Reviewed by Rod McLary
It would take a certain amount of courage and perhaps chutzpah to write not just one memoir but four as Phil Brown has done. But while the first quality is certainly present in his latest very honest and revealing volume, the second is far less likely as what may mistakenly be identified as chutzpah is leavened by a self-deprecating sense of humour.
Beginning ‘Confessions’ from 1972 when the author and his family moved to the Gold Coast, he chronicles his journey towards a career in literature and journalism – but only after he becomes a ‘naïve teenage Gold Coast surfie’ [3]. Even then, he is an emerging poet with an early effort glassed into his surfboard’s undercarriage. As he asks rhetorically and then answers, ‘how the hell does a teenage surfie on the Gold Coast come to be writing poetry anyway? Well, it all started … with a girl’ [5].
What also starts is the author’s fifty-year journey towards a career in journalism and literature and it is a journey well-worth the telling. But it is not without its trials and tribulations. The author speaks with raw emotion of watching helplessly as his father slowly drinks himself to death and the emotional impact on the author, his mother and siblings. He tells equally movingly and candidly of his first admission to the Glen Pacific Private Hospital following what the author calls ‘a nervous breakdown’ [50] and how the two are connected. The author was prescribed ‘benzodiazepines’ for his ‘nervous disposition’ which was really his strategy for coping with his father’s alcoholism and his subsequent excessive use of the drug led to his hospital admission. His state of mind was not helped by his reading material at the time which included The Bell Jar by Sylivia Plath and Death and Eternal Life by John Hick.
Woven through the biographical detail are two threads – one replete with cultural and literary references from F Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway to Trent Dalton and Les Murray and a veritable who’s who of contemporary Australian writers and poets. There is no sense of ‘name-dropping’ – simply the reflection of the literary circles in which the author lived and worked; most – if not all – of the names would be familiar to many lovers of literature. The second thread is the author’s poetry – from what could be called juvenilia All alone under friendly sun / Quiet moment [3] – to his more mature work The hosts stood hopelessly at the door watching their guests / depart, en masse [213]. The latter poem appeared in the author’s second volume of verse – An Accident in the Evening [UQP 2001]. The lines of poetry quoted throughout the book provide an extraordinary insight into the author’s state of mind at pivotal moments in his life.
His working life as a journalist was equally varied – albeit in some situations short-lived – but the author is always making his own mark and bringing his own writing style to the various publications which employed him. For a few years, he and his wife Sandra McLean moved to Melbourne so that Sandra could take up a job with the very successful TV Week. The author worked here and there, wrote poetry, had one poem published in an anthology Queensland: Words and All. He was in rather illustrious company which included Hugh Lunn, David Malouf, Ross Fitzgerald and Judith Wright. But again, these are the people he socialised with – and Ross Fitzgerald was a personal friend.
There are so many anecdotes and cultural references and well-known characters frequenting the pages, it is almost impossible to summarise them – and nor should they be summarised. It is best to enjoy the book in its entirety page by page – luxuriating in the language and the self-deprecating humour – and marvelling at the author’s honesty and openness in sharing so much of his personal and inner life with his readers.
It is indeed a fine memoir.
Phil Brown is a journalist, poet, author and editor of InReview Queensland. He is the author of two books of verse, a book of humorous travel stories Travels with my Angst [with apologies to Graham Greene], and three books in his memoir series. Confessions of a Minor Poet is the fourth in the series.
Confessions of a Minor Poet
[2025]
by Phil Brown
Transit Lounge Publishing
ISBN: 978 1 923023 41 3
$32.99; 265pp