Introduction

For some years now, retired and following the passing of my soulmate, companion and boundless life spirit, my wife, my lover, Julie, for over 50 years, and then me – dreadfully alone – having moved from Tasmania, where we had gone to live in retirement, to the New South Wales Hunter Valley, with all the accompanying memories of my long life with Julie, I volunteered to run a course for the Singleton Branch of U3A on the topic of the writing of memoirs. Within days, enrolments for it had flled many-fold. It appeared that there was a healthy food of people – mostly retired folk – interested in writing their memoirs. But there were also younger people, Year 12 students undertaking High School Certifcate (HSC) English Extension course, seeking to make a specialist study of the memoir genre.

In her 2016 publication, Mary Karr captures this rising interest in the writing of our memoirs and the spirit of enquiry into an individual's past in her New York Times bestseller, The art of the memoir, with this paragraph from the frst page of her opening chapter: ‘But there are always memories you dig for: you start with a clear fx on a tiny instant, and pick at every knot until a thin thread comes undone that you can follow back through the mind's labyrinth to other places.’

This reading occurred as I was attempting to make sense out of my troubled childhood and an adolescence, which, in its cultural sense, had been denied me.

February 2024: Hamilton South, Newcastle, New South Wales

I stared into his face as I had done many times before over the past decades. Now, our conversation was reaching into our recent research: his conducted under the auspices of the University of Newcastle – he an emeritus professor and me an adjunct, senior research fellow at Charles Sturt University, folks who just don't know when to call it all a day and hang up their research notes. In the status-conscious realm of academia, there was a world of diference between the roles of emeritus professor and an adjunct senior research fellow […] but maybe in that regard with John and me there always had been, at least back to sometime late in 1960 when I frst met him during a time in my life that now seems like that it all occurred in another world.

Long an octogenarian, his face was a topographical map of the Snowy Mountains, his ears and nose bearing the hallmarks of having been selfessly and unsparingly committed to too many rugby scrums. His blue eyes sparkled and marked his Scandinavian ancestry, his hair once wavy and thick, now greying and thinning. With his goatee beard and his practised professorial mannerisms, he was an archetypal emeritus professor. He maintained an Orson Welles-type appearance and sense of the dramatic, complementing his professorial mannerisms and voice.

The purpose of this exegesis has been to demonstrate the veracity of my following memoirs in respect to the stated major theme of personal struggle and the four related subthemes:

• • social class and government-provided school education;

• • the efect of adolescent sexual abuse on an individual's life chances;

• • the lifelong disadvantages and benefts of correspondence/distance education; and

• • untangling the insidious long tentacles of racism.

Veracity in the choice of these subthemes has been established through the connection of this major theme and the four related themes by reference to other literary forms such as novels and to the fndings of research literature, additionally what authors of memoirist advice literature are advocating.

First, however, this exegesis sought to uncover the diferences between memoirs and autobiographies, the former being a vignette of an individual's life – at the same time, about something much bigger than information about oneself. Hence, in the case of the author's memoirs preceding this exegesis is the aptness of the genre in explicating the aforementioned major theme and its four subthemes.

This exegesis then revealed the multiple number – and growing – of sub-genres of the memoir genre, not least is the coming-of-age memoir, which has a special appeal for education undergraduates, postgraduates and teachers participating in professional development programmes.

Signifcantly, inter alia, this exegesis has revealed further multiple reasons why we might write our memoirs. Little wonder that the genre has become so popular, least of all in a pedagogical setting for both school and college students as well as their teachers.

While leading my brother with her other hand, I swear I can remember my mother carrying me from our house at 90 Dart Street to Oberon's main street – Oberon Street – to witness the end of the Pacifc phase of World War II – V-J Day. She carried me and led by hand my brother, Ray, 15 months older than me, along what's now known as Tally's Lane to Oberon Street and the celebrations. But memories can be feeting and deceptive things, so I can't be sure. Still, the memories of that day seem to have been with me as long as I can remember.

I had been born on 24 April 1944 in Nurse Fox's Nursing Home in North Street, a building which continues to stand. Large numbers of Oberonites continue to identify themselves as Nurse Fox's children, including the renowned Tasmanian-based environmental activist, Dr Bob Brown, of whom these pages will later tell more.

