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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Brenda Niall, arguably Australia’s foremost biographer, looks back on her own life and the circumstances, events and choices that shaped her career.
'My Accidental Career spans nine decades, from her childhood in the Melbourne suburb of Kew—where powerful neighbours included prime minister Menzies, millionaire gambler John Wren and Archbishop Daniel Mannix—to her university days, her first job writing reviews for a magazine and her travels in Ireland after breaking off her engagement to a suitable young man. It’s a lively account of academic life at the newly established Monash University in the 1960s, a time when women were rare in university departments and even more rarely promoted, the snakes and ladders ups and downs of her time in the US, and of her charting new territory in Australian biography with acclaimed works on artists, writers and leaders.
'Brenda Niall’s career isn’t one of struggle against the odds in a man’s world but one of quiet, confident work that couldn’t be ignored. Her Jane Austen-like wit and elegant prose enlivens this story of Australian women’s history seen through the lens of her remarkable life.'
Source : publisher's blurb
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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A Felicitous Career
2022
single work
column
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 24 April vol. 32 no. 8 2022;'Towards the end of Brenda Niall’s new book My Accidental Career she muses on her reluctance to insert herself into her biography of Judith Cassab and the authority that allowed her to do so in her biographies of Archbishop Mannix and Irish Jesuit William Hackett. She says, ‘When it came to Hackett and Mannix, I was back in a world that I remembered well. I had the right to speak’. ' (Introduction)
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Quiet Achiever : Brenda Niall’s New Memoir
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 441 2022; (p. 52)
— Review of My Accidental Career 2022 single work autobiography'It’s always interesting to see biographers decide to turn the spotlight upon themselves, and to ask why. Will it be another case of ‘now it’s my turn’? The need to confess, even to enter into the Land of Too Much Information?'(Introduction)
-
Quiet Achiever : Brenda Niall’s New Memoir
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 441 2022; (p. 52)
— Review of My Accidental Career 2022 single work autobiography'It’s always interesting to see biographers decide to turn the spotlight upon themselves, and to ask why. Will it be another case of ‘now it’s my turn’? The need to confess, even to enter into the Land of Too Much Information?'(Introduction)
-
A Felicitous Career
2022
single work
column
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 24 April vol. 32 no. 8 2022;'Towards the end of Brenda Niall’s new book My Accidental Career she muses on her reluctance to insert herself into her biography of Judith Cassab and the authority that allowed her to do so in her biographies of Archbishop Mannix and Irish Jesuit William Hackett. She says, ‘When it came to Hackett and Mannix, I was back in a world that I remembered well. I had the right to speak’. ' (Introduction)
