Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} True North the Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack by Brenda Niall Durack Sisters Find the Kimberley Not All What They Believed
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} True North The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack by Brenda Niall Durack sisters find the Kimberley not all what they believed. Elizabeth and Mary Durack were brought up on tales from the fabled land called The Kimberleys, and when they finally lived there, it shaped them in unexpected ways. When Michael Durack arrived in Fremantle port, stepping off the state ship after a long journey from the Kimberley, his children were eagerly awaiting his homecoming. The father of six would always bring fascinating gifts from the far north such as a baby crocodile or a pony. His stories of the far away country, settled by the Durack forebears in the 1880s, was a fabled, incredible place. But the Durack pastoral dynasty was not one that would automatically pass from father to son, or daughter. In fact it was a business with debt, and Michael's daughters would continue the family's historic connections with the region through their paintings and writings. Life was far from easy for the Durack girls, which surprised academic Brenda Niall, as she began a huge project to write about Mary and Elizabeth. A trove of letters written between them during the 1930s and 40s was very revealing, as they struggled to bring up children with absent husbands, and forge a career. She says a number of myths were broken as she worked on the book, and she also realised how storng the sisters' sense of social justice was to become, over the treatment of Aboriginal people, upon whom their pastoral industry relied. Brenda Niall's book True North: the story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack includes a number of family photographs, and Brenda's favourite is the cover photo. Related Photos. The cover of Brenda Niall's book depicts one of her favourite photos of the sisters, and the small child in the background epitomises the theme ( Text Publishing - Audience Submitted ) True North : The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack. Shortlisted, NSW Premier's Awards, Australian History Prize, 2012 Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, 2012 Shortlisted, Australian Book Industry Awards, Biography of the Year, 2013 Shortlisted, WA Premier's Book Awards, 2012. Growing up in suburban Perth in the 1920s, the two Durack girls were fascinated by tales of the pioneering past of their father and grandfather overlanding from Queensland in the 1880s and setting up four vast cattle stations in the remote north. A year spent together on the stations in their early twenties ignited in the sisters a lifelong love of the Kimberley, along with a growing unease about the situation of the Aboriginal people employed there. Through war, love affairs, children and eventual old age, the Duracks continued to write and paint - their closely intertwined creative lives always shaped by the enduring power of the Kimberley region. With unprecedented access to hundreds of private family letters, unpublished memoirs, diaries and family papers, Brenda Niall gets to the heart of a uniquely Australian story that spans the twentieth century. Brenda Niall is one of Australia's foremost biographers. She is the author of four award winning biographies, including her acclaimed accounts of the Boyd family. In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Australia for 'services to Australian literature, as an academic, biographer and literary critic'. She frequently reviews for the Age , Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Book Review . 'Brenda Niall has produced a graceful and perceptive biography of two extraordinary creative women. She treads carefully through the minefield of controversies about their family's exploitation of Aboriginal labour, as well as their own interventions in Indigenous art and politics.' Australian Book Review. 'Through private letters, diaries and family papers provided by surviving Durack family members, Niall unravels a compelling Australian story that is just as relevant to today's social fabric as it was when it first began more than 130 years ago.' Courier-Mail. 'A rich portrait of two complex and inter-connected lives. And throughout is the marvellous incisive Niall ability to distil, to capture the essence of a situation or problem, to ask the penetrating questions, to display sympathy and empathy but never to shirk criticism or to be afraid of exposing frailty. The individual portraits are beautifully drawn and very nicely contrasted with both the sisters emerging as their own person but yet with much that is shared. The book breaks important new ground. It is celebratory but far from uncritical and it confronts complexity on every page.' John Thompson. 'Yet there is so much to admire and enjoy in this profoundly interesting biography. As a picture of Perth society in the first half of the 20th Century it is as good as anything I know. As a sympathetic portrait of the difficulty women as mothers had to be creative and absorbed in their word, it is profoundly moving. As a picture of a rare closeness between two sisters it is, if anything, enviable. Brenda Niall could not write a poor book. But this is, quite simply, one of her very best.' Canberra Times. Queens of the outback. From feudalism to Mabo, boom to bust - the Durack sisters' saga is rich in contradiction. By Review by David Marr. It's all over now for the Duracks but once they cut a swath across the top of the country, an Irish family with immense holdings in the Kimberley. After they went broke in the 1940s, two daughters survived the general ruin to make names for themselves: the painter Elizabeth and the writer Mary, whose Kings in Grass Castles gave the family's story a place in the imagination of Australia. Their father was a monster and they married men rather like him. Their marriages were wrecks. They worked hard to survive. They collaborated, Elizabeth illustrating Mary's books and short stories. Mary ended her days a dame of the British Empire. Elizabeth made herself a laughing stock in old age by faking an Aboriginal identity, Eddie Burrup, to sell her paintings. Royal stock … sisters Mary (left) and Elizabeth Durack, whose family once ruled the Kimberley. Nothing was more interesting about these relics of another age than their long entanglement with the Miriwoong people who worked for their family for generations on Argyle Downs and Ivanhoe. The sisters wrote about them and painted them. In the 1960s they watched helplessly as equal pay saw the Miriwoong thrown off the country that was both their own and once the vast possession of the Duracks. True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack by Brenda Niall. Text Publishing, $32.99. Mary and Elizabeth lived through it all: from feudalism to Mabo. True North might have given a unique view of how this country adjusted - or failed to adjust - through the eyes of these two remarkable women. I'm sure the distinguished biographer Brenda Niall believes that's what she has written here. But she doesn't take us deep into this difficult subject or the imaginations of Mary and Elizabeth. We skate. We skate all through their lives. It's mildly shocking to discover Elizabeth in old age siding against Henry Reynolds's histories of frontier encounters, objecting to native title and concocting the shameful commercial guise of Eddie Burrup. We come to these unhappy discoveries barely prepared. Niall had a great deal to cover. Her double biography begins on an evening in October 1950 when Michael Patrick Durack's widow and children come to empty his office in Perth. The empire has been sold off. The Duracks had gone bust. Mary gathers the papers she will turn, years later, into her family saga. What follows is an often vivid account of two lives that could never be lived today, but I was left at the end of True North wondering what sort of people the Durack girls really were. The material is there. What's missing, I think, is Niall's willingness to make up her own mind about these women. And she doesn't take money seriously. Money explains the lives of families such as the Duracks. The ruined are always fascinating. But it's page 118 before we're given a sketchy explanation for the collapse of their empire: competition from Argentina and the many Irish relatives living on the dwindling dividends of Connor, Doherty & Durack Pty Ltd. We should know that all along. This failure to explain, to ground us in the particular experience of the Duracks, their country and its people is baffling. Again, the material is there but Niall's reluctance to decide for herself about the fundamental circumstances shaping her subjects' lives gives True North a drifting quality. But what extraordinary details she brings to light: the index of the first edition of Kings in Grass Castles didn't list the Aborigines. Mary made sure the names were there in the second edition. And when she was smashed up in a traffic accident in Perth, her old friend Paddy Roe rang from Derby. ''He had organised a ceremonial singing of me back to health - they were all painted up and bearing magical totems. I heard, or at least seemed to hear them chanting. Anyway their message of love got through.'' That's all very well, but where did the Durack girls find themselves in what Niall calls ''a story about place, dispossession and imaginative possession''. How far had they come since writing and illustrating those children's books about charming black kids playing around the homestead? What precisely were they thinking by the ends of their lives about the great question of blacks and land and country? My hunch is Niall couldn't face the fact that Elizabeth, at least, was a shocker.