Introduction

Malcolm Allbrook

The articles in this number of the Australian Journal of Biography and History concern a diverse range of subjects, most of which are little known in the annals of Australian history. Yet each of the featured individuals lived their Australian lives on the edges of societal expectations and norms, and, in doing so, raise questions about Australian identities. Their lives not only call for more expansive definitions of what it means to be Australian but also present borders as fluid—as imagined rather than real. This can apply to a white woman teacher in South Australia, for example, or two Wiradjuri men who sought to meet on equal ground the representatives of the British Crown at the opening of the provisional Parliament House in Canberra. Similarly, Australian identity might also incorporate a Welsh littérateur living, working and describing the diversity of the lives of those he encountered in the sugar cane fields of far north Queensland; an Australian trade commissioner in Shanghai; a Japanese soldier turned Australian collaborator; an Australian cartoonist in conflict with an American illustrator over Felix the Cat; or an Indigenous woman acting as an intermediary and informant in early colonial Sydney.

Crucially, lives lived on the edge might involve deep trauma and disease—suicide, unhappiness, dispute and conflict. Yet they might also be happy and seemingly blessed by riches and good fortune, like the high-flying Skases in the heady days of their youth; or they might delight in service to their local communities, as with Annie Sharpley in her lifelong commitment to education in a small South Australian community. But when we peer beneath the edges of these lives, biography offers a vantage point from which we might understand the complexity of lives that, on the surface, seem uncomplicated. The lives examined in this volume also have implications for wider phenomena, such as colonisation and capitalism, even when the subjects themselves might be wilfully blind or deliberately evasive as to the implications of their agency. Rather than presenting biography in its traditional cradle to the grave format, the articles in this volume utilise biographical methods to illuminate lives that were full of risk, excitement, uncertainty and unconventionality.

Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui relates the complex and conflicted story of the writer John Naish (1923–1963). Born and raised in Wales, Naish came to north Queensland in his 20s and produced a significant body of literature on life in the sugar cane industry and the tropical north. At the time of his death by suicide, he was forecast by critics to become a dominant literary figure. He led an eventful life and his works illustrate important aspects of Australian labour and cultural history.

Uncertainty and conflict also feature in James Cotton’s article on the two years (1921–23) Edward Selby Little spent as Australian trade commissioner in Shanghai. In a brief and unhappy but still portentous career, Little was, in part, a victim of both the ad hoc and personal nature of the policy experiments of Prime Minister W. M. Hughes in his final years and the machinations of his countrymen. British officialdom in China was offended by an individual who wished to give the Chinese the respect owing to them in their own country and also exercise a role for Australia independent of imperial oversight.

Georgina Fitzpatrick’s portrait of Eric Shimada (Shimada Masakazu) likewise considers an individual whose bicultural identify brought a seemingly fluent transformation of identity—from a Japanese soldier in the Pacific War to an interpreter working for the Australian and British occupation forces and, later, at the International Military Tribunal in Japan.

In his article ‘A Cat with Two Tales’, Andrew Marshall examines whether the Australian cartoonist and entrepreneur Patrick Sullivan or the American illustrator Otto Messmer was the rightful creator of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat. While Messmer’s claims have steadily gained pre-eminence in the United States, a close biographical examination provides almost inarguable proof that it was the Australian who conceived, launched and then exploited the figure of Felix the Cat. Sullivan’s position as an outsider in the American universe has seen him cast in terms unfavourable to his rightful legacy as a successful and imaginative entrepreneur. So too has colonial orthodoxy rendered the Wiradjuri men John Noble (Ooloogan) and Jimmy Clements (Nangar/Yangar) as at best inconsequential, at worst ridiculous, figures in Australian history. The two Elders walked about 170 kilometres to Canberra in May 1927 from Brungle Reserve (near Tumut) to protest their sovereign rights and to speak with the Duke of York (later, George VI) at the opening of the provisional Parliament House. The episode has, in many ways, defined the two men. However, in his article, James McDonald uses collective biographical methods to discuss how the largely forgotten racist term ‘King Billy’ was deployed in colonial Australia to diminish and mock the status of senior Aboriginal men. Similarly, Toby Raeburn, Paul Sanders and Kerry Doyle, in their article ‘Boorong of the Burramattagal’, elevate the status of a young woman—who, until now, has largely been cast in the role of indentured servant to two well-known Sydney Cove figures, the Reverend Richard Johnson and his wife Mary—to that of an important cultural and linguistic intermediary between the Traditional Owners of the region and the colonists.

Few Australian biographies focus on public couples, especially not couples in business. Kate White’s article ‘Creating the Mirage’ adds to this biographical genre by focusing on the public lives of Christopher and Pixie Skase and their efforts to establish a business empire. The article encompasses both their private and public lives and seeks to move beyond the public image of the Skases into their private world, an arena that is the central concern of many biographers. The private world is also the concern of Kay Whitehead and Belinda MacGill in their article on Annie Sharpley, a teacher at Naracoorte, South Australia. While Sharpley’s career was extraordinary in length, the selfless woman teacher in an idyllic and apparently homogenous country school is a familiar trope of histories of rural education in white settler countries such as Australia. Yet hers too was a life lived on the edge, as she challenged gender and social conventions in choosing a career over marriage.