What can McCamish offer in the way of new interpretation? There are few secrets in Moorehead’s life. Within this framework, McCamish also examines his own changing attitudes to Moorehead: as an individual, as a writer, as an Australian living abroad. In this book, McCamish combines an elegantly written account of Moorehead’s life in all its various phases with detailed analysis of the work – from potboiling travel articles to the histories. It’s a handsome looking book with a striking cover photograph: Moorehead close up, enormous eyes, staring out of the past at the reader. The latest biography is Thornton McCamish’s Our Man Elsewhere: In Search of Alan Moorehead (2016). Our Man Elsewhere: In Search of Alan Moorehead, Thornton McCamish. He was then just 56, but he lived on until 1983, surviving Lucy by four years. Restricted in speech, incapable of writing, Moorehead’s career was over by the end of 1966. I say “hybrid” as this work was patched together from disparate drafts by Mooreheads’s wife, Lucy, after the writer was incapacitated after emergency surgery for a blocked artery that went horribly wrong. There was Tom Pocock’s 1990 biography, Ann Moyal’s more recent study (which concentrates on his post war historical work), and of course, Moorehead’s own hybrid autobiography, published in 1970. Many books have been written about Moorehead. His novels were not a great success, but as a writer of popular history incorporating his own love of travel and with a feel for larger than life characters, Moorehead’s non-fiction books won prizes, sold well, and ensured a steady flow of work offers. Moorehead used language well but his stock of terms and expressions was often limited. The war books are better, yet they suffer a little from the inevitability of repetition when years of conflict are being described. The derring-do of the imperial explorers fascinated me – though when I re-read them years later, the locals were often secondary to the colonial narrative. He decided to change shape again and become a proper writer like his idol Hemingway.Īs a child in the 1960s, many of his books were on our family bookshelves.

After 1945, Moorehead, with his Australian accent eliminated, turned his back on lucrative offers from Beaverbrook to stay in his job.

Gallipoli by alan moorehead