In this rollicking biography of General Sir John Monash, Roland Perry seeks to release his subject from the image of a dourly brilliant engineer and soldier. This, perhaps, has diminished Monash’s status in the as yet unbuilt Australian pantheon.
Due weight is paid to the earnestness with which Monash made the most of his scholarly chances at Scotch College in the 1870s, and to the distractions that led him to take so long to complete the degree in arts, law and engineering that eventually he secured from Melbourne University. Principally that was because Monash pursued several parallel careers to the academic. He was also dedicated to gaining experience and preferment in the militia, to socialising and to finding work as a junior engineer. His struggles as partner in his own firm during the 1890s Depression, where work took him deep into Gippsland and as far away as Western Australia, are vividly detailed. This is the story of redoubtable striving, not of some homiletic progress to riches.
Perry spends a lot of time with the sexually venturesome Monash, although little mention is made of his celebrated collection of erotica. Apparently women possessed of a ‘superb figure’ could prevail upon him. The first of these was Annie Gabriel, wife of Monash’s clerk while he worked on the white elephant of the Outer Circle Railway in Melbourne. Though he was beaten up for her husband’s pains, and contemplated elopement with Annie, Monash in the end demurred. Instead he took on an altogether tougher proposition in Victoria Moss, who became his wife and mother of Bertha, their only child. Vic left him after a few years and decamped to England. They reconciled, although Perry is short on information as to how they accommodated the worst of what they suspected of each other. In the Great War, Monash was parted from his family for four years. When Vic was diagnosed with uterine cancer, in anguish he sought leave to return to Australia. This was refused. Before long Monash began an affair in London with Lizette Bentwitch, who would become his companion in Australia after the end of the war and Vic’s death.
A racier Monash strides from Perry’s biography than that of Geoffrey Serle. When his German-Jewish father was reduced to running a store in Jerilderie in the late 1870s, Monash may have met the Kelly gang, in town to sell a horse (a year before they robbed