Brenda Niall
The Boyds: A Family Biography
MUP, $49.95hb, 514pp, 0 522 84871 0

BIOGRAPHY CAN BE difficult to achieve. There is the balance between too much detail, where one can't see the wood for the family trees, or not enough, which can be disappointing all round. One also bears in mind possible antipathy: Sigmund Freud, who famously began burning his personal papers at twenty-nine, was dismissive of future chroniclers: As for biographers, I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray.' Consider, then, the work involved in writing a family biography, where the factors of histories, stories, lives, facts, checks and balances are dauntingly multiplied across generations, within and without direct recollection, and are not always easily resolved.

Such was the task facing Brenda Niall who, by utilising one theme, has succeeded where she might well have come off second-best. Her magnificent survey of the Boyd family starts with a series of questions: Where to begin? How to structure a narrative covering one hundred and fifty years and five generations? Who to include or exclude? Where to stop? Niall, who had a head start with her 1988 biography of the novelist Boyd, Martin, had considered a wider-ranging biography of the others — the painters, potters, architects, musicians, writers and the other myriad artisans of this astonishingly creative family — but no ideas of how to build their history into anything other than a cluttered, over-detailed book. Then an epiphany: the idea of the family house as a recurring motif in Boyd history.' This stirred Niall's memory of a conversation she had in 1976 with the American biographer of Henry James, Leon Edel, who was writing a biography of the Bloomsbury group:

Edel had nine characters moving towards the house' that was Bloomsbury, and he did not attempt a cradle to grave' narrative for any one of them. His way of using interlocking chapters rather than strict chronology was a useful example. The Boyd story offered a sequence of family houses, each of which expressed an individual, a way of life, a time and place.

The Australian and European houses that inhabit these pages are almost as human as their inhabitants, with evocative names that turn simple real estate into something living and breathing between the bricks: Penleigh House, Wilton, Tralee, The Robins, Viewbank, The Grange, Open Country remain synonymous with the Minnies, Arthurs, Merrics, Martins, Guys, Davids, Robins and Emmas who built or bought their homes (in some cases, sold and re-bought) in which they married, bred, cooked, wrote, threw pots, stretched canvases, fired kilns, made amateur films — and eventually died. Some of these houses have long gone, swallowed by quarries or replaced with apartment blocks; others survive, lived in by family members or strangers, or, like Arthur Boyd's Bundanon, given over to the nation. The houses provide a centrepiece to Niall's narrative, most effectively and movingly as later generations of Boyds feel their own sense of belonging and being:

For Penleigh, Martin and Guy, as for W.A.C. à Beckett, the impulse has been expressed in buying back a family house in the country or by the sea. In the subtly differing meanings which each of them invested in a chosen house it is possible to discern different ways of seeing the past and the self.

The leitmotif of the family home enables Niall to place a complex cast of characters as if in a setting that shows each of them to maximum advantage, without resorting to a strict chronology or any sense of artificial placement in an unwieldy narrative. It also brings its own symmetry, permitting us to see the family as a series of residents, in their own lives and times, but also as part of a wider perspective in which a basic location is fixed against a shifting tenancy. This allows for judgments that prove, in the end, similarities of habit that might otherwise go unnoticed. Thus the Boyds' nostalgic impulse to redeem the past' links the generation of W.A.C. à Beckett (the son of Victoria's first Chief Justice, Sir William, and who married Emma, the daughter of John Mills) with those of Martin Boyd (the son of the mid-generation Minnie à Beckett and Arthur Merric Boyd) and the sculptor Guy Boyd (grandson of Minnie and Arthur, and of the same generation as the more recent Arthur and Robin, who were cousins). This also explains the spirit of place that dominated, and, no doubt, still dominates, the Boyds' way of life, and is best summarised in W.A.C.'s quotation from Horace's Odes for his family motto: Immemor Sepulchri Struis Domos: Forgetful of the tomb, you build houses.'

Niall makes the early generations come to life, not just through the sometimes sketchy records of their life and times, but out of where they happened to live, their travels and their emerging artistry. An invaluable resource is Emma à Beckett's diaries, which allow Niall to colour in the sometimes sketchy early family life of the 1880s, and W.A.C.'s purchase of his ancestral home, Penleigh House, in England.

There were less grand houses, too. Think of Merric and Doris Boyd's Murrumbeena compound, Open Country, with its rudimentary accommodation, in-laws either side, and housewives who complained, every Monday, that black specks from Merric's kiln were spoiling their washing. This was the world into which Arthur Boyd was born in 1920, the first of the five different' children of the district, with hand-me-down clothing but speaking in the modulated tones of an upper-class background and living in a home where Anna Pavlova would come to sit for Merric. How their neighbours must have talked …

Thus we steal effortlessly from one generation to the next: mindful also of hand-me-down habits and attitudes. In 1933, thirteen-year-old Arthur, already a fine painter and longing to escape from school, wanted to be a comedian: I had an idea that if you were a clown you could get away with being yourself in private. I thought it might be easier, or at least possible, to deal with the world if you could make people laugh.' No doubt he did, but thank goodness he persevered with art.

Niall's survey of Arthur Boyd and his cousin, the architect and writer Robin, place these two great cultural figures in a new light at a time when re-evaluation is important to understanding the contribution each made in his respective field. Martin, too, we need to know again, and also to reread his novels in a more contemporary light. Robin (son of Penleigh and Edith Boyd) was a fine architect and extraordinarily gifted writer, whose views were sardonic, yet superb. His searing description of Castle Towers, in Marne Street, South Yarra (It is as though a giant garbage tin had been shaken over Melbourne for about a decade,' it began) earned him a writ; the settlement, an apology, was set by Robin in Gothic type: the last word. Niall puts him neatly in perspective, as a Boyd, but also as a craftsman, commentator and public intellectual who died far too soon and whose books should be reprinted without further delay.

Cousin Arthur, more celebrated and who died only three years ago, also receives the space he deserves. This is not a technical book, nor hagiographic; yet one can see how clearly Arthur's approach to painting arose from his childhood and family background and traditions. Niall does not neglect, at any stage of her work, the importance of the women in the family. For example, Arthur's wife, Yvonne, was her husband's secretary, protector, amanuensis: in the words of a friend, the perfect artist's wife — and nice as well'. But, without her, and the other Boyd wives, the family would not have been the same.

Perhaps the home of all Boyd homes is at Bundanon, whose properties house the ultimate Boyd museum, containing family memorabilia, furniture, and Merric's little earthenware figure of Arthur at the age of three'. It is, says Niall, not a museum but a family house, with a certain unplanned disorder'. Moreover, There's not a blank wall anywhere'. Which is what one could say of Niall's own crowded canvas, peopled by the members of a great Australian artistic family long overdue for such a work. This is a history that highlights one family, but, in the process, brings alive their times and why or how the Boyd painting gene' passed its way down the line. Its scholarship lies in its research, interpretation and, finally, its absolutely clear readability, where opinions are neither gratuitous nor ambitious but essential to overall enlightenment. With Niall as guide, the Boyds, past, present and future, could not have had a better biographer. This publication, handsomely produced with many illustrations, does them all proud.