Biographers in Conversation

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Micaela Sahhar chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

The death of Micaela Sahhar’s grandmother’s last surviving sister created a sense of urgency for Micaela to capture her Palestinian family’s stories before they slipped beyond living memory.

With many primary sources destroyed in the 1948 Nakba, Micaela learned to read absence as a form of evidence, drawing on object memory, fragments, photographs, and ephemeral archives to reconstruct what official records could not.

Micaela’s grandfather’s late-life oral history tapes were a vital source of historical and family information. They looped between present and past, between stories and digressions and became a structural model for the encyclopaedic, non-linear form of Find Me at the Jaffa Gate.

In 2023, Micaela visited Jerusalem to retrace her family’s footsteps through the Old City. She recalls that walking the actual terrain, up hills, distances and ordinary neighbourhoods, brought a present-tense vividness to the story.

Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is structured as a 48-entry encyclopaedia spanning four generations of Micaela’s Palestinian family, from the streets of Jerusalem and Bethlehem to the Palestinian community of Melbourne.

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Professor Karen Fang chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

Karen Fang explains why only a full-length biography could do justice to Tyrus Wong’s 106-year life that encompassed his achievements across fine art, animation, Hollywood storyboarding, greeting cards and kite-making.

Karen reveals that the title Background Artist is Tyrus Wong’s Disney credit in the original 1942 release of the movie Bambi.

Among the most revealing archival discoveries was Tyrus Wong’s personal correspondence that showed a wickedly funny, warm and creatively restless person that no formal interview could have captured.

Karen reveals how Tyrus Wong’s signature visual style, rooted in Chinese brush painting technique and aesthetic heritage, transformed racial difference from a liability into an artistic asset, enabling him to succeed in a society that otherwise offered very little opportunity to Chinese Americans.

The closing passages of Background Artist tie together the themes of visibility, immigration and artistic legacy, ending with the line Karen says came directly from her conversations with Tyrus Wong’s daughters: ‘Tyrus was always simply an artist.’

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, award-winning author Dr Debra Adelaide chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting When I Am Sixty-Four.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: 

When I Am Sixty-Four is a tender, poignant story based on Debra Adelaide’s lifelong friendship with the award-winning author, Gabrielle Carey.

When I Am Sixty-Four began not as a planned book but as a single vivid memory that arrived unbidden while she was working on another project; it simply refused to let go.

A work of extraordinary depth and grace, When I Am Sixty-Four is crafted as autofiction, a hybrid genre that blurs the line between fiction and autobiography.

Debra defines autofiction as writing memoir using the tools of narrative fiction, shaping, rearranging, condensing, and inventing to reach for a broader emotional truth.

Debra explains her decision not to name Gabrielle or anyone else in the book, wanting readers to bring their own experiences of loving someone in despair to the narrative.

Debra describes the story’s mosaic structure of vignettes as entirely instinctive. The final tragic months of her friend’s life provide a loose chronological spine, while memories from their 50 years of shared history were weaved in. 

The story’s dark humour, Debra explains, was both an authentic expression of who Gabrielle Carey was, a woman with an extraordinary laugh, and a deliberate way of honouring her.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Troy Bramston chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New. This is the first full biography of Gough Whitlam, a former Australian Prime Minister, since his death in 2014.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

The biography’s subtitle The Vista of the New came from a poem Gough Whitlam wrote in 1934 as a student at Canberra Grammar School. In it, he imagines a bolder brighter future for Australia.

The biography’s central theme is political leadership.

Troy Bramston is interested in how power is gained, used and lost.

Gough Whitlam’s school reports noted his difficulty getting along with others. These interpersonal failures would contribute to his downfall decades later.

Troy argues that Whitlam was not a man of destiny but a man of history, driven not by a sense of predestination but by a hunger to change Australia’s direction.

Troy makes a compelling case for advancing the biographical subject. Continually asking what is new, he argues that a biography that doesn’t tell us something we didn’t know before, however well written, fails to fully justify itself.

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Ian Hembrow chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while crafting Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

Celsius: A Life and Death by Degrees is the first full-length English biography of Anders Celsius, a modest Swedish astronomer who quietly revolutionised our understanding of the natural world.

Ian Hembrow’s accidental discovery of Celsius’s story in 2016 sparked a years’-long quest that led him to the Arctic Circle, retracing Celsius’s 1736–37 expedition to measure the shape of the Earth.

Celsius’s story is set against the backdrop of the European Enlightenment, illustrating how he thrived in the vibrant 18th-century scientific community while unlocking fundamental mysteries of nature.

Ian Hembrow draws connections to the present, noting that Celsius, who is best known for inventing the 100-point centigrade temperature scale, now lends his name to global climate targets as humanity strives to limit warming to 1.5°C.

How Ian Hembrow delves into Celsius’s human story, sharing the personal struggles and triumphs behind his scientific achievements and offering a poignant reminder that even great scientific minds face immense personal challenges.

The relevance of Celsius’s story today, reminding us of the crucial role of scientific inquiry and our shared responsibility to use knowledge wisely as we face urgent challenges like climate change.