PUBLIC LECTURE: The Inaugural Seymour Lecture: "Walking upon Ashes": the footsteps of a modern biographer

Abstract:

The lecture title comes from Samuel Johnson, as he contemplates the difficulties of writing the life of Addison, whose lifetime, very briefly, touched Johnson’s own. ‘As the process of writing these narratives (The Lives of the Poets) is now bringing me among my contemporaries, I begin to feel myself myself walking upon ashes under which the fire is not extinguished, and coming to the time of which it will be proper rather to say nothing that is false rather than everything that is true.’ This paper will discuss the ways in which a modern biographer, working close to her own time, must try to resolve the problems Johnson discerned.

Brenda Niall’s first biography, Martin Boyd: a Life (1988) seemed to offer the ideal distance between author and subject: close enough to provide many living witnesses, yet with a certain degree of detachment which would enable Boyd’s life (1893-1972) to be seen in perspective. She followed this work with Georgiana McCrae, painter, diarist, pioneer, for which the sources, from McCrae’s birth in 1804 to her death in 1890, were all documentary. The Boyds; a Family Biography explored five generations of family history, with a time range from the 1840s to the 1990s. Its concluding chapters are based on interviews with the present generation of Boyds, and other living witnesses. Most recently, in August 2005, Niall published Judy Cassab: a portrait. Interviews with the Hungarian Jewish artist, who survived the Holocaust and migrated to Sydney in 1951, as well as access to Cassab’s unpublished diaries, were the main sources for this biography. Comparing the experience of writing these four works suggests that for a modern biographer, the fire beneath the ashes may still give off heat in unexpected ways, no matter how distant in time her subject may be, or how close.

Biographical note:

Brenda Niall is one of the very few writers to be awarded an AO (Order of Australia). In June 2004 she was honoured for ‘services to Australian literature, as academic, biographer and literary critic’.

Until recently Brenda Niall has combined two careers: as an academic and as a writer. A graduate of the University of Melbourne, with postgraduate degrees from the Australian National University and Monash University, she is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and has held visiting appointments at the University of Michigan, Yale University and the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. Now, having retired from Monash University, where she was Reader in the English Department, she is a fulltime writer, whose book reviews appear regularly in the Melbourne Age and other Australian newspapers and journals. She has won six major national literary awards, and many shortlistings.

Her books include three major biographies, all published by Melbourne University Press and all award-winners. Her first biography, Martin Boyd: a Life won the National Book Council’s award for 1989. This study of the novelist member of the Boyd family of artists opened the door for the more recent study of the wider Boyd family.

Next came the biography of another artist, Georgiana McCrae, (Georgiana : Painter, Diarist, Pioneer) which won the Victorian Premier’s Award for non-fiction in 1995, and the Fellowship of Australian Writers’ award for biography.

Published in 2002, The Boyds: a Family Biography, traces the famous family of artists over five generations. Like Georgiana, The Boyds won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for the best work of non-fiction in its year. It also won the Queensland Premier’s Prize.

Other books include Seven Little Billabongs: the World of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce (1979) Australia Through the Looking-Glass: Children’s Fiction 1830-1980 (1984); The Oxford Book of Australian Schooldays (co-edited with Ian Britain, 1997), The Oxford Book of Australian Letters (co-edited with John Thompson, 1999). All Niall’s books have been reprinted, some several times.

Brenda Niall’s most recent biography (for release, Allen & Unwin, August 2005) is the story of the celebrated Sydney artist, Judy Cassab, who came from Hungary to Sydney in 1951 as a ‘displaced person’, having survived Nazi persecution and the siege of Budapest. Cassab is probably best known as a portrait painter, and the only woman to have won the Archibald Prize twice, but her haunting paintings of the Central Australian desert are now winning recognition. Cassab, who invited Niall to sit for a non-commissioned portrait when they first met in 1997, agreed to have her own biographical ‘portrait’ drawn by Niall. Based on sixty years of diaries and many interviews, this work was given the same freedom of interpretation which sitters give to Cassab the portrait painter.

Monash University will confer an Honorary D. Litt on Brenda Niall on 13 October 2005, and she has been invited by the Biography Institute of the Australian National University to give the Inaugural Seymour Lecture at the National Library, Canberra, on 2 November 2005.

This lecture has been organised in partnership with the Biography Institute at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU. The Inaugural Seymour Lecture was first presented at the National Library, Canberra, on 2 November 2005.