Daniel Mannix was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne for the best part of 50 years, dying in the job on the night of the Melbourne Cup in 1963, a few months short of his 100th birthday.
He was a central figure in the social and political history of Australia in the 20th century.
Mannix did everything in his power to frustrate biographers, including, as Brenda Niall relates, consigning his personal papers to an enormous bonfire. It honours something of the man’s contrariness, then, that so many biographies have been written of him.
There have been at least half a dozen before this. He deserves them all. He is a spell-binding figure and the extraordinary diversity of opinions about his personality and career is testimony to the deep and lasting passions he aroused.
For my money, Brenda Niall’s Mannix is the most wise, shrewd and elegant biography yet produced of this complex and beguiling man. Niall’s irresistible prose strengthens the candour of this fine book.
Niall writes as an insider: she first encountered Mannix in 1959 when he was 95 and she was in her 20s. She was sent by Bob Santamaria to interview Mannix for the biography on which Santamaria had been working but that did not appear until 1984.
Mannix had been kind to Niall’s family after the death of her father. She continued to work within this world and was close to many of the people within it, including the man often regarded as Mannix’s only real friend, Father Bill Hackett.
Niall published an excellent biography of Hackett in 2009.
As the years elapsed, Niall found she needed to distance herself in some ways from this intense Catholic sub-culture. There is a poignant moment, one of many, when she is watching Mannix give a “bravura performance” in a long TV interview in 1961.
By this stage she had become “uncomfortable with Santamaria’s certainties”. Mannix “seemed wilfully to ignore the pain and bitterness felt on both sides of the ideological divide”. Niall writes: “all very well for him, I thought, switching off the television”.
Niall herself did not switch off. However discerning its judgements, this book is deeply engaged with its subject. Continue reading
- Michael McGirr in The Sydney Morning Herald
Michael McGirr is the Dean of Faith and Mission at St Kevin’s College in Melbourne.
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