Recognition and Autobiography

It was less like seeing than being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In February 1974, Robert Rose, a twenty-two year old Australian Rules league footballer and Victorian state cricketer, was involved in a car accident that left him quadriplegic for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. The tragedy received extensive press coverage and struck a chord with many in and beyond the Melbourne sporting community. Robert was a brilliant all-round athlete with an impeccable sporting pedigree. He was the latest of the celebrated Rose family of the Collingwood Football Club —the most famous sporting club in Australia; a bastion of working class pride located close to the center of Melbourne. Robert's father, Bob, had been one of the greatest ever players for the club and had gone on to coach it. Four of Bob's brothers had also played for the Collingwood 'Magpies'. Later in his career, Bob coached Footscray, another Melbourne working class club. At the time of the accident, Robert too had joined Footscray, was playing state cricket, and might have gone on to bat for Australia. His best-remembered cricketing feat was to put Dennis Lillee, perhaps the finest of all Australian fast bowlers, to the sword at Melbourne's coliseum of sport, the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Robert's younger brother, Peter, witnessed the assault on the great fast bowler. Sitting in the top tier of the Northern Stand reading Norman Mailer's autobiography, Peter's attention is drawn to the "microscopic drama" (21) unfolding below. Proud as always of his brother's sporting prowess, he forgets about Mailer and becomes part of the rapturous crowd.

Rose Boys (2001) is Peter's account of his brother's life and death. The book is about their relationship as brothers, about what life is like for the families and friends of catastrophic spinal injury victims. It is also about Peter himself: about the adolescent who had to look up from Mailer to see his brother hooking Lillee; the "Rose boy" who, far from playing for Collingwood, was to become an accomplished poet, a gay man, and now a fine practitioner of a form of life-writing that combines biography, autobiography, autopathography (Couser 1997), disability narrative, eulogy, ethical reflection, and social history —an inquiry into Australian myths, ideologies, styles of masculinity, and cultural locales.

In writing the book Peter sets out to "reanimate" Robert; "to examine his achievement, what he symbolized, what he gave and what he withheld, what he divulged and what he never said, as a son, as a brother, as a husband, as a mate, above all as a tragic victim of that 'second or two in time'" (27). Perhaps no book by or about Australian athletes has been written at such a remove as Rose Boys from the tired and uninquiring protocols of Australian sporting hagiography. Though clearly loyal and deeply attached to his family, Peter, "a devotee of Henry James's 'temple of analysis'" (12), concedes that he must "violate old privacies" (12), disclose frailties and failings, in order to capture what is most important about this sporting life —not the deeds enshrined in family scrap books ("those bibles of scrap, collages of self-delight," 3), but the moral, psychological, even spiritual, quality of the life after the accident. And of the other lives that were touched by it. Here, as elsewhere, the book is eloquent, profoundly moving, deep-seeing into the mysteries of human suffering, adaptation, and connectedness.

Rose Boys is also a self-proclaimed narrative of recognition.¹ The book begins with a description of a disturbing, Dantesque dream Peter has four years after Robert's accident. In the dream, the alarmed Peter sees a burning library. A blond boy who "is clearly the oracle because of his uncanny vision" (ii), appears with two companions at a nearby apartment window, but the boy is neither named nor quite recognized:

He is slender and vivid and blond as an angel. His two companions stare at him open-mouthed. I almost recognise this boy, but he is...