4 DECADENT MEMOIRS
NORA HEYSEN, A PORTRAIT by Anne-Louise Willoughby, Fremantle Press
The first woman winner of the Archibald Prize in 1938 (the second, Judy Cassab, would not win until 1960); Heysen was a trailblazer in many fields. An army captain, she also became Australia’s first female official war artist in 1943. Daughter of Australia’s best known landscape artist Hans Heysen, her talents were not widely recognised for much of her life due to social constraints. Willoughby had unprecedented access to archives, family and friends. Heysen loved strong coffee, which she served guests in brown Derby mugs. “She would throw great chunks of mince to butcher birds and magpies and pigeons. They were all equal. She was very democratic.”
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF BYRON by Emily Brand, Hachette
It’s 1798 and Old Joe is the last servant at Newstead Abbey, ancestral seat of the Byron family. He used to serve in the Fleet before joining the household and is about to welcome its newest Lord, 10-year-old George Gordon Byron, arriving with his widowed mother, Catherine. The plump mother and son with their Scottish drawl inherit a decaying pile with damp servant quarters. But the boy who shall become famed Romantic poet Lord Byron sees poetry in his ancestry which he spills onto paper. “Newstead and I stand or fall together,” he swears. “I have fixed my heart upon it.” A gloriously indulgent portrait of a flamboyant family of adventurers, artists and scandalous socialites.
THE INNOCENT READER by Debra Adelaide, Pan Macmillan
A volume that covers everything from childhood awe at her parents’ leatherbound Reader’s Digests to Adelaide’s recommendation that anxious children should try reading to a dog. It’s a charming confessional too – in a hotel, she didn’t “steal the second-hand niche volume on a shelf”. Not only did she swap it for her book, she passed it on to a friend with even keener interest in its subject. One day she was baton-passed a book by a stranger on a train. As it pulled into Paddington station he tucked the book into the corner of his seat. “It was deliberate, practised, as if he were a character out of an Alan Furst [spy] novel.” Furtively she slipped it into her bag: it was an Alan Furst.
THE KOWLOON KID by Phil Brown, Transit Lounge
The lobby of “The Pen”, as old “Hong Kongers” call the best hotel east of the Suez since 1928; the Peninsula, is captured in all its colonial glory by humble, smart Courier Mail Arts Editor Phil Brown. Taking wife Sandra and son Hamish, eight, back to the place where he grew up – his family construction business relocated here from Shanghai by his grandpa in the 1930s – he winces a little as Hamish flings rice to all corners of the banquet room. The hotel was his father Ted’s unofficial office, where he would star-spot, bringing his son a Steve McQueen autograph. “I’m part of a diaspora of old Hong Kongers, colonials wandering the earth with memories of their childhoods,” he muses.