![Subtle Moments, by Bruce Grant.](/web/20170515170059im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/u/t/n/6/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gvuu0s.png/1493544420458.jpg)
MEMOIR
Subtle Moments: Scenes on a Life's Journey
Bruce Grant
Monash University Publishing, $34.95
When I was young and besotted with movies, Bruce Grant, then writing for The Age, was the best film critic in Australia. While wishing he had never stopped, one can only be grateful for what else he went on to achieve – and this seems enough for several lifetimes.
The title of his memoir is taken from Albert Camus who wrote of "that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life ... contemplat[ing] that series of unrelated actions which become his fate". But Grant's Subtle Moments offers not only moments in his own life but, as well, course-changing moments in the life of Australia over the last century – and, indeed, changes in the balances and imbalances in world affairs at large. This may sound like big claims but Grant's insight and eloquence justify them.
He evokes his boyhood in rural Western Australia, with its strong sense of family and community values that would stay with him as he embraced the wider world. After military service, he returned to a late education at the University of Melbourne, chosen because its Arts course could combine with a diploma course in journalism. The vivid summoning-up of the immediate post-war world is achieved with the resonant detail that also characterises his first journeys overseas.
As for many of the period, England (as Age correspondent) was his first overseas goal. Such disparate moments as that after the London premiere of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, "leaning backwards and sideways to hear what the issuing audience was saying", or, on other levels of importance, the Suez crisis and the uprising in Hungary, often acquire a newsreel's immediacy. Subsequent samplings of the great world as foreign correspondent – Asia, to which he would often return in other capacities, and the US, where he'd already had a year at Harvard – are called up with a blend of sensuous exactness and social reflectiveness.
Matters of personal and (inter)national consequence make equal claims on the reader's absorbed attention. The three marriages and the offspring deriving from the first two are warmly and tactfully dealt with, as are the many friendships of a long life. And in this long life, the multiplicity of roles is astonishing: film and theatre critic, journalist, public intellectual, High Commissioner to India (1973-76), consultant to Gareth Evans, federal Minister for Foreign Affairs, member of innumerable councils and boards of cultural institutions, are but some of them.
With all this going on, he also managed to write several novels as well as non-fiction works with such provocative titles as A Furious Hunger: America in the 21st Century and The Australian Dilemma.
This life threads its way through a wonderfully realised tableau of the wider Australia. With an even-handedness not always associated with socio-political commentators, he ponders the ways in which the country gradually loosened its imperial ties, looked to the US for ongoing support in, say, matters of defence, paid more heed to its proximity to its Asian neighbours, perhaps finally casting itself in the role of a "middle power". He asks questions as primal as "What is State?" and urges Australia to take a proactive stance in the region.
Grant's has been a life of public service, not just in the political matters in which he has held advisory and consultancy offices, but also in the cultural scene of the nation. Subtle Moments is a heartfelt reflection on life and what makes it worth living.
Brian McFarlane is an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University of Technology.