Edition 33
Such Is Life
- Published 6th September, 2011
- ISBN: 9781921758225
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
Award-winning author Lloyd Jones reveals how childhood rugby and a reverence for the All Blacks shaped his adult sensibilities and success beyond the Wellington suburbs.
Carrie Tiffany comes to terms with pain and shame; Shakira Hussein falls between identities and cultures in the wake of 9/11.
Debra Adelaide learns the value of an official identity; Meera Atkinson’s friendship transcends pubescent pop star fandom; and David Carlin attempts to write the history of Circus Oz.
In essays, Frank Moorhouse tests the boundaries of privacy and stigma; Peter Bishop salutes teachers – real and literary – who nurture our creative imagination; AJ Brown gets behind the writing of his new biography of Michael Kirby; and Matthew Ricketson surveys recent political memoirs.
Marion Halligan, Toni Jordan and Anna Dorrington explore the legacy of mothers and children, while John Tranter, Brian Geach and Andrew Sant investigate rites of fatherhood.
Raimond Gaita and Kate Holden consider what is honoured or lost when adapting memories to book or film; plus Virginia Lloyd, Rosie Scott, Sheila Fitzpatrick and much more.
In this Edition
Beyond stigma
'Nothing is as revolutionary as candour.' – Robert Desnos (French surrealist from the 1930s) I THINK WE would agree – in some hazy way – that privacy as a value, and behaviour surrounding the idea of privacy, are considered fundamental in a good society and...
Beyond truth and justice
AT THE FUNERAL of Chile's General Pinochet, in December 2006, Francisco Cuadrado Prats stood for hours in a queue of grieving mourners. When it was his time to say goodbye, he walked up to the coffin and spat on the general's slowly decomposing face....
The living subject
'BUT COULD YOU do it warts and all?'When in 2002 Michael Kirby greeted my proposal for a biography with this response – in writing, very helpful for lawyers and historians – I was doubly sure this was the makings of a great life story.As...
Adventures of the letter I
In the town of Odessathere is a gardenand Dvonya is there,Dvonya whom I lovethough I have never been in Odessa... MORE THAN THIRTY years ago, the Jamaican-born American poet Louis Simpson came to Australia and was for a time in Armidale as a guest of...
Deep connections, artistic inevitabilities
FOUR YEARS AFTER the release of the film adaptation of Romulus, My Father, it still feels strange to refer to the characters in the film as characters rather than as real people – to Romulus but not to my father, to Christina but not...
Child’s play
In memory of Harvey. Dedicated to Donna. IN 1977, ON a windy summer day, two thirteen-year-olds walked into a milk bar on Sydney's Broadway and, as they often did, struck up a conversation with a complete stranger, sharing their love of Sherbet, the Australian pop...
Waking up
'THERE ARE TWO types of people in the world, aren't there, Aunty Tone?' asks Bella, who is five going on thirty-five. It is the first week of 2011, and I'm babysitting my niece and nephew while my sister and her husband take a long-overdue...
Family
A NEW MALE human being entered the universe a year ago, with one-eighth of his genetic material identical to my mother's and one-eighth identical to my father's. Those millions of delicate fragments of code, assembled around a hundred years ago, were duplicated perfectly, then...
Denzil
FOR A MOMENT he doesn't recognise me. He stares at me, rheumy-eyed, then breaks into a smile.'Very nice,' he says, 'very nice.'I'm in a suit and tie but he's still in his pyjamas. Earlier, I'd spoken to the nurse. 'He's a bit stroppy this...
Never stop looking
TWO MONTHS BEFORE my husband, John, died of secondary bone cancer, I asked him if it would be all right if I took a few pictures of him in bed. I was not looking to add to our collection of photographs of us as...
The veiled bride
THE SYNAGOGUE WAS still there: an inconspicuous brick building in a poor part of Shanghai where tower blocks had not yet risen, on the far side of Suzhou Creek. The narrow houses were two storeys at most, with the ground floors given over to...
The true history of the Circus
IF I AM to write the true history of the Circus, I must start by telling you how my girlfriend ran off with the silent clown. 'Harpo!' we called out to him across the border from South Australia, my loyal friends nursing my ego.The...
Going to Washington, DC
'ARE YOU GOING? If he wins, are we going?' It was October 2008, a month before the presidential election, yet many of my friends and family had begun asking this question. 'Are you going to the inauguration in Washington?' The question became more important...
Nine-eleven-itis
Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2011 I TRIED NOT to jump to conclusions. I remembered Oklahoma – those few hours (or was it days?) during which people thought that the blasted government building, its child-care centre littered with tiny corpses, was a Muslim crime...
My mother and me
FOR A LONG time I could not make up my mind where and when to start my story, but eventually I decided to begin in the middle.About ten years ago my sister told me that my mother had had another child, one we knew...
The cigar box
CIGAR BOXES ARE elegant and prettily made small objects, more common once than they are now. They are made of thin slices of wood, and their labels may show a certain rose and gilt baroque splendour. They have a delicious scent that has nothing...
Not for official use
WHEN I READ Georgia Blain's memoir, Births Deaths Marriages (Random House, 2008), I was struck by the cover of the book as well as by its remarkable contents. The design incorporates a copy of a birth certificate of similar vintage to mine, a document...
After the words
MY PAST HAS not quite perished, nor would I want it to. The events described in my second memoir, The Romantic (Text, 2010), took place years ago and in another country – but the wench is not dead, only changed. There is a woman...
My last-ditch attempt
MY PSYCHIATRIST IS this pert petite pixie. Excuse me: when I'm manic, and I am manic at the moment, I'm drawn to alliteration like a moth to a flame. Also, to tired analogies. She has a corona of taut blonde curls, perfect teeth, and...
On self-knowledge
Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2011ON MY LEFT index finger is a ring that fits snugly. It's been there for a decade. I began to wear it several years after my father died. Then, a few days ago, I was washing my oily...
Looking back: a self-portrait
I HAVE STEPPED inside a replica of Leonardo da Vinci's cabinet of mirrors, and here I am, as I have never before seen myself. The back of me, the sides, as well as the usual frontal perspective – in other words, the whole of...
Hospice
You never tire of the sky,caught within the frame and sash,spun sugar, your tongue can almost tastebefore it melts away.You bask in brushstrokesmilky blue,where white fire congealsinto shaggy buffalo and swans.Mornings are paleto match the tint of these four wallsand you imagine you’re afloatin...
Heart’s dream
Only recently did it occur to me that she might have dreamt a different life, a creativity not bound by all the matter of women's domesticity. So I asked her. The afternoon was sunny – matching her disposition. Over coffee in the chic café...
Featured Contributors
Lloyd Jones
Lloyd Jones co-edited Griffith Review 43: Pacific Highways. His novels include The Book of Fame, Mister Pip, Hand Me...
Shakira Hussein
Shakira Hussein has recently completed a MacKenzie postdoctoral fellowship on Muslim women, gendered violence and racialised political discourse at...
Frank Moorhouse
Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers...
Meera Atkinson
Meera Atkinson is a Sydney-based literary writer, academic, and the author of Traumata (UQP, 2018), The Poetics of Transgenerational...
