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. Instead she spends many embarrassing pages defending her late-life deception as something like Ethel Robertson calling herself Henry Handel Richardson. Elizabeth was unrepentant. After 50 years of trying, she finally had a solo show in London in 2000 under the name of Eddie Burrup. She died before the exhibition opened. Mary had died in 1994. The Duracks had lost their last link with the Kimberley in 1973 when the Whitlam government returned the remaining corner of the family's old holding to its traditional owners. At this point, Niall has Mary asking a question I wish had been answered more persuasively in Truth North : ''What had it all been for?'' TRUE NORTH Brenda Niall Text Publishing, 272pp, $32.99. Late Night Live. Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. The Durack sisters. By Phillip Adams on Late Night Live. Facebook Twitter Mail. Patrick 'Patsy' Durack and his brother arrived in Australia from Ireland in 1853. The Duracks went on to become one of Australia's great pastoral dynasties with vast landholdings in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and in the Northern Territory. Patsy Durack's eldest son, Michael Patrick Durack, took over the family business until its sale in 1950. The author Mary Durack and painter Elizabeth Durack were the daughters of Michael Patrick Durack. Book Review: True North by Brenda Niall. True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack by Brenda Niall, (Text Publishing: Melbourne, 2012). I lost my carparking ticket so I bought a book. 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. 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. I spotted a bookshop and decided to purchase a book. It was one of those chain book shops with plenty of books but nothing that excited me enough to purchase. 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. I had just been to the library and had heaps of reading waiting for me in the car and home. I did not need to add more to my reading list! 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. I named three authors but not one title I wanted was in stock. The queue at the checkout grew longer. All I wanted to do was to purchase a book and go home. I grabbed the latest Brenda Niall biography from the new releases stand near the counter and bought it. This is not a good start for a book that I hoped to enjoy. Brenda Niall deserves better than this. Niall is a sensitive and fastidious biographer. 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: A Family Biography, and an autobiography, Life Class. True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack is a biography of two sisters, one an artist, the other a writer. They were members of the famous Durack family that were pastoralists in the Kimberley, Western Australia. They grew up in Perth while their father lived on the station hundreds of miles away. 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. 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. Niall observes, “their time in the Kimberley was far more important for the sisters than the overseas travel that followed”. Elizabeth and Mary Durack developed strong relationships with the Aborigines at the station – relationships that would endure for the rest of their lives. 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. An article written by Mary Durack and published in The West Australian in 1944 is just one example of the forthright manner in which she shared her views in the media. For most of their lives Mary and Elizabeth Durack lived far away from the Kimberley, but they frequently returned. It was their sanctuary, their place of respite. It was also the source of the inspiration that they needed for their creative work. 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. The subjects of Mary’s books, Keep Him My Country (1955), Kings in Grass Castles (1959) and The Rock and the Sand (1969) were from north-west Australia. Place, a recurrent theme in Niall’s work, looms large in this book. Niall also grapples with the other key issue that confronted the Durack sisters throughout their lives – identity. The sisters were burdened by their family’s history as pastoralists. This identity negatively affected the reception of their work at times. They had to muster talent, persistence and audacity in order to pierce the veil of assumptions that their surname evoked. Identity is the theme of the most fascinating chapter of the book. 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. Her action in assuming an Aboriginal identity through Eddie Burrup and entering her work in a competition for indigenous artists horrified the art world. Niall argues that this reflected the burden of identity carried by Elizabeth. It was a dishonest attempt to free herself from being a white woman descended from a family of pastoralists. However, in a thoroughly argued discussion Niall concludes that her assumed identity was a misguided act of reconciliation on her part, not appropriation. The chapter on ‘Eddie Burrup’ is the highlight of the book and is reason alone to read it. 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. I would have liked Niall to explore this further. What did the Aboriginal women think of Mary and Elizabeth Durack? Did the Aboriginal women perceive their relationship with the Durack sisters in the same way that the Durack sisters understood the friendship? 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. Aside from these aspects of the book I felt that it was not one of Niall’s best. The book is structured as a typical cradle to grave biography. There is nothing essentially wrong with this but the opening chapter needed to be more engaging. 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. This scene with the repeated questions “where was” she/they, came across as hackneyed and was a disappointing element in her concluding chapter. At the same time I appreciated Niall’s handling of Elizabeth’s sexual liaisons. 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. 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. There is no doubt that Brenda Niall has chosen her subjects well. 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.