One of my favourite easy reads is Robert Wilson’s A Small Death in Lisbon. Of course, because it’s a thriller we’re dealing with, the ‘small death’ turns out to be not so small, to have in fact wide ranging, serious ramifications; but we know what he means.
Many deaths, the majority no doubt, are ‘small’, in the sense that the ripples they spread diminish and quickly smooth into invisibility before reaching any shore in the unforgiving rage of time and history. Still, there are friends and loved ones who sense these diffident, unpretentious ripples and grieve at the remembrances they conjure up and the finality of their disappearance as time runs over them.
Last year, as a regular contributor to Australian Book Review, I agreed to review the newly published Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 18 1981-1990 L-Z. I did so with some trepidation. Reading the ADB is not like reading a novel or even a history; it is not a narrative. How could it be? I asked in my review, ‘traversing, as it does, a decade’s worth of diverse Australian lives?’ But discrete narratives do emerge ‘if you are in the happy position of being able to read the Dictionary not for reference but simply for its rich cornucopia of sheer existence, the intersecting trajectories, directions, quirks, good and bad luck, triumphs, mistakes and fascinating penumbras of lives’.
Many of these of course are not small deaths. Distinction, achievement, leadership, innovation, creativity or, in some cases notoriety, quixoticism or eccentricity provide the grounds for inclusion in the ADB. Yet, for all the differences that emerge as one tracks the Dictionary’s decade-long roll call – placing some names above many, some in a class of their own, others in a ruck of the scarcely memorable – one indispensable criterion unites all the ADB’s characters and places them beyond our imaginative, intellectual or descriptive reach: they are dead, and in that sense, having enlisted on what Kenneth Slessor memorably called that ‘other front’, these are all in a way ‘small’ deaths because, once gone forever, only those of truly historical consequence can maintain stature in memories and anecdote.
This sombre train of thought was prompted by the death of Dr Syd Harrex (pictured), my close friend and long-time colleague at Flinders University. Syd was a legendary figure at Flinders. He was a wonderful teacher, a compassionate, respectful nurturer of his students, a fine poet