Martin Edmond was born in Ohakune and grew up in small towns in the North Island. He studied at Auckland and Victoria Universities before joining avant garde theatre group Red Mole in 1977 and touring with them for five years as an actor, stage manager and lighting designer. Since 1981 he has lived and worked as a freelance writer in Sydney. His books are The Autobiography of My Father (1992), The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont (1999), Chronicle of the Unsung (2004), Luca Antara (2006), Waimarino County (2007), and The Evolution of Mirrors (2008). His new book The Supply Party (2009) takes the reader on a physical trek and intellectual quest across outback Australia in the footsteps of Ludwig Becker; the official artist and naturalist on the ill-fated Burke and Wills exploring expedition of 1860-61. His visit is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.
Read Martin Edmond's blog
Read an excerpt from Martin Edmond's latest book, The Supply Party
BOOKS
The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont
In The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont Martin Edmond writes a strange and striking book. It mingles biography, autobiography and art history but like his previous book, The Autobiography of My Father, it is a moving work of great power which fits no categories. At its centre is the life and art of the painter Philip Clairmont, the brilliant, enigmatic, tortured figure who died by his own hand in 1984.
Colin McCahon once said of Philip Clairmont, 'He's one of the best of the very best.' However, Clairmont lived an extreme life and died too soon. He is New Zealand's equivalent of Van Gogh or Jackson Pollock (or James Dean). Meeting those who were close to Clairmont and observing where he lived and what he left behind, Martin Edmond made his own journey. The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont has been shorlisted in the History and Biography section of the 2000 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
The most interesting biography of the year has to be Martin Edmond's The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont. . . . startlingly well-written, replete with unexpected insights and heartily recommended. - Michael King, NZ Listener
. . . terrific, loving biography . . . if Edmond's book leaves the readers as simultaneously drained, perplexed, uplifted and haunted as the author himself seems to be, then that is just about the perfect epitaph for Clairmont and his work - bold, maddening, unforgettable. - Philip Matthews, NZ Listener
Chronicle of the Unsung
Award-winning scriptwriter and biographer Martin Edmond uses this as his point of departure in his new book, Chronicles of the Unsung, in which he meshes his real life and his thinking life in a fresh take on the notion of biography, a travelogue of the mind. Martin documents his artistic journey as a writer (under the personal shadow of being the son of a prominent poet) and his personal journey as a young man, in particular the last phase of an early marriage. Four quite separate periods or episodes in his life - in Europe, Australia, Fiji and New Zealand - are linked thematically and he intersperses his journey with the people he meets, the knowledge he gleans of place, in both the past and the present or reflections on the nature of art and its relation to personal life. One of the fascinations of the work is the skilful way in which Martin conveys the power, often sinister and disturbing, of the places in which he has lived and the impact the locations seem to have on his own personal life. He peoples his landscape with the now-famous, who went unsung, at least for part of their lives - Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rimbaud, Wilde, George Grey, the architects of a Sydney incinerator - and with the decidedly not-famous - flatmates, friends, lovers. The book thus becomes an account of Martin's own development, of his process of self-discovery, and is another variant on the theme that has always interested him, the nature of the creative personality.
Winner 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Biography.
Luca Antara
Luca Antara is a rich tapestry of history and the present. Essentially, it parallels the life of the author, an émigré to Sydney, and the life of an historical figure, António da Nova, the servant of a Portuguese explorer who in the 1600s sends him to find out more about Luca Antara (now Australia). New to Sydney, Martin Edmond finds himself impoverished and displaced. He earns money as a taxi driver but spends his spare time frequenting second hand bookshops trying to learn more about the history of Australia and the wider region. The people Edmond encounters in his taxi and in his search for rare books are varied and strange, offering the reader a voyeuristic glimpse into Sydney’s sub-culture. Sent to discover more about Luca Antara, António da Nova’s crew mutinied and dumped him on the West Australian coast. He is found by Aborigines who take him on an epic walk across northern Australia to a place frequented by Chinese trepang fisherman who, the Aborigines quite rightly predict, take him back to Malacca and eventually to his master in Portugal who awaits news of his explorations. Edmond’s reading centres upon da Nova, but each book he reads leads to another and the subject becomes broader and increasingly fascinating. The lives of the two men and the strange customs and unique social mores of each man’s culture and time intertwine throughout the book. It ends with Edmond literally walking in the footsteps of da Nova across northern Australia..
