Caroline Jones: Through a Glass Darkly. ABC Books, 2009. ISBN: 9780733323980. Online
'I consider that the honest telling of my life experience is the most authentic gift I have to offer.' Caroline Jones
Caroline Jones' working life has been devoted to stories. Initially these stories were the ones we call 'news' — the large impersonal events of history as it happens.
Then her career matured into the much-loved and highly original Radio National program The Search for Meaning, and the ABC TV series Australian Story. There the stories she told, or made space for others to tell, concerned the life histories, and interior landscapes, of individual people.
She has made a vocation out of giving voice to something that would otherwise be almost mute in the cacophony of opinions, events and arguments that usually demand our attention. It is as if, in her programs, not the face but the heart of society is speaking, and it tells a completely different kind of story to the ones we are accustomed to hearing.
In two of her books, An Authentic Life (1998) and now, Through A Glass Darkly, Jones tells something of the story of her own life, though characteristically this is deeply entwined with the stories of others. Through a Glass Darkly concerns the quietly heroic life of her beloved father, and her own profound grief over his death.
Brian Newman James was born in 1907 and lived the first 11 years of his life on a property called Grattai, outside Mudgee in New South Wales, which for the rest of his life remained his spiritual home. At seven he faced many months away from his family in Sydney Children's Hospital, being treated for osteomyelitis in his right leg. Then, at 11, there was the sadness of having to leave Grattai forever, when his parents were forced to sell most of it.
A talented amateur artist and writer, he spent his working life as a reluctant accountant, volunteering to serve his country in the AIF during World War II, although, to his chagrin, he was never posted overseas.
He lived a long life with many challenges, including the suicide of his first wife, Caroline's mother, in 1969. But his final eight weeks, which began with open-heart surgery at the age of 93, and which were spent in an onerous and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover from it, must have been some of the most difficult of his life.
Jones