Stillways: A Memoir by Steve Bisley

JUDGES' COMMENTS

Steve Bisley’s Stillways remembers a childhood, his own, lived with his not abnormally dysfunctional family on a 15 acre farm near Lake Munmorah near Wyong, New South Wales. Bisley is well known as an actor, but this book is the farthest thing imaginable from a celebrity memoir. Young Bisley comes across as the father of the man: knockabout, awkward, tough, tender. But he could be almost anyone, and his could be almost anyone’s country childhood. It is as an instance – one particular life – that Bisley writes his own beginnings. He writes his young self almost as if it were not his own: with fascination and compassion and detachment.

What’s remarkable about this memoir is not the childhood – notwithstanding that it belongs to a man now famous, a face now familiar; notwithstanding his father’s drunkenness and violence, his mother’s remarkable forbearance and the resilience and resistance of Bisley, his sister and brother – but the telling. Bisley’s prose is taut and lyrical. He evokes his childhood place with delicacy, avoiding banality and cliché: a lake and the sea, ‘the soaking wind’ and ‘the paddock of sticks’. Bisley’s voice is sad and forgiving; quiet but passionate. He manages beautifully the memoirist’s trick of channeling but standing back from his own life: he has a good line back to the delight and confusion of a boy from a troubled home, growing into himself and into the man he will become.