At 94, Brenda Niall talks history, creativity and the meaning of life

Most of us would like to know the secret of a long and fruitful life. Perhaps we could ask Brenda Niall who, at the age of 94, has just completed another full-length biography. This time her subject is Joan Lindsay, the author of Picnic at Hanging Rock.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the secret to long years of creativity is being more interested in other people than you are in yourself. Niall’s apartment is lined with works by Judy Cassab and members of the Boyd family, gifts which suggest the significant relationships she has formed with the people whose lives she has explored.

Brenda Niall at home in 2020.Credit: Justin McManus

“I don’t like biographies that have an axe to grind,” she says, “the ones that are out to prove a point. I prefer books that are simply open to a person as an individual, not as an example of some theory or other. I was lucky to escape academia just as the likes of Derrida were infecting it with theory. They bored me stiff. Life writing is the opposite of theory making.”

Niall has written more than a dozen biographies, including a couple of group portraits, and two volumes of memoir which reflect on the biographer’s craft. “I see biography as solving a puzzle and I have always liked puzzles.”

She laments the fact that few Australians call themselves biographers. We are more likely to have historians who occasionally dabble in biography. England celebrates writers such as Claire Tomalin, Hermione Lee and Richard Holmes. She mourns the loss of our Hazel Rowley who died in 2011. She appreciates the work of Jim Davidson and more recently that of Bernadette Brennan.

For Niall, biography is not about putting people in little boxes. She loathes both demonology and hagiography because they are invariably untrue. An example is her 2017 study of Daniel Mannix, the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne for almost 50 years who had been the subject of previous works. He is often presented as a culture warrior. Niall’s work shines in a previously gloomy space because she creates a far more subtle and poignant portrait of a freedom fighter who was in many ways himself trapped.

But no biography, Niall explains, has been as challenging as Joan Lindsay because Lindsay was “an immensely private person.”

“It was the hardest book I have done because Lindsay was so carefully composed and self-protective, not to mention protective of her marriage.” Her husband was Daryl Lindsay, the 10th child in a family that included such significant cultural figures as Norman and Lionel Lindsay. Daryl was thought of as less talented than his siblings and was always selling himself, even after he rose to become the director of the National Gallery of Victoria. His wife was left in the shadows.

Joan Lindsay was born in 1896 into a family of significant social standing. “She had culture, prestige but also neglect.” She was especially neglected by her mother, who never thought of herself as Australian. Once widowed, her mother returned to England, which she had always considered home.

This tension is the bedrock on which, many years later, Lindsay came to build Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), set in the year of Australian Federation. Mrs Appleyard’s College for Young Ladies, from which three Edwardian ladies disappear whilst on a picnic in the bush, typifies the world of Joan’s mother. The bush presents a kind of mystical otherness at sharp odds with imported culture. Niall summarises the theme of the book as “the earth rejecting what does not belong,” and notes “the earth belongs to the non-human creatures whom the girls barely notice.”

The book’s early roots lie in bush paintings on which Lindsay was working in the 1920s. Her mentor had been Fred McCubbin. Sadly, her husband’s artistic career was expected to take precedence.

A scene from the 1975 film adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock.Credit: B.E.F.

Picnic at Hanging Rock was a late-life success for Lindsay, even more so when it was made into a celebrated movie by Peter Weir and Pat Lovell. Daryl, by now Sir Daryl, struggled to cope with his wife’s move into the limelight. At the launch of the film, he described the whole thing as “bloody nonsense”. To be fair, he was showing signs of dementia by this stage. “He was a man who always had to win,” says Niall.

Niall met Joan Lindsay in 1984, a few months before her death, when she was working on a biography of Joan’s cousin, Martin Boyd. She visited her in Mulberry Hill, the Mornington Peninsula house Joan had created with Daryl and in which they had entertained prime ministers and movie stars, including Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. By 1984, it was being prepared for handover, after Joan’s death, to the National Trust. “She was like a ghost in a house that once had a lot of life in it,” Niall says.

Niall’s biographies have often explored the relationships between people and their houses. “People’s personal spaces are often a kind of self-portrait,” she explains. She developed a feeling for Lindsay because Mulberry Hill, the stage on which Lindsay performed most of her life, reminded Niall of her own mother’s feeling for their family home in Kew. “It had to be sold when my father, a doctor, knew that he was dying and wanted to leave us all safely provided for by investing the profits of the big house,” she says.

Joan Lindsay with her husband, Sir Daryl Lindsay.

’My mother had created that home to be a very special space. I am sure she pestered the architect, Ole Jorgenson, every day while he was building it. The loss of it was devastating for her, coming as it did when she was facing widowhood with young children.”

It was in this house, Niall explains, that she first dabbled with biography. As a young child, she suffered from asthma and, in the days before Ventolin, was often kept home from school. “I would look out the window and point to people in the street and say to my mother, ‘Tell me a story about them.’ So, she did. I was quite young when I came to understand the idea of the narrative of a life.”

Niall had thought that her previous book, An Accidental Career (Text 2022), might have nicely rounded off her working life, but “I found I missed writing biography.” The surprising gift of a box of documents enabled her to hear Lindsay’s voice and get beyond her carefully crafted carapace.

Even now, Niall is far from finished. She is starting work on a book about self-portraits by female artists such as Nora Heysen; artists who have often been relegated to the shadows. “I’m thinking of calling it ‘Who did she think she was?’”

For such an eminent, thoughtful, and attentive biographer, there remains one question. What is a human life? “It’s what you make from the circumstances in which you find yourself,” Niall says.

“It’s what you create.”

Joan Lindsay: The Hidden Life of the Woman Who Wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock (Text) by Brenda Niall is published on February 4.

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