Biography is a growing genre in Australian writing, says historian Peter Cochrane, "not just as a search to understand lives but to get to the truth behind the spin, cover and public masks that confront us every day in politics.
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"A healthy biography scene is a marker of a healthy society," he says. "There's a new scepticism.
"Good biographies get to the truths behind manufactured images and tell us about the times as well as the person."
As chairman of the judging panel for the National Biography Prize, Cochrane and his fellow judges, critic Rosemary Sorensen and historian Richard White, read 110 entries. They included 15 biographies of artists and writers, 11 of politicians, eight about migrants and refugees (three of them African), seven military subjects, and 15 he defined as "misery lit or inspirational memoir".
Among the six books shortlisted on Monday at the State Library of NSW are biographies of two artists, an author, an archbishop, a war correspondent, and autobiographies by a diplomat and a performer: Battarbee and Namatjira by Martin Edmond, Comrade Ambassador: Whitlam's Beijing Envoy by Stephen FitzGerald, Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather by Karen Lamb, Mannix by Brenda Niall, Bearing Witness: The Remarkable Life of Charles Bean, Australia's Greatest War Correspondent by Peter Rees, and Reckoning: A Memoir by Magda Szubanski.
"This field is exceptionally strong, and I could name three or four books that in another year would make the shortlist and even be contenders," Cochrane says.
He notes "a tendency towards more confessional writing in memoir and autobiography, and the rise to cultural prominence of the traumatised individual is quite a strong theme – even though it is not represented on our shortlist".
Battarbee and Namatjira is a "deeply researched dual biography and art history" about the Indigenous artist and lesser-known wounded Anzac and watercolourist who became friends and mutual teachers in Hermannsburg.
The autobiography of FitzGerald, former ambassador to China, is banned in China despite expressing affection for many of the leaders he met.
"It links up with bigger themes – the end of white Australia, coming to terms with Asia," Cochrane says.
In her biography of the late novelist Thea Astley, Lamb "really did get inside her head to explore the unquenchable difficulties and dissatisfactions that drove her on. She was a very complex person."
Niall, "the elder stateswoman of biographers", took on a "formidable "subject in the powerful Archbishop of Melbourne, who had all his correspondence destroyed.
"She did a remarkable job," Cochrane says. "The Daniel Mannix we get is more nuanced than we knew ... Her prose is silky smooth."
Rees has been criticised by some historians for not going deeply enough into the British archives for his biography of Charles Bean, the war correspondent and official World War I historian, but Cochrane disagrees.
"This award is for writing as well as research and this is a tremendously readable biography for anyone interested in a slightly different take on World War I."
Szubanski's family memoir "could be located in the inspirational memoir category but it rises way above that and transcends the category of celebrity memoir," Cochrane says.
"She has a way with a sentence and there are lines that make you smile and then chill you."
The winner of the $25,000 prize – not yet chosen by the judges – will be announced on August 8 at a free public event at the State Library of NSW.
