Editor's Blog

12 October , 2006
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Sunday, October 8. Back to Adelaide for the third, and final, delivery of the 2006 Australian Book Review/La Trobe University Annual Lecture. (High time, you might well think, for an acronym.) This year's lecturer is Professor Ian Donaldson, the noted authority on biography and on Ben Jonson. Ian has been untiring, first delivering the lecture in Canberra, at the National Library; then at La Trobe University; finally at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Somehow Ian also finds time to run the ANU's Humanities Research Centre and to finalise two not insignificant projects - the twenty-five volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (CUP) and the first major biography of Jonson in several decades, all to be published over the next two years.

I lunch with Ian and his wife, Grazia Gunn, in the Gallery Café prior to lecture. Soon the café begins to fill with familiar faces: ABR readers, the ever-loyal volunteers (deeply chic in ABR T-shirts) who will help us to move them in and move them out. Also present is Professor Anne Edwards, Vice-Chancellor of Flinders University - our other university sponsor - along with many members of the School of Humanities, where ABR has an office. Good attenders, Adelaideans. We'll do more events here in 2007. Indeed, there are still two to come this year: Ronald de Leeuw, Director of the Rijksmuseum, on Monday, October 30 (Radford Auditorium); and Professor Glyn Davis, who will deliver the inaugural ABR/Flinders University Annual Lecturer on Thursday, November 30 (Flinders University).

The partnership with Flinders came about last year when (for personal reasons, as they say) I began commuting between Melbourne and Adelaide. Talks followed between Flinders and the magazine. We liked their approach, and they seemed to like our direction, so this led to the third of our formal sponsorships (NLA being the other sponsor). When I announced in the magazine that ABR was returning to Adelaide (where it began, back in 1961), some readers assumed that we were in complete retreat from Melbourne, which had never been envisaged. 'What are you doing back in Melbourne?' people would ask me during my long stints there. ABR's headquarters remain in Melbourne (glorious, insalubrious Richmond, to be precise), but I spend about a third of my time at Flinders, sharing an office with Ruth Starke (Writer in Residence). Ruth writes for us from time to time, reviewing swags of children's books, so the working day often begins with a useful exchange of literary gossip and with mutual incredulity at the frequency with which certain authors publish children's books in this country.

We present most of our Adelaide events in the Radford Auditorium, on Sunday afternoons. Situated behind the Gallery, this was built in the nineteenth century and has previously housed the state archives and the Gallery's library. It seats about 140 people and is nearly full today. Once the audience has assembled, I get up to introduce Ian Donaldson, with a nasty sense that something viral is brooding in my throat.

This is the fourth ABR/La Trobe University Annual Lecture since Peter Porter inaugurated the series in 2002. The previous lecture happened just down the road, in the Mortlock Library, within the State Library of South Australia. This was in December 2004, during the second Adelaide Ring Cycle. It was one of the rest nights during Wagner's tetralogy. It must have been, because the Maestro on that occasion, Israeli Ascher Fisch, was seated in the front row for Peter Goldsworthy's lecture. Peter's theme was the old and vexed, even operatic, one of 'words versus music'. That lecture ended memorably, if unconventionally, with a massed sing-along. I had never thought of Peter Goldsworthy as Bryn Terfel, but he got us all going like the great Welsh ham. Lyrics were handed round, and before long all of us were singing 'Some Enchanted Evening' - not too badly either. Somewhat bizarre it was to look around and see the distinguished audience belting out Rodgers and Hammerstein's great melody. We should have recorded it: our first CD!

Anyway, back in the Radford Auditorium, I warn the audience that anything can happen at these occasions, but Ian Donaldson, duly introduced, quickly disabuses them of this idea, and sticks to his script. His theme is 'Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography'. Ian discusses the changing fortunes of biography in recent decades, especially at an academic level, and introduces his five dissentient voices - Terry Eagleton, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Roland Barthes and Stefan Collini - all of whom, in different ways, have questioned biography: its datedness, its relevance, its 'remorseless linearity', its 'Hoovering' tendency, its eschewal of social history. He also covers the myriad forms of the 'new biography': Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography and Curry: A Biography (not to be confused with the recent biography of the Curies). The range of subjects is awesome: from William Shakespeare and Dr John, to Julian Barnes and Jonathan Coe, to the newly online ADB and a website called 'Pizza Biography'. The audience, at the conclusion of the lecture, is every bit as enthusiastic as the ones in Canberra and Adelaide. I tell them we will publish the essay in our November issue, and online.

Ian Donaldson is worked hard during his short stay in Adelaide. On Monday, he delivers a lecture for Nicholas Jose at the University of Adelaide, then heads out to Flinders for a lunch with members of the School of Humanities. Ian hasn't been back to Flinders since a brief stay in 1974, but his recall of departmental personalities and politics seems to be as acute as his mastery of the rarest masques by Ben Jonson (two of which, newly discovered, he is adding to the General Edition; one of them written, Ian tells me later, to celebrate the opening of a kind of Elizabethan shopping mall).

Lunch over, we move to the Stockdale Room, with its commanding, if slightly dusty, view of Adelaide and the Gulf of St Vincent. Ian delivers his third lecture in thirty-six hours, this time on a subject close to his heart: William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and the invention of authorship. It whets the appetite for the new biography; and for more orations from this remarkably erudite scholar.

On Monday night, putting on another hat, I head off to the city to take part in one of Ken Bolton's regular 'Lee Marvin' series of readings. These take place in the Gallery de la Catessen, down a little lane off Waymouth Street, just opposite New Ltd's impressive new headquarters, whose glassy façade is reflected internally, so to speak, with transparent floors, which must be slightly disconcerting for some employees. The Gallery de la Catessen is much more modest: an old shop now devoted to contemporary music and occasional readings. It seats about thirty or forty people. Everyone is remarkably punctual and orderly. I spot a couple of Creative Writing students from Adelaide who were at Ian Donaldson's lectures. They tell me that the poetry reading scene in Adelaide is quite healthy, which can't be said for Melbourne, I fear.

Ken Bolton asks me to go first - always a relief. By now I have so little voice I feel I should apologise to the audience for croaking at them. Clutching my water bottle like a broken-down athlete after a marathon, I clamber on to the podium. This is set up in front of the shop window. I've never felt like a window display before. Ken Bolton performs the introductions, and we're off.