Biography

A biographer is tasked, after all, with interpreting a life, yet Mears deliberately did so much of this interpretation, and re-interpretation, herself. And she did so with an increasing knowledge, it seems, that her own interpretations were partial and fallible and liable to change shape over time.

In The Warrior, The Voyager and the Artist, Kate Fullagar invites us to rethink the British empire of the eighteenth century, understanding it not as the inexorable outcome of economic and technological superiority but as a more tenuous – even tentative – project, contested at its centre as well as its edges.

Mark Mordue’s compelling biography asserts that Nick Cave’s self-mythology is a product of both genuine artistic obsessions, and of the networks of friends and family uniquely equipped to guide and nurture them.

Colin McCahon ceased painting in 1982. He locked his studio door and, as became apparent after his death in 1987, left his final painting, perhaps unfinished, face down on the floor. Its text, from Ecclesiastes, begins: I considered all the acts of oppression/under the sun; and ends: Here again I saw emptiness under/the Sun without son or brother/toiling endless yet never. It is unsigned and above those last words is a roughly oblong area of deep dark black.

With that a brilliant career as an artist of unstinting generosity, fierce commitment and unparalleled skill, concluded.

Long before the Stella Prize, there was Stella herself, but also Ada, various Marys, Catherines and Elizabeths, Tasma, Rosa and so on.

Fairweather’s letters are unsettling enough not to make them good bedtime reading. Just like his two reckless sea trips in make-do craft – one in 1944 on an old boat, from Sandgate, on the outskirts of Brisbane, landing on Bribe Island off the coast by chance, and the second in 1952 on a self-made raft from far-north Queensland aiming for Dili – his letters are a rough ride on rolling waves.

Awoken by his insomnia after a performance by Grinderman in 2011, Nick ends up sending me an email that wrestles with his complicated sense of who his father was.

Why then is Brett’s new biography important? It is important, because, written with conspicuous skill and economy, it is the leading continuation and affirmation of Deakin’s liberal-progressive life and work in our own troubled times of short parliaments and major geopolitical changes – the rise of China at a time of uncertainty about US leadership in the world today. It is important because, in those ways, it offers the most rational defence of Deakin’s nation against the changes he already saw the need to guard it against. But while the biography presents the face of liberal reason and a sharp, though still sympathetic psychological and political portrait, it generates a certain silence. Its greatest importance may indeed be that it takes us to the limits of its liberal comfort zone. For at that limit, it becomes possible to see how the biography’s minimal history represents the ongoing liberal denial of the geopolitical reality that was a mainspring of federation.

It’s no easy task to render a sprawling archive into a narrative that captures the significance of Paula Modersohn-Becker for a readership a century later – a figure not only of her time but also for ours. A trace, she calls it, and yes, it is her trace and with it she achieves – more than existing studies have – the aim Hermione Lee posits for all forms of biographical and life-writing: ‘a living person in a body, not a smoothed-over figure’.

Fink is as scrupulous, in her way, as her subject was. By which I mean she is able, most of the time, to avoid comment. She doesn’t editorialise. The significance of events in Oliver’s life is allowed to emerge from contemporary testimony, perhaps, or from narrative juxtaposition, or simply because of the baleful grandeur of Oliver’s commitment to her work and the sometimes alarming consequences of her dedication.