughters and Mexican-American relational autobiography. Julie Ward showed delightful slides of a life-story project that developed reminiscence work with elderly Sunderland residents through writing their memories on household objects while Odine de Guzman explored the collaborative writing of a young researcher and 60-year-old women in the Philippines.

Generation was equally fruitful as a political concept. Most obviously pertinent was the question of the Australian Stolen Generation. Here intergenerational transmission took tragic form as the forced interruption of cultural and familial memory. Mick Dodson, a member of the Yawuru peoples and a prominent advocate on land rights as Australia’s first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner gave a moving keynote speech about the pain inflicted on the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families throughout the last century as part of white racist assimilation policy. His discussion of the importance of personal testimony not only in individual healing but for political relations with Australian government found echo in several discussions of testimony in South African, Chinese, Jewish and other contexts. Biography also focused questions of race relations. Alison Ravenscroft, who worked with Jackie and Rita Huggins in producing a recent Australian Aboriginal auto/biography Auntie Rita, asked us to think of the white contexts within books are conceived, edited, published and promoted. Penny Van Toorn described relearning reading in editing early Aboriginal life writings, while Melinda Hinkson told of the challenge of writing the biography of W.E.H. Stanmer, anthropologist best known for his respectful interpretations of the Aboriginal Dreaming.

Sidonie Smith’s riveting plenary ‘Personal Narrative in the time of Human Rights: ‘grandmothers’ telling stories of sexual servitude in World War II’ set the framework for where much work on testimony is going. Analysing the way that Korean/Japanese women who survived ‘sexual slavery’ under the Japanese military in the 1930s and 40s are now testifying in many international fora including the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Smith argued that their life narratives powerfully challenge gendered and national notions of shame and silence. Asking why these kinds of stories have begun to circulate in the last decade, especially in the case of long-silenced ‘Comfort Women’, she showed the facilitating power of new human rights discourses especially in relation to war crimes, transnational feminism and the changing structures of geo-political memory. But Smith offered some cautionary notes in the embrace of life narratives as political advocacy. Testifiers can become hostage to an ur-narrative in which they are cast as perpetual victim and can suffer in being asked to ‘perform’ trauma repeatedly. These stories can also perpetuate structures of shame and honour in the asking for absolution and too easily become commodified in ways that obstruct the very empathetic response being sought. And in the tendency to homogenisation, testimonies that foreground one arena of trauma, in this case sexual abuse, can occlude other social determinants. For example few of these women’s stories addressed the class contexts that often lay behind parents’ willingness to give their daughters to the military in the first place.

In the inter-disciplinary and politicised temper of many papers, keynote speaker Charles Altieri provided a striking note of dissonance as he pleaded for a separation between ‘aesthetics’ and ‘ethics’ even in such a highly engaged genre. His suggested alternative criteria for analysing autobiography were seductive: How is the agent moved by particular causes? How does being moved modify the agent’s sense of the world? How does this bring will into play? In pursuing such questions Altieri celebrated self-portraiture such as Rembrandt’s or poets like Lowell who chronicle their sensual and intellectual process in the world without idealisation. In some ways Altieri’s challenge to contemporary auto/biography theorists as priestly puritans echoed the culture wars of US academia and left little room for discussing the reader as well as the (privileged genius) writer, or any of the ways in which life history has always been socially as much as aesthetically important. However he himself represented a generational voice that awakened memories of poetry and pleasure alongside heated discussion.

An evening of readings by Australian life writers and a witty keynote by Don Watson, the speech-writer for and biographer of Australia’s maverick prime minister Paul Keating, amplified the sense that the academic discussion is part of a very real and very popular culture of life writing in Australia as elsewhere. As a whole the conference focused attention on Australian research and its driving themes of Aboriginal and migration histories. Organised by Richard Freadman, director of the Unit for Studies in Biography and Autobiography at La Trobe University, with the help of Trish Dutton, it was the third in a series associated with the International Association for Auto/Biography. The IABA is an affiliation that aims to promote international links in the field. To join its listserve contact the moderator Craig Howes on craighow@hawaii.edu. The next conference will be organised by David Parker at the Chinese University, Hong Kong in March 2004 and will build on links made at previous conferences in Beijing and Vancouver. Titled ‘Inhabiting Multiple Worlds: Auto/Biography in an Anti/Global Age’, this forthcoming conference hopes to offer multi-lingual workshops as well as a postgraduate day with leaders in the field.

Published in Auto/Biography: A Journal of the British Sociological Association, edited by Andrew Sparkes, University of Exeter. For full details of who spoke on what in Melbourne, see http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/english/usba/usba.html.