A Fuhrer for Father: The Domestic Face of Colonialism

by Jim Davidson

'I was written out of the family story. This book is my attempt to write myself, and my mother, back into it.'In this singular memoir, historian and biographer Jim Davidson writes about his fraught relationship with his authoritarian and controlling father, whose South African background and time in Papua New Guinea and Fiji prompted his own post-war mini-empire of dominance. A manipulative and emotionally ferocious man, he rejects his son and creates a second family, shutting Jim out and eventually disinheriting him, but never really leaving him alone. Traversing territory across Australia, South Africa, India and London, this beautifully written book tells of a time of crushing conformity, sharply reminding us that some experiences can never be written out of our personal histories.

260 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 1, 2017

About the author

Jim Davidson is a historian, biographer and former editor of Meanjin (1975-82). He has been an academic and an opera critic, and the author of two prize-winning biographies.

Librarians note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Di · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jim Davidson is a notable Australian historian, biographer, music critic, editor and academic teacher. This book is a memoir about his father, an authoritarian figure, also named Jim Davidson. Subtitled 'the domestic face of colonialism', the memoir joins Davidson's account of events from his childhood, growing up, and adulthood with the sweep of world history, in particular with 'empire and racial dominance' which were firmly embodied within Jim Snr.

Jim Davidson Snr, the 'Fuhrer' of the title, was a man for whom other human beings were mere chattels to be used as his will dictated. He was a man's man, a man of action and supreme confidence, determined to get ahead in the world and damn any expense of pain to others including those close to him: his younger sister, his wife, Olga, his son Jim, his various girlfriends (women in general) and his second family.

The memoir traces many of the known facts of 'Dadda's' (Jim's) life- such as could be ascertained given his lies and obfuscations when it suited his purposes: his birth in South Africa, his growing up in Tasmania, his self-education and training that enabled him to earn a living as a surveyor in Papua New Guinea,Fiji and Australia, his later successful careers as businessman, factory owner, property developer and collector and dealer in Aboriginal art. To complement this life of action and achievement he was determined to have his own family ('Man's Estate', as he called it) and so managed, finally to persuade the competent, artistic, Olga to marry him.

Young Jim, the author, was the child of this union. His mother, Olga, suffered many hardships at the hands of her callous husband that caused her, sensibly, to leave, often facing societal disapproval and discrimination, but surviving as a separated, and later divorced woman dogged by Jim who kept her son from her, blamed her for the marriage breakdown and denied her decent rights to property at a time when those rights were much less secure than they are in the present day. The bare bones of marriage breakdown, divorce and family disruption are common enough, but closely examined, as they are here, forensically, we feel the great human drama affecting individual lives.

Jim, the historian and memoirist, has in his hands the fine tools to unpick the human drama, to understand it and share it and the wide historical canvas it is played out against and within. His mother emerges from the mess with dignity despite the 'Fuhrer's' attempts to leave her weeping and ashamed. But the historian is also a son and a subject in the drama. We see throughout not only how he survived his father's cruelties and narcissism, but how, in doing so her developed the temperament and the interest that would equip him for his career as a historian, a witness, and a recorder of the everyday, but extaordinary, human drama.

[Janine · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading a string memoirs written by women that seemed to excoriate their mothers, I decided not to read any more. I probably should have stuck to my decision when I picked up historian and Meanjin editor Jim Davidson's A Fuhrer for a Father. But perhaps a memoir about a father written by a son might be different, I thought. Indeed, beyond Germaine Greer's Daddy We Hardly Knew You (which I haven't read) and Raymond Gaita's Romulus My Father (which I have), I'm hard pressed to think of other similar books, written by sons about their fathers. [However, I see that Shaun Carney and Mark Colvin have both recently released books that exactly fit this category]. Furthermore, I knew that Jim Davidson is open about his homosexuality, and the question of a father's acceptance of his son's sexuality is an interesting one, particularly when the father is a domestic and forceful martinet with a string of relationships with women. And besides, a historian can bring a particular eye to memoir, able to interweave the personal with the broader historical picture, as Graeme Davison did so well in Lost Relations. So, read it I did.

For the first half of the book, I appreciated Davidson's depiction of 1950s-60s upper middle-class suburban life in Melbourne that had echoes of Barry Humphrey's Sandy Stone character and, although set in an earlier period, My Brother Jack. It is the juxtaposition of the theoretical and domestic that is highlighted in the subtitle of the book: "The domestic face of colonialism".
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However, much of the last half of the book is a long, petulant complaint of one grown man as son against another grown man, his father.
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Not one of my better book choices.

For my longer review see https://residentjudge.wordpress.com/2...

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting enough read however it really does not write the writer back into the family history as the original premise suggests rather is a discussion of the father's life. It really doesn't talk about the mother all that much at all and nor about Jim Davidson either. Perhaps that is the point though that the father even sticks his nose into the book like he does the son's life.

[Sarah Anderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was ok, fairly interesting however I found the writing clunky and hard to follow at times.