Writing Lives.(Life Class: The Education of a Biographer)(Book review)

Life Class: The Education of a Biographer, by Brenda Niall; MUP, 2007, $32.95.

BRENDA NIALL'S BOOKS established her over many years as one of Australia's most successful biographers. Each title sold widely, enjoying successive reprints, and one the accolade of a re-issue by Penguin. Many won literary awards. She achieved as well an academic career of distinction, in both Australian and overseas universities.

She gave us Seven Little Billabongs--lives of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce; a study of Martin Boyd (of whom A.D. Hope said that his novels would continue to be read long after Patrick White's had been forgotten); a wonderfully revealing re-creation of Victorian pioneer Georgiana McCrae; the intricate (but not obscure) story of the whole creative family of Boyd; the eventful life of Archibald Prize-winning portraitist Judy Cassab. Nothing stereotyped about that list: on the contrary, a wide and varied revelation of Australian life and experience over 150 years.

Her new Life Class makes the risky leap from biography to autobiography--a very different territory. I found it an altogether engaging little book--fewer than 300 pages, and small pages at that. (Alas for those neat and well-made true pocket editions which publishers used to produce before the Second World War.)

Niall begins with a sketch of her own early life as a strictly-raised Catholic girl, educated by the nuns at Genazzano Convent. Her family lived on Kew Hill, that airy eminence which, by way of Studley Park Road, rises up from the Yarra River above less salubrious Collingwood. The locality was home to many Irish-Catholic professional families--doctors, surgeons, lawyers, judges--mostly with a solid reputation for probity and generous community concern. They formed an interesting "demographic" (as we now seem to say). The "Hill", however, was spiced with a certain variety, for it supported the towering red-brick mansion "Raheen", home of Archbishop Mannix; nearby stood the white colonnaded palazzo of John Wren, whom Niall calls a gambling "entrepreneur of some notoriety"; and not far away, in a dwelling rather more modest, lived the ever-rising figure of R.G. Menzies.

Brenda Niall worked for a time in the office of the redoubtable B.A. Santamaria, occupied partly in interviews with Archbishop Mannix, preparatory for the biography which Santamaria would later write. The interviews, she tells us, were not a great success. Indeed, I can imagine that the aloof and majestic Mannix gave her a terrifying time. There follows a brief and modest account of what was in fact a distinguished academic career, with graceful acknowledgments to older scholars who helped her along the way, such as historian Geoffrey Serle and poet A.D. Hope.

Niall handles two particular aspects of biographical writing with cogency and clarity.