AustLit logo

AustLit

y separately published work icon Hal Porter : A Man of Many Parts single work   biography  
Issue Details: First known date: 1993... 1993 Hal Porter : A Man of Many Parts
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Notes

  • Includes reference to the influence of Beatrice Davis and Barrett Reid on Hal Porter.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Milsons Point, North Sydney - Lane Cove area, Sydney Northern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,: Random House , 1993 .
      Extent: 330p.
      Description: [16] p. of plates : ports.
      ISBN: 0091827949
VIEW PUBLICATION DETAILS FOR ALL VERSIONS ()

Works about this Work

Bohemia on the Mountainside Ann-Marie Priest , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Meanjin , Winter vol. 80 no. 2 2021;

'In the early 1950s, the writer Hal Porter, then in his early forties, lived for a couple of years in the Tasmanian village of Fern Tree, halfway up kunanyi (then known as Mount Wellington). The scattered settlement was home, he would later write, to ‘a community of city-eschewers and suburb-disdainers’, ‘escapees from what they call The Rat Race’. These proto-hippies favoured ‘cabin-like weatherboard houses of singular unsightliness set, with a view to views, in what much resemble the crude clearings of early settlers’. Undeterred by ‘built-in snowstorms, visiting bushfires, and resident soggy clouds’, Fern Tree’s residents showed a decided partiality for ‘flagons of claret, political leftism, bellicose pacifism, the taking up of crazes and causes: palmistry, immorality, astrology, starving children (far-off and coloured), air-conditioned cells and caviar for criminals, preservation of murderers, carte blanche for abortionists’.'  (Introduction)
Bad Memories : Mary Lord's Hal Porter : Man of Many Parts David McCooey , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Telling Stories : Australian Life and Literature 1935–2012 2013; (p. 470-476)
“Yrs Patrick” : Thea Astley’s Brush with Timely Advice on “The Rackety Career of Novel Writing” Karen Lamb , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 72 no. 1 2012; (p. 53-65) 'Thea Astley had a difficult relationship with critical responses to her work throughout her entire writing life. Success - early or late career (for she had both) - did little to diminish the wounds she felt were inflicted when a reviewer or critic got to work on her "style". By the mid-1980s there were even some Australian literary scholars who were beginning to endorse Astley's own sense of critical foul play. Elizabeth Perkins wrote of Astley's fiction being the kind of writing which not only "disconcerts enthusiastic readers" but seems to render it "beyond the reach of the more usual modes of criticism" (Perkins 11; 17). Yet until now little has been said about how this state of affairs developed or how Astley, over time, came to deal with it - despite the many re - marks she made in interviews which indicate just how strange her relationship with her public persona as a writer actually was. Astley, for her part, became adept at deflection: her teenage poetry was "a form of acne" (Smith 43); she was "incapable of playing the game of the writertaking- himself-seriously seriously" (Astley, Kunapipi 21); she was just a "bit of a misfit" (Astley, Australian Voices 37) and later, more defensively, "I've worked all my life and I haven't had to time to be in the ghetto de Balmain" (Astley, Sunday Herald 3). One person who had an impact on Astley's self-regard at an early stage in her writing life was Patrick White. The record of the friendship has thus far rested on the evidence of its beginning and ending, detailed in David Marr's biography Patrick White: A life (1991) yet a letter White wrote to Astley in 1961, and which Astley kept from view and from publication in Marr's subsequent collection of White's letters, is a critical new source from which we can interpret the influence of White's mentoring of Astley.' (Author's abstract)
'No One but I Will Know': Hal Porter's Honesty Noel Rowe , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , February no. 41 2007; Ethical Investigations : Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics 2008; (p. 194-212) Rowe argues: 'Porter's texts - and here I am deliberately merging autobiography and fiction on the grounds that they employ the same fictive strategies - permit a reader to return paedophilia to narrative and examine how it functions within stories that make a virtue of secrecy even as they evacuate those notions of goodness and responsibility that make virtue credible'.
