Wayne's Reviews > Proud Australian Boy: A Biography of Russell Braddon

I'm just eating up this book.

POST-READ:

Totally consumed and happily digested.

While reading this book I noted the deaths of three survivors of Changi Camp as well as the notorious Burma Railway, both run by the Japanese with a sickening brutality justified utterly in their eyes and culture, by their contempt for soldiers who surrendered.
One death was that of Ronald Searle, creator of those savage St Trinian's Schoolgirls, whose vicious mischiefs were often based on the cruelties of his Japanese torturers on the building of the aforementioned railway.
It is ALL relative.
One Japanese guard actually wrote to Russell asking if he could play himself if ever a film were to be made of Russell's best-seller account of his captivity in "The Naked Island", so proud was he of his contribution to the construction of the railway on which tens of thousands of Asian, British, Indian and Dutch prisoners died through starvation,disease and physical brutality.
More relativity.

The list of Russell Braddon's achievements, one of which was his surviving the slave-construction of the Burma Railway as a young man in his early 20's, are listed on the back cover of this wonderful book.
But it is ultimately hollow, this list, except for its last line:
"This biography investigates those many challenges and achievements."

Those challenges were surviving his captivity through detachment from himself and his surroundings, through compassionate involvement with his fellow prisoners, his sense of humour and hatred for his captors.
The latter, his understandable hatred, became a liability when he had to survive surviving.
And he also had to survive living in an intolerant heterosexual world. In the camp it was totally ignored.

It wasn't easy but he did it very well.
He tried suicide first and then a stint in a psychiatric ward where he had to survive captivity all over again.
But his personality, belief in himself and his creativity were to gain him entry to a star-studded world. But these celebrities were solid and realistic people who had just come out of a dreadful war.

Finally freed, he left Sydney for London, and immediately almost, found himself with n Ausie Changi mate and his wife on the London stage doing the Mind-Reading act they had worked up in Changi. It travelled the world,English-speaking bits. A book about the act led him to "The Naked Island" still in print after 60 years and 2 million copies sold. And solid fame. Ronald Searle contributed powerful illustrations to this memoir.

Now came biographies of the Famous and most Humble and most Down-to-Earth Celebrities - Fellow-Aussie Joan Sutherland - La Stupenda of the Opera World but always a Mate to all; New Zealander/Aussie Nancy Wake, French resistance leader, a killer who hated violence and harboured no hatred for the Germans as also did Leonard Cheshire VC.
Russell learned from all of these encounters.
Russell was always a private person, as homosexuals of this era had to be, but his two partners can now speak openly, which they do with honesty and with gratitude for a good friend.

This is just the beginning of a happy, extraordinary and tortured life,
as all good lives should be; and all resolved finally, as all good lives hopefully are.

Russell died in Sydney in 1995 in his early 70's.
He refused treatment for his cancer, choosing a Slow Euthanasia, free of pharmacists. He was over familiar with death and accepted it as a reality of life.

FUTURE READING:
This biography may be difficult to get, but Russell's biographies of Joan Sutherland and Nancy Wake, and his best selling memoir, "The Naked Island" are still in print.All together he wrote 15 novels and 14 non/fiction works.
Russell's great-great aunt was Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of the famous and infamous "Lady Audley's Secret" which is also STILL in print, a Victorian potboiler if ever there was one!!!



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