Now, with these V-J Day celebrations marking the end of some of the darkest years of Australian history, these momentous times were taking place on 3 or 4 September 1945, with the Pacifc Phase of the war ending on 2 September. Of course, I only would have been 16 months old, and consequently I may only be recalling something my mother had described to me. Memories are such unstable things. But I strongly believe I can remember seeing the lavish displays of the multi-coloured bunting on the few electric light poles then standing in Oberon Street. Still, they are the quirks and vagaries of memories.

For a book that attempts to explain how to understand visuals in life sciences, it seems prudent to first explain what we mean by “visual,” even if it may seem quite a common word.

In everyday conversation, “visual” is often used as an adjective and means “relating to seeing or sight,” as in “visual impression” or “visual effect.” In the context of this book, “visual” is used similarly as an adjective, but in addition, and more often, it is used as a noun. As a noun, it refers to the variety of images used in life science communication. For example, photographs are a type of visual commonly used in life science communication, and so are drawings.

Writing this book has been a pleasure. The scholarly significance of it aside, I just enjoy visuals. I enjoy looking at them, thinking about them, and talking about them. And that’s not limited to my research interest in science visuals either. I like all of them.

I delight, for example, in IKEA’s visual-only assembly instructions (I’m fully aware that some people don’t). For me, I look at them, I look back at the mess lying on the floor, I see the panels I need, the screws I need, I put them together step by step, just as the visuals show. Everything feels easy, efficient, and intuitive. Just as much, I hate it when I stumble upon a bad set of visual instructions. Examples of those are plentiful. The most recent memory pertains to putting up the bagger kit on our Greenworks mower. Great, great mower really (and great bagger, too), but the instructions? Not so much. The photographs are grainy, dark, and small, so I struggled to see what’s on them and to identify the parts of importance. The angle of the photographs wasn’t quite right, so I really struggled to see what I’m supposed to do with the parts. It took a lot of trial and error, a lot of straining, and, I’m not proud to say, a fair amount of swearing.

Illustrations are a visual staple in life science communication. Despite being commonplace, they are in many ways a blackbox. They mask the creative – and scientific – decisions that go into making them. They present an end product that says, as it were, “this is how you look through life to its essence.” The use of precise lines and explicit shapes helps to convey this scientific authority. In contemporary illustrations, pseudo-details such as colors and dimensions further prove that “this is what life looks like.”

Micrographs, like the little (pun intended) cousin of photographs, are considered by some as an objective portrayal of nature. Why, they are photographs of the microscopic world invisible to the naked human eye. As such, what you see is what you get, and what you get is nature unveiled.

Particularly because the microscopic world is invisible to us in everyday life, we find it even more urgent to behold that world. We assume that if and when we see, we will automatically understand. If and when we observe microorganisms in their smallest components, we will be able to “get” them and conquer them.

Contemporary life sciences are big data sciences. The human genome, for example, contains about three billion DNA base pairs and an estimated 20,000 protein-coding genes. Public health data, as another example, are endlessly enormous and encompass electronic medical records, health monitoring data, environmental data, and more. When it comes to analyzing and presenting these big data, interactive online visuals – maps, graphs, three-dimensional models, even computer games – have inherent advantages. They are dynamic and easily updated. They support user interaction and allow users to create displays that make sense to them. Being “hands-on” also makes these visual displays more interesting. As computer visualization technologies continue to advance, we are guaranteed to see faster, more fluid, more ingenious interactive displays.

As we have seen throughout this book, standalone visuals like photographs and illustrations are promising ways to communicate science to the public – and they carry their fair share of misconceptions and complications. These promises – as well as challenges – are multiplied in infographics.

The word “infographic” comes from the phrase “information graphic.” Originally, the term referred to the production of graphics for print media such as newspapers and magazines. Today it refers to a unique multimodal genre that combines data visualizations (i.e., graphs such as lines, pies, bars, and pictographs), illustrations (such as icons and drawings), photographs, and small amounts of text. When designed for online use, infographics can also have interactive components. For example, putting the mouse cursor somewhere on the infographic may reveal a small pop-up window with additional information. Some infographics are also animated: bars in a bar chart may grow, colors may change, or characters may move. This is often achieved by using animated GIF files that display a sequence of static images in a repeating loop, which creates the illusion of motion.