Life Sentences Podcast

Errol Flynn is still the most famous Australian actor ever to make it big in Hollywood. Best known for athletic and romantic leads in films like Robin Hood, he had lived the life of an entitled boss on plantations in New Guinea as a fortune hunter before being discovered on the beach at Bondi.   His rapid rise to stardom in Hollywood was enabled by the powerful studio system operating at full tilt and by media complicity that burnished his image and relished the scandals of his many marriages. When he was put on trial for statutory rape in 1942, it only served to increase his popularity and fan base. A new biography by colonial historian Patricia O’Brien provides a fascinating and often shocking insight into Flynn’s behaviour and his values, as well as shedding light on his family’s shady background, his many under-age lovers, and his tendency to exaggerate wildly about his exploits.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before Ash Barty, there was Evonne Goolagong, the first First Nations champion at Wimbledon. She was a player endowed with natural ability but also handicapped by plenty of disadvantages. To develop her talent at tennis she has to leave home at a very young age and move in with her coach and his family, a story she told in a memoir she wrote many years later with her friend Phil Jarratt.   Now a TV adaptation, directed by acclaimed First Nations director Wayne Blair, and written by Steven McGregor and Megan Simpson Huberman, tells the Goolagong story on screen in a dramatization based on her memoir. But a biopic is constrained by budget and other issues such as casting that mean the story has to be told differently. So what gets left out?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Between 1974 and 1991 Frank Arkell was the flamboyant mayor of Wollongong. But his name is forever associated with the infamy of being accused of being part of a paedophile ring. In a sensational twist, he was murdered in his home.   As the mayor of a major industrial hub, Arkell had ambitious visions of how the city could transform itself into a tourism destination with a more refined profile, and applied himself to promoting his plans with relentless conviction. But his darker side became increasingly public knowledge.   Historian Erik Eklund, who grew up in Wollongong, has written a biography of Arkell that explains his background, his impact and his legacy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this very revealing memoir/biography hybrid, bestselling author Bryce Courtenay’s son Adam explores the motives and personality traits that shaped his father as a public figure and parent.   As a pathological fantasist, Bryce could not resist making up stories about his ancestry and life experience growing up in South Africa. Later, he was able to harness his success in advertising to making the leap into writing fiction. But he seemed unable to distinguish between the stories he invented on the page and the stories he told about himself, causing hurt and confusion at home.   Based on his own memories and conversations with many of Bryce’s friends and associates, Adam paints a complex portrait of a generous man who did everything - from running to drinking to writing at full tilt. His books The Power of One and April Fool’s Day earned him the adoration of millions, but he could never earn the respect of the literati. In Adam Courtenay’s account, his father was better at life in public than in private, finding fame easier than family.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Australian poet Dorothy Porter blazed across the literary scene like a meteor. She was even more seductive in real life than on the page and broke many women’s hearts in her short but busy amorous life. Now her adoring younger sister, Josie McSkimming has written Gutsy Girls, a revealing memoir biography of her sister and their family, exposing some of the darker aspects of life with their QC father Chester Porter. A restless traveler, a passionate lesbian who fell in love as easily as breathing, Dorothy Porter consumed life at a heightened intensity and velocity. Her best known works made poetry part of the mainstream, including the crime verse novel The Monkey’s Mask. She beat cancer, but died in 2008 at the age of just 54, of pneumonia.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fearless Beatrice Faust is an overdue biography of a significant reformist force in the women’s liberation movement of the 60s and 70s in Australia.   Written by political scholar Dr Judith Brett, this lively biography returns Bea to the prominence she once enjoyed as a controversial media figure and activist, primarily championing abortion rights. But it also explores the shadows in her life; including her struggles with her mental and physical health, and her lifelong fascination with all aspects of human sexuality, including her own, which she regarded as androgynous. When it came to Bea Faust, nothing was taboo; her contemporary Helen Garner declared she was not afraid of anything, and this book certainly confirms that fearlessness and curiosity were key aspects of her intellect.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli is a fascinating biographical investigation into the life of Harry Freame - a half Australian, half Japanese military Scout who defied the odds at the front in some of the most vicious fighting of World War One. Some believe he deserved the VC for his bravery but was denied because of being partly Asian.   After the war Harry faces a new challenge: becoming a soldier settler and orchardist. This proves to be harder than war, while his family life is messy and puzzling. Much later, at an age when many would be contemplating retirement, he is recruited into Australian intelligence, but totally unprepared for the role. His cause of death is disputed and he is denied a military headstone.   When he discovers this final injustice, author Ryan Butta becomes indignant and goes beyond the role of biographer to intervene on behalf of Harry and those like him who never got the acknowledgement they deserved.