Reviewed by Anita Heiss

Audrey Evans was an inspiration in her life and her death. Her memoirs portray the human spirit at its best, and the human experience at its worst. Growing up in the 1930s and 1940s in Queensland, Audrey in the first two decades of her life, had physically survived being sexually assaulted by strangers, employers and her father. She’d witnessed the violent tirades and oppressive views of her cruel, racist father against her mother. She went out to work at eleven. Become a runaway at thirteen, and had panic attacks at fourteen that lead to her being depressed and sedated in a psychiatric ward. By sixteen she was pregnant and by seventeen was forced to become a sex worker as the family lived within extreme poverty and she had a son, Peter, to raise. In and out of mental institutions, Audrey had shock treatment and suffered nightmares for years, before being forced to perform an abortion on herself. Then her mother Winnifred, to whom she was most loyal, died when Audrey was 19. The next decade isn’t much better.

In Many Lifetimes the reader is taken on a disturbing chronological journey with Audrey, a self-defined ‘Aboriginal hybrid’ - of two cultures and two colours – as she attempts suicide and desperately seeks, but never receives the love and support of her siblings. Pages are turned in the hope of something positive happening for Audrey. Thankfully, she meets David and they share twenty-seven loving years together, raising children they have been given.

Audrey’s experiences will haunt you as they did her, and some of her recollections may force you, as they did this reader, to turn away from the page in sheer agony and sadness at what this woman had to do to survive. Leah Purcell says, ‘Not even the greatest of writers could dream up Audrey’s life,’ and it’s true. And no one would want to. I couldn’t help reading each page wishing that it was a work of fiction, and not the real life experiences of a young girl, forced to grow up in one hideous environment after the next. The only place Audrey talks about finding peace before she was 20 was in the Chareville Cemetery as a child.

Against all odds growing up, Audrey graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and a Graduate Diploma of Adult and Vocational Education from Griffith University in her late 50s, going on to be a teacher of English, History and Aboriginal Cultural Studies with the Queensland Education Department and a lecturer at the Australian Catholic University. Many Lifetimes formed part of a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland, and the family committed themselves at her funeral in 2000 to ensuring her story would one day be published.

Audrey Evans’ attention to detail and incredible sense of memory recall makes this work a compelling read, and there needs to be more books published liked Many Lifetimes to help us understand the human spirit, ourselves and the complex lives of the poor, of Aboriginal people generally, and indeed how disproportionately lucky most of us are today.



Audrey Evans will be remembered as an Australian Aboriginal Elder of the Gunggari/Kunji tribal language group, and for inspiring a number of other Aboriginal students to achieve.

Reviewed by Anita Heiss

http://www.gadigal.org.au/Arts/Many%20Lifetimes;%20A%20Memoir.aspx?Id=49