In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, one of Australia’s most celebrated literary figures, Robert Dessaix chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while crafting Chameleon: A Memoir of Art, Travel, Ideas and Love, which was shortlisted for the 2026 National Biography Award.
Robert Dessaix’s testament to a wonderful life is funny, incisive and literary.
His voice is completely distinctive and utterly compelling.
Shortlisted: 2026 National Biography Award
‘I rattle on exactly as I’d talk
With any body in a ride or walk.
Lord Bryon, Don Juan
‘Reflecting on life at 80, Robert Dessaix likens his head to “an ants’ nest, alive with tiny scurrying thoughts”. Memoir is his chosen medium to explore life’s complexities— “the perfect genre for playing in the gap between what everyone has taken you to be and who you in reality are”. In his intimate, chatty style, Dessaix addresses his naive young self as Thomas Robert Jones (his adoptive name) and argues by text with his acerbic friend Niall, who may well be his alter ego.
‘With apparent spontaneity, Dessaix treats his readers to a dazzling display of erudition, covering literature, art and the modern wonders of YouTube, all suffused with his sly wit as he ponders his life (‘this shadow play about being a man’). He describes the erotic awakening of the prudish Thomas among the steamy kasbahs of Morocco and links 1960s censorship with the over-policing of identity today, rejecting common terms to describe his sexuality and settling on being ‘a man who likes men’. Words are what incite his passion and he is a wordsmith nonpareil. This is vintage Dessaix. Savour it.’
Judges: 2026 National Biography Award
In Chameleon, Robert Dessaix cartwheels from story to story across an identity in flux. Candid, wise, witty and idiosyncratic, it captures his restless, shape-shifting life and voice. It’s also a conversation about art, pleasure, sexuality, ageing and what it means to look back on a life without trying to tidy it up. Chameleon explores how Robert’s searching mind takes constant detours to discover what makes life good, a place of wisdom and love. It is a virtuoso meditation on what it means to embody an authentic self.
First, Find Your Voice
Robert Dessaix has spent a lifetime ‘blending’, as he puts it, into whatever the reigning doctrines of the era demanded, while something underneath stayed stubbornly, elusively himself. Chameleon is the book that finally admits this out loud, and it does so with the mischief of Byron, whom Robert quotes in the epigraph. He insists his memoir’s defining demand is finding a voice that rattles on like a companion on a walk, not a lecture, but someone to wiggle his eyebrows at.
Readers aren’t interested in me. My job is to jolt their memory.
Robert chose Chameleon as his memoir’s title because a chameleon changes colour while staying essentially the same underneath, blending into whatever cultural or intellectual climate surrounded him at the time.
What makes Robert Dessaix’s voice so unmistakable is his refusal to distinguish fact from truth. He rearranges the actual sequence of his own life, India before hospital, not after, because the truth, he insists, sits elsewhere than the timeline. ‘I want to seduce the reader with a work of art’, he says, and a beautiful life, une belle vie, matters more to him than accuracy.
‘Sweet Jesus, this is beautiful.’
David Marr
Robert deliberately avoids the tidy resolution many memoirists reach for, choosing instead to honour mess and contradiction. He ends Chameleon with a chapter titled, ‘The Green Room’, which insists that art and a life are never truly finished. His memoir is less a life story than an extended, candid conversation with one’s own vanished selves.
Praise for Chameleon
‘…As thrilling and thoughtful as anything you’ll get from younger, hungrier writers.’
Tim Byrne (Best Australian Books of 2025)
Guardian
‘Wise, witty, and sumptuously idiosyncratic, Robert Dessaix is a writer for all seasons.’ Andrea Goldsmith
‘In this flinty yet fond conversation with his long-ago self, Robert Dessaix explores the myriad contradictions that make us fully human.
His words, and his singular wisdom, shimmer.’
Ailsa Piper
‘A dazzlingly beautiful mix of sex, travel and intimacy.’
Guardian
Photo Credit: © W. H. Chong, 2024
Robert Dessaix’s best-known books are his autobiography A Mother’s Disgrace, his novels Night Letters and Corfu, and the travel memoir Twilight of Love, reflecting on the life of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. These books have all appeared in translation in a number of languages. His most recent publications include What Days Are For (a meditation on what makes for a good life, even when death is near), The Time of Our Lives (focussing on ageing well) and Chameleon, an older man’s quirky dialogue with his younger self. From 1985 to 1994 he presented the weekly Books and Writing program on ABC Radio National. In 2022, he received the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. He lives in Hobart, Tasmania.