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2024 a story appeared in the Toronto Star by Deborah Dundas that set the world of biography on fire. At the centre of it was Alice Munro’s biographer Robert Thacker, who has devoted thirty years of his life as an academic to a close archival study of Alice Munro’s work.   It was revealed that Thacker had known for two decades that Alice’s daughter Andrea had been sexually molested by her stepfather Gerald Fremlin. When Andrea approached Thacker to ask him to make revisions to the manuscript of his book, in the light of this information, it was just at the point when the manuscript was complete and about to be printed, and he declined. He declined again when a revised edition of the book appeared several years later. He has always maintained that as an archival scholar, he had no interest in personal family dynamics and in the psychological aspects of Alice’s oeuvre.   Gerald Fremlin pled guilt to a charge of indecent assault and served a suspended sentence with two years probation. Alice Munro chose to remain with Fremlin rather than support her daughter.   In this episode Caroline Baum talks to Robert Thacker and explores the uncomfortable moral terrain of a biographer when presented with explosive material that they feel is beyond the scope of their particular focus and asks where does the biographer’s responsibility lies.   To read an in-depth account of Andrea Skinner’s experience and its repercussions for her, for Alice Munro and for Munro’s reading public, go to the excellent piece by New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/30/alice-munros-passive-voice   There is also an essay by Anne Enright in her latest anthology Attention, on the Munro affair.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a first for Life Sentences, host Caroline Baum welcomes a panel of four Australian biographers to discuss the biographies they have read and enjoyed recently. -Ryan Butta chooses Anthony Sharwood’s hybrid travelogue biography of Polish freedom fighter Tadeusz Kosciusko and also mentions Didion and Babitz, by Lili Anolik, which compares the lives of two gifted writers on the LA scene of the Sixties. -Susan Wyndham chooses Vicki Hastrich’s The Last Days of Zane Grey about the flamboyantly successful American big game fishing legend who was also a bestselling author with a complicated love life. -Bernadette Brennan chooses Drusilla Modjeska’s important new group biography of European and American modernist female artists who have been largely overlooked or eclipsed by male partners. -Anthony Sharwood chooses Ryan Butta’s The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli, about the mysterious Harry Freame, an Australian war hero who was half Japanese and raised in the code of the samurai. Caroline makes reference to the new biography of former Governor General Quentin Bryce, and to reading the doorstop epic new biography of Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Past biographies have always dismissed Pamela Harriman as a socialite who slept her way to the top, in a series of affairs and marriages that boosted her thirst for power.   But Sonia Purnell argues persuasively that Harriman was in fact one of the most significant diplomats of the 20th century and that her motives were always those of ensuring peace and the best possible outcomes for the UK, the US and the world. She deployed her charms and incredible power of seduction on everyone from Randolph Churchill to Gianni Agnelli, the Aga Khan, Ed Murrow, Bill Paley and Averell Harriman, moving from politics to the world of Broadway by marrying producer Leland Heyward and hosting a salon in Washington that became the epicentre of the world of intelligence and refinement. Even the Russians were not immune to her charms.   How did a minor British aristo with no formal education come to be so influential? Purnell’s juicy biography, Kingmaker, is a fascinating and deliciously gossipy but serious portrait of a bygone world of glamour and intrigue, high stakes secrets, scandalous love affairs and strategic partnerships in and out of the bedroom of one of the world’s most intriguing women.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Painter Charles Blackman described himself as a guttersnipe when he met and fell in love with partially sighted poet Barbara Patterson.   Together, the couple became part of a bohemian crowd of artists who moved between Sydney and Melbourne, and helped shape Australian art for decades.   Now their daughter Christabel has documented a significant, passionate and fruitful decade of their early years and marriage, thanks to her parents love letters and her mother’s diaries.   The result is a uniquely personal and intimate perspective on a creative partnership.   To see images from Charles and Barbara Blackman a decade of love and art, go to: @carobaumlifesentences on InstagramSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Anthony Sharwood set out to investigate how Australia’s highest peak comes to be named after an eighteenth century freedom fighter and military engineer, Taddeusz Koszciuscko. The result is an unorthodox hybrid he describes as a travelography. The result is much more than a portrait of a remarkable figure of enlightenment and progressive ideals, whose influence was felt from his native Poland to America, where his will was a vexed issue for his friend Thomas Jefferson.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Caroline Hodgson took the name Madame Brussels to become the ‘flash madam’ of Melbourne in the post Gold Rush era. Her business sense for buying real estate and flair for style and comfort attracted the big end of town, as well as the attention of the press. As well as running a brothel, she was a wife and a mother, a fascinating character who showed care and consideration for her employees. Her biographer Barbara Minchinton uncovers her story through a mix of archaeology, a photo album and the sleuthing skills of a feminist historian.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.