Memoirs Of A Young Bastard: The Diaries Of Tim Burstall

Tim Burstall was a key figure in Australian postwar cinema. As a director, writer and producer, he was instrumental in revitalising Australia's dying film industry and launching the careers of many well-known actors. But in 1953, before realising his cinematic aspirations, Burstall began keeping a diary. He set himself the task of writing 500 words a day, storytelling, recording, observing and reflecting. The diaries begin when Burstall is twenty-six, married and with two small sons. The family were building their mudbrick house in a progressive community in the semirural township of Eltham, near Melbourne. Their lives revolved around domesticity, parties, art, politics, film screenings, intellectual discussions and promiscuity.

Burstall's diaries aren't simply passive recordings of everyday life, however. He mercilessly turns his gaze upon his immediate neighbours and wide circle of friends and acquaintances; the artists, writers, philosophers, musicians and academics that belonged to a left wing, intellectual subculture set apart from provincial Melbourne. Burstall turns on his wife, his lovers and the young woman he was determined to seduce. And he turns on himself, castigating, mocking and repeatedly revealing his insecurities. The Memoirs of a Young Bastard offers a unique snapshot of 1950s Australian bohemian life. Written against the backdrop of an Australia easily caricatured as dull and provincial, straightjacketed by suburban convention and paranoia, this is one of the most evocative, and certainly most comprehensive, Australian diaries of modern times.

Hilary McPhee was a founding director of McPhee Gribble Publishers and Chair of the Australia Council for the Arts and of the Major Organizations Board 1994-7, and a founding director and editor of online political newsletter New Matilda.

Other People's Words, published in 2001, documents her career. She continues to write about cultural policy and literature and her selection of recent Australian writing, Wordlines, was published in 2010. She is currently writing a companion volume to Other People's Words.

She has an honorary doctorate from Monash University, was the inaugural Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Melbourne and remains a senior Fellow of the University. She was awarded an Order of Australia for service to the Arts in 2003.

Ann Standish is a Melbourne-based historian, writer and editor. Her book, Australia Through Women's Eyes, was published in 2008.