But this is to leap beyond the immediate concerns of the book. McCooey is no common-sense critic, dismissive of post-structuralist theory. Instead, he confronts it in a detailed dissection of theories that deny the referential nature of autobiography, or propose that all narrative is falsification. He defends the possibility of a self, individualised and with continuous memory, at the same time that he recognises the possibility that such a self might be complex and divided. Autobiographies are literary constructs operating to formal notions of narrative, but they are not only literary constructs; like histories, they interpret experience and make it meaningful. McCooey stresses that autobiography is not simply the narcissistic creation of a self separated from the social and historical world. He argues that autobiography is particularly important as a genre precisely because it intersects with the community and because the autobiographer may be called to account by reference to the social and historical world.

One of the upshots of such an argument is that autobiographies can be judged critically by reference to both their literary/formal qualities and their relationship to the social/historical world. Given that the autobiographer must write on the basis of accidental life experience, is it possible that one autobiography can be better than another? McCooey leaves us in no doubt about this. Hal Porter’s The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony is central, both as the first of the ‘modern’ Australian autobiographies and as an exemplar of the way in which the autobiography uses literary myth (here, the loss of Eden) to connect the individual life with community and even national history. Mary Lord’s revelations about Porter’s biography –there was no cast­iron balcony at Porter’s infant home – cannot detract from his achievement in creating a narrative which reflects on the relationship between an Australian individual, his family and region, and indeed the wider world. Patrick White’s autobiography, on the other hand, turns the self into a monolithic and static creature, unresponsive to the people around him; Peter Conrad is locked in a self which cannot penetrate beyond the surfaces of place, nor acknowledge the roles of other people. The measurement is not against the accuracy of the life account, but against its awareness of the place of the individual in other narratives, including the larger narratives of history.

McCooey’s enthusiasm for the autobiographies of Porter, Jill Ker Conway, Graham McInnes, and Martin Boyd reminds us of the peculiar delights of autobiography reading. As he says, with this genre, the reader of necessity begins to compare and recall her own origins. The autobiography serves as an aid to memory, and a way of placing one’s own narrative in relation to others. The organisation of this book, with chapters on childhood beginnings, parents and education, the hidden past and personal history, displacement and place, allows the reader a similar pleasure of considering these aspects of personal narrative. How do you see your own beginnings? What does your education mean to your sense of self? Do you identify spiritually with houses or landscapes? These questions form part of every personal history.

Here McCooey discusses a range of autobiographies which address such questions. The chapter on displacement, for example, discusses the autobiographies of Graham McInnes, Mary Rose Liverani, Walter Krauss, Judah Waten, Arnold Zable, Emery Barcs, Andrew Riemer, David Martin, and Susan Varga. Along the way, McCooey engages with Sneja Gunew’s theories of cultural difference, suggesting that, like other post­structuralist theorists, her lack of interest in autobiography and realist writing stems from a suspicion of the universal narrative and the unified subject. McCooey’s examples demonstrate an interaction between similarity and difference, so that their various life stories speak of a heterogeneous Australian history, at the same time that they show the possibilities of communication and understanding across cultures. In this way, a multitude of individual stories contribute to a richer social history, but a history which has some meaning beyond its fragmentary parts.

This is the other strength of Artful Histories: while it is a work of literary criticism, it re-establishes the importance of the autobiography in our record of Australian experience. Certainly, autobiography is not a reliable source of factual evidence: ‘autobiographers lie. That alone, however, distinguishes them from novelists’. But it provides testimony of the way in which Australians have chosen to see their lives, and intrudes the personal response – whether that be to a ‘horizontal’ landscape, a hidden family history, or life in the suburbs – on the broader sweep of Australian social history. Artful Histories reclaims attention for a genre in which Australian writers have excelled, it engages with the limiting fallacies of some post-structuralist theory, and it contributes to the broader historical study of Australian life. McCooey has something to say on most of the literary areas at issue in contemporary Australia – from gender to genre – and his book should flow like fresh air through current debates.