{"id":2917,"date":"2012-05-23T18:52:50","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T08:52:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stumblingpast.wordpress.com\/?p=2917"},"modified":"2022-08-04T00:33:52","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T00:33:52","slug":"book-review-true-north-by-brenda-niall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/2012\/05\/23\/book-review-true-north-by-brenda-niall\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: True North by Brenda Niall"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Book<\/a>
True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack by Brenda Niall, (Text Publishing: Melbourne, 2012).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I lost my carparking ticket so I bought a book.\u00a0 The person at the shopping centre information desk informed me that I could either pay $40 to get out of the car park or $10 if I bought something from the shops at the centre.\u00a0 It made sense to buy something but what? I was uninspired and just wanted to get out of the soulless place as soon as possible.\u00a0 I spotted a bookshop and decided to purchase a book.<\/p>\n

It was one of those chain book shops with plenty of books but nothing that excited me enough to purchase.\u00a0 To be fair, my lack of enthusiasm was probably more due to my lack of time and annoyance at myself for losing the carparking ticket.\u00a0 I had just been to the library and had heaps of reading waiting for me in the car and home.\u00a0 I did not need to add more to my reading list!<\/p>\n

After quickly browsing the shelves of history books and biographies I decided to save time by going to the counter and asking if they stocked some particular titles I was interested in.\u00a0 I named three authors but not one title I wanted was in stock. The queue at the checkout grew longer.\u00a0 All I wanted to do was to purchase a book and go home.\u00a0 I grabbed the latest Brenda Niall biography from the new releases stand near the counter and bought it.<\/p>\n

This is not a good start for a book that I hoped to enjoy.\u00a0 Brenda Niall deserves better than this. Niall is a sensitive and fastidious biographer.\u00a0 There are no short cuts in her research and I thoroughly enjoyed other books she has written: the biography of the Boyd family, The Boyds:\u00a0 A Family Biography<\/a>, <\/em>and an autobiography, Life Class<\/a>.<\/p>\n

True North:\u00a0 The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack<\/a> is a biography of two sisters, one an artist, the other a writer.\u00a0 They were members of the famous Durack family that were pastoralists in the Kimberley, Western Australia.\u00a0 They grew up in Perth while their father lived on the station hundreds of miles away.\u00a0 After they left school in the early 1930s they lived and worked on the family holdings in order to save money for a trip to Europe.\u00a0 It was during this period in the north as young adults that they developed a bond with the land and its people who dominated the rest of their lives.\u00a0 Niall observes, “their time in the Kimberley was far more important for the sisters than the overseas travel that followed”.<\/p>\n

Elizabeth and Mary Durack developed strong relationships with the Aborigines at the station – relationships that would endure for the rest of their lives.\u00a0 They were concerned about the difficulties faced by Aborigines as a result of damaging government policies and hostile treatment by some of the white people on the stations and the police. They began to express this concern to other family members and later spoke out in public.\u00a0 An article written by Mary Durack and published in The West Australian <\/a><\/em>in 1944<\/a> is just one example of the forthright manner in which she shared her views in the media.<\/p>\n

For most of their lives Mary and Elizabeth Durack lived far away from the Kimberley, but they frequently returned.\u00a0 It was their sanctuary, their place of respite.\u00a0 It was also the source of the inspiration that they needed for their creative work.\u00a0 For Elizabeth, a critical period in her artistic development was the work she did next to Aboriginal artist, Jubul, on the banks of the Ord River.\u00a0 The subjects of Mary’s books, <\/em>Keep Him My Country<\/em> (1955), Kings in Grass Castles <\/em>(1959)<\/em> and The Rock and the Sand <\/em>(1969) were from north-west Australia.<\/p>\n

Place, a recurrent theme in Niall’s work, looms large in this book.\u00a0 Niall also grapples with the other\u00a0 key issue that confronted the Durack sisters throughout their lives – identity.\u00a0 The sisters were burdened by their family’s history as pastoralists.\u00a0 This identity negatively affected the reception of their work at times.\u00a0 They had to muster talent, persistence and audacity in order to pierce the veil of assumptions that their surname evoked.<\/p>\n

Identity is the theme of the most fascinating chapter of the book.\u00a0 Niall devotes a significant space in her work to consideration of Elizabeth’s controversial decision to paint under a “nom de brush” adopting the name, Eddie Burrup.\u00a0 Her action in assuming an Aboriginal identity through Eddie Burrup and entering her work in a competition for indigenous artists horrified the art world.\u00a0 Niall argues that this reflected the burden of identity carried by Elizabeth.\u00a0 It was a dishonest attempt to free herself from being a white woman descended from a family of pastoralists.\u00a0 However, in a thoroughly argued discussion Niall concludes that her assumed identity was a misguided act of reconciliation on her part, not appropriation.<\/p>\n

The chapter on ‘Eddie Burrup’ is the highlight of the book and is reason alone to read it.\u00a0 Another interesting thread that runs throughout the book is the strong friendships that the sisters developed with the local Aborigines as this confronts our understanding of relationships between Aborigines and white people at the time.\u00a0 I would have liked Niall to explore this further.\u00a0 What did the Aboriginal women think of Mary and Elizabeth Durack?\u00a0 Did the Aboriginal women perceive their relationship with the Durack sisters in the same way that the Durack sisters understood the friendship?\u00a0 In Niall’s defence most of the women had died by the time that she researched this book which would have made it difficult to explore these questions.<\/p>\n

Aside from these aspects of the book I felt that it was not one of Niall’s best.\u00a0 The book is structured as a typical cradle to grave biography.\u00a0 There is nothing essentially wrong with this but the opening chapter needed to be more engaging.\u00a0 The notes I jotted while reading the book were sporadic, sometimes I was stimulated by the biography, at other times I was simply reading on, waiting for the next absorbing episode. The relationship between the two sisters was a strong element in the earlier and middle chapters which Niall gave less attention to towards the end of the book. Maybe this is simply a reflection of a diminishing connection between the sisters as they grew older, or did the author simply lose this focus? In the last chapter Niall imagines what Elizabeth was thinking near the end of her life while sitting and watching while the daylight faded.\u00a0 This scene with the repeated questions “where was” she\/they, came across as hackneyed and was a disappointing element in her concluding chapter.<\/p>\n

At the same time I appreciated Niall’s handling of Elizabeth’s sexual liaisons.\u00a0 She did not shy from mentioning them, but she did not place much weight on them, giving what I felt was a balanced and fair account.\u00a0 Other biographers may have treated this material very differently. I also enjoyed Niall’s reviews of Mary’s books and her discussion of Elizabeth’s views of the history wars<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There is no doubt that Brenda Niall has chosen her subjects well.\u00a0 Elizabeth and Mary Durack made important contributions to the artistic and literary life of Australia. Understanding their connections with Aboriginal people will help us to develop a more nuanced and complex understanding of the diversity of white\/indigenous relationships at the time.<\/p>\n

Further Reading<\/h2>\n