"Luca Antara is a book-lover's book, a graceful and mesmerizing blend of history, autobiography, travel and romance." - JM Coetzee
Waimarino County
A new work from a master prose stylist, Waimarino County is a book of essays described as ‘elegant discursions on themes of memory, words and travel’. Edmond has an idiosyncratic and utterly engaging way of writing that always draws on himself and his own often quite intimate experience, yet his work is never self-absorbed but turns outwards: to the past, to the landscape and the natural world, to other writers and artists, to journeys and distant places. Though held together by a single consciousness the book is divided into four sections: ‘Autobiographies’ draws on memories of childhood and adolescence; "Meditations" ranges over subjects from the Rosetta Stone to Alan Brunton; "Illusions" on dreams and visions; and "Voices" is his masterly long essay, "Ghost Who Writes," on the mysterious identity of the writer. Waimarino County confirms the view that Martin Edmond is a major voice in our literature. As Edmond writes of the essays in his afterword, "Any order they may have is inadvertent, a product of my obsessions or predilections: self and other; psychedelics and the nature of perception; landscape, with its intimations of paradise lost or found; the City; the far reaches of spacetime and the means used to probe it; above all, the workings of memory and what it can tell us of time, mind and world . . . It isn’t for me to say what might emerge from this collection; but those repetitions and cross-references that do appear were neither contrived nor suppressed."
The Evolution of Mirrors
“To dance we need those three original muses: memory, voice, occasion ...” Martin Edmond begins his new book of prose meditations, The Evolution of Mirrors with an account of the evolution of the Muses, the daughters of Memory. As his own memory moves from Ohakune to Alexandria, Sydney to San Francisco, we are invited to look into a series of mirrors trained upon the past. “We remember in order to write but we write to forget,” he quotes himself. At times his lapidary prose echoes Borges, elsewhere he appears to be channelling Pessoa. Whatever he writes, though, he remains one of the true originals of our epoch, a stunningly inventive writer whose prose is as haunting as any poem, whose poetry is as circumstantial as Thucydides. As memory folds into memory, mirror into mirror, something starts to come into focus, some justification for our – perhaps quixotic – belief that “across all versions there is something incontrovertible, a substratum of truth.” —Jack Ross
The Supply Party
Ludwig Becker, artist, naturalist, scientist, was a member of the doomed Burke and Wills expedition of 1860-61—one of the best equipped yet worst fated of explorations. The sophisticated, talented and always curious Becker would die beside an ephemeral creek in south west Queensland while his party was under siege from displaced and enraged Aborigines. He had lived an extraordinary life in Europe before coming to Australia. As court painter for the Archduke Ludwig III of Hesse-Darmstadt; as an archaeologist and a portraitist; and, controversially, as a member of the radical political group Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte, the Society for Human Rights, Becker participated in formative events leading up to the European Revolutions of 1848.
A collector and a dilettante as well, Becker at various times owned a first edition of Martin Luther’s Table Talk (1556), original artworks by Rembrandt, Raphael, Cranach and van Dyck, and was the man who recognised and rescued from oblivion a unique artefact—the death mask of Shakespeare. Becker’s principal Australian legacy is his written and visual diary of the Burke and Wills expedition, which includes over seventy luminous artworks—half of them reproduced here—depicting this new and foreign environment with eloquence and sympathy. In The Supply Party author Martin Edmond follows Becker’s path from Melbourne to Bulloo Creek, guiding the reader on a physical journey and an emotional quest through outback Australia in search of a man who, malnourished, bullied by Burke, harried by Aborigines and horribly injured, until the last continued to fulfil his official duties as artist and naturalist.