Heydays

Alister Kershaw was a member of the lively crew of poets, painters, musicians and marginal madcaps who made up Melbourne's artistic avant-garde in the Thirties and Forties. In this book he recalls some of the people he knew in his heydays. Here are Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan and James Gleeson, who were savaged in by Kershaw in a notorious satirical poem before the Ern Malley hoax. The youthful Max Harris is depicted with affectionate irony although his fellow publisher at Angry Penguins gets thoroughly roughed up, as does the Marxist critic Bernard Smith. And we have his great admiration for Adrian Lawlor - writer, painter and sublime eccentric; and Cecily Crozier, editor of Comment - all helping create Melbourne's bohemian circle.I'm glad I met him. An afternoon with Alister Kershaw, like his beguiling memoir, was filled with comic scenes and memorable characters. In Heydays, he draws humour from his defeats and weaknesses, and occasional small triumphs, with the sort of mandarin sense of knowing when to move on to the next story that you don't often come across these days. - Graeme Blundell, from his Introduction