Although Hughes is often profiled in the media and cited in academia, this biography is one of the few dedicated studies of the cartoonist, minor poet and self-confessed ‘lousy’ painter turned renowned art critic. Anderson, editor of the Australian Art Review and contributing art editor for Quadrant, is a leading critic of Australian art whose extensive research for this book was gathered over more than thirty years. Her thoroughness is evident in her recounting of Hughes’s early life, from his first school photograph, which shows ‘an angelic and delicate boy with a mop of golden hair and a cowlick across his forehead’, to his days at Sydney University, where it seems he spent more time writing and cartooning for the undergraduate newspaper Honi Soit than on his Arts/Law degree (which he failed), followed by his work as a cartoonist and writer for publications such as The Observer and The Sunday Mirror, and his days as an exhibiting artist with contemporaries whose works he was often simultaneously critiquing, to his incipient movements towards an expatriate life. Clearly, Anderson is well qualified, but her admiration for Hughes often results in soft prose and faint analysis; a whisper to Hughes’s bawl.The opening chapter of Robert Hughes’s memoir, Things I Didn’t Know (2006), may have persuaded readers that Australians are a mercenary, uncouth and ungrateful lot who love nothing more than a glistening athlete on a podium. Hughes had reason to be sensitive at this time, having eluded the ‘feather-foot’ on that desolate Western Australian highway in May 1999 and endured the trials that followed. He names two writers, Peter Craven and Catharine Lumby, who have stood by him, whereas others, he says, have sought to further their careers by denouncing him. To the former small but faithful posse can be added Patricia Anderson, who defies that great Australian tradition of ‘cutting down the tall poppy’ to celebrate Hughes’s achievements in this biography of his ‘Australian years’: from Hughes’s birth in 1938 until 1970, when Time magazine afforded him the opportunity at last to leave our shores.

Anderson’s research into the Hughes dynasty extends back to Robert’s great-great-grandfather, ‘Thomas Hughes of County Roscommon’, and constructs an image of his landing at the burgeoning colony of New South Wales by citing sources such as census records and newspaper articles. Such genealogical and historical descriptors are standard fare in many biographies (Edmonde Charles-Roux’s 1989 biography of Coco Chanel opens with Hannibal and his army of elephants marching through the south of France), but the task can satisfy the biographer more than the reader. Here, Anderson’s adherence to a strict chronological narrative results in a missed opportunity to weave in a reading of Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (1987). With the exception of The Art of Australia (1966), which receives considerable attention, Hughes’s later works sporadically puncture the narrative and function as little more than footnotes. The use of time is crucial to biography and need not to be rigid; one of the outstanding biographies of recent years, Stuart: A Life Backwards (2005) by first-time author Alexander Masters, confronts this issue by reversing the chronology, resulting in a playful and persuasive narrative.

Publishing, like love, is about timing. With Hughes’s memoir still fresh in many readers’ minds, a rival text needs to dig deeper to unpack the Hughes persona. Given that both books cover the same period of Hughes’s life and mirror each other structurally, Anderson’s biography needed to provide a vigorous counterpoint; instead, it is little more than an auxiliary voice. She questions the validity of some of Hughes’s claims in his memoir, but neglects to interpret when such anomalies arise. Subjects such as the prevalence of homosexual behaviour at Hughes’s Jesuit boarding school, St Ignatius’ College, and disputed details about the loss of his virginity provided an opportunity for interpretation, but these were not pursued. This, however, is not a personal biography, but rather a surface study of Hughes’s career. Unlike Ian Britain’s Once an Australian: Journeys with Barry Humphries, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes (1997), which uses biography as a lens to examine issues of identity and expatriation, Anderson’s thesis is comparatively unclear. Given Hughes’s complex relationship with Australia, there were many critical perspectives from which this book could have been written.

The interplay of a subject’s life and works is central to biography. In Anderson’s portrayal of Hughes the painter, we learn little about when he started painting, how he learnt to paint, who taught him or whether he was an autodidact, who his influences were or what his style and technique were, other than what is quoted from reviews and inter-views. Anderson’s dependence upon quotes and anecdotes, rather than providing her own exegesis, is evident in Chapter 10: ‘Painting is my whole life’:

Douglas Stewart thought that Hughes was ‘a talented young man in a hurry’ and while nothing in the show pointed to it, Hughes could do ‘the most captivating work in black and white’. Stewart was referring to Hughes’ accomplished cartoons which were appearing in Nation and The Daily Mirror at the time.

The dearth of examples of Hughes’s art and the excess of panegyric in this book disappoints. Considering the obscurity of Hughes’s paintings, it would have been beneficial to see examples of his works. The images that we do see, some of which are possibly gleaned from the Internet, suffer from low-resolution pixelation. The miniature, mostly photographic, greyscale images are hard to discern and are often awkwardly cropped. Unlike other recently published biographical works such as Helen O’Neill’s Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret and Extraordinary Lives (2006) or even the more conventionally designed Brenda Niall’s Judy Cassab: An Australian Story (2005), the design of Robert Hughes: The Australian Years is clunky. The images could have formed a more engaging visual narrative to complement the text. Unfortunately, the design and production of the book are not to the standard of Anderson’s research.

Ironically, the strength of the book is not the portrayal of Hughes’s life story but rather Anderson’s evocation of the ‘colourful characters’ of the Australian art milieu of the 1960s. Anderson is solid and detailed in her depiction of Hughes’s place in it. A biography, then, was perhaps the wrong approach. Instead, a prosopography, or a collective biography, with Hughes as its critical prism, would have resulted in a more finely tuned thesis, as well as a more engaging social history.

Towards the close of the book, Anderson shifts tone as she at last begins to tackle some of Hughes’s claims from his memoir. Structurally, this resets the narrative and returns to the theme of Hughes’s relationship with his family. Surely, this should have been fully explored at the beginning of the book.

Ultimately, Anderson does not deliver the scrutiny or analysis Hughes deserves. Sympathy can be a powerful narrative device, as proved by Samuel Johnson’s Life of Savage (1744), but biography is, to borrow from Hughes, ‘nothing if not critical’. Robert Hughes is a robust critic who requires a robust biographer.