Looking Beyond the Subject: Some Recent Biographies Ivor Indyk , 1995 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , May vol. 17 no. 1 1995; (p. 95-99)
— Review of Hal Porter : A Man of Many Parts Mary Lord , 1993 single work biography ; The Scandalous Penton : A Biography of Brian Penton Patrick Buckridge , 1994 single work biography
Untitled Kenneth Gasmier , 1994 single work review
— Appears in: Fremantle Arts Review , February/March vol. 9 no. 1 1994; (p. 13-15)
— Review of Hal Porter : A Man of Many Parts Mary Lord , 1993 single work biography
Monster Biogs Michael McGirr , 1994 single work review
— Appears in: Eureka Street , February vol. 4 no. 1 1994; (p. 37-39)
— Review of Christina Stead : A Biography Hazel Rowley , 1993 single work biography ; Hal Porter : A Man of Many Parts Mary Lord , 1993 single work biography
The Portrait of a Monster Geoffrey Dutton , 1993 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 6 November 1993; (p. 11A)
— Review of Hal Porter : A Man of Many Parts Mary Lord , 1993 single work biography
A Blurred Portrait of a Ruthless Seeker of Experience John Graham , 1993 single work review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 20 November 1993; (p. C11)
— Review of Hal Porter : A Man of Many Parts Mary Lord , 1993 single work biography
Hal Porter: Man and Monster Jim Davidson , 1993 single work review
— Appears in: The Age , 20 November 1993; (p. 9)
— Review of Hal Porter : A Man of Many Parts Mary Lord , 1993 single work biography
'No One but I Will Know': Hal Porter's Honesty Noel Rowe , 2007 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , February no. 41 2007; Ethical Investigations : Essays on Australian Literature and Poetics 2008; (p. 194-212) Rowe argues: 'Porter's texts - and here I am deliberately merging autobiography and fiction on the grounds that they employ the same fictive strategies - permit a reader to return paedophilia to narrative and examine how it functions within stories that make a virtue of secrecy even as they evacuate those notions of goodness and responsibility that make virtue credible'.
“Yrs Patrick” : Thea Astley’s Brush with Timely Advice on “The Rackety Career of Novel Writing” Karen Lamb , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 72 no. 1 2012; (p. 53-65) 'Thea Astley had a difficult relationship with critical responses to her work throughout her entire writing life. Success - early or late career (for she had both) - did little to diminish the wounds she felt were inflicted when a reviewer or critic got to work on her "style". By the mid-1980s there were even some Australian literary scholars who were beginning to endorse Astley's own sense of critical foul play. Elizabeth Perkins wrote of Astley's fiction being the kind of writing which not only "disconcerts enthusiastic readers" but seems to render it "beyond the reach of the more usual modes of criticism" (Perkins 11; 17). Yet until now little has been said about how this state of affairs developed or how Astley, over time, came to deal with it - despite the many re - marks she made in interviews which indicate just how strange her relationship with her public persona as a writer actually was. Astley, for her part, became adept at deflection: her teenage poetry was "a form of acne" (Smith 43); she was "incapable of playing the game of the writertaking- himself-seriously seriously" (Astley, Kunapipi 21); she was just a "bit of a misfit" (Astley, Australian Voices 37) and later, more defensively, "I've worked all my life and I haven't had to time to be in the ghetto de Balmain" (Astley, Sunday Herald 3). One person who had an impact on Astley's self-regard at an early stage in her writing life was Patrick White. The record of the friendship has thus far rested on the evidence of its beginning and ending, detailed in David Marr's biography Patrick White: A life (1991) yet a letter White wrote to Astley in 1961, and which Astley kept from view and from publication in Marr's subsequent collection of White's letters, is a critical new source from which we can interpret the influence of White's mentoring of Astley.' (Author's abstract)
Writer Hal Porter a Paedophile Matthew Ricketson , 1993 single work biography
— Appears in: The Australian , 26 October 1993; (p. 1)
Porter's Hypocrisy was the Target Jim Davidson , 1993 single work correspondence
— Appears in: The Age , 9 December 1993; (p. 16)
Masterly Portrait of a Monster Wayne Crawford , 1993 single work criticism biography
— Appears in: The Saturday Mercury , 18 December 1993; (p. 36)
VIEW ALL WORKS ABOUT (25)
Last amended 25 Sep 2002 10:39:27
Subjects:
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X