The Continual Inner Search. Margaret Winn

      Introduction

      I have wanted to write about Roy Winn’s life for many years. Roy was my grandfather and very close to my father Dick, his elder son, although I did not know him well. I was only 11 when he died.

      Roy was Australia’s first full-time practising psychoanalyst, a career born out of his personal experiences during the First World War. He spent a lifetime exploring the mind, trying to understand himself and others.

My father thought very highly of him, believing Roy to be an original thinker and a man of integrity who lived his own life according to his own code, seemingly unswayed by the prevailing moral climate or conventional social niceties. In Roy’s own writings, he reveals himself as witty and self-mocking, insightful and inventive. His colleagues in psychoanalysis saw him as kindly and tolerant, a man of great personal charm and fine character who had a ready smile for the foibles of human nature and acute insight into unconscious mental processes.1 He was said to have had a keen sense of humour.2

      And yet I never felt entirely comfortable with Roy. I found him reserved and disengaged, uninterested in getting to know me. He did not seem to bother with idle chitchat and only spoke if he considered there was something worthwhile to say, although if you asked him a question he was pleased to answer. He was a chain-smoker, lighting a fresh cigarette from his previous one, which left him with yellow nicotine stains that, as a child, I found repellent. His wooden leg both fascinated and embarrassed me.

      Nevertheless, even then, I knew him to be something special, someone to be remembered.

      My mother Helen’s side of the family included many larger than life characters who were actively remembered. Helen was the grand-daughter of Sir Henry Parkes, the Father of Federation, and the daughter of Cobden Parkes, the Government Architect. Her house was full of Parkes’ heirlooms and memorabilia. She was connected to the wider Parkes clan and told Parkes’ family stories until we knew them by heart. In her sitting-room was an enormous marble bust with an imposing bosom and imperious gaze. It was of Eleanor, Sir Henry’s second wife. In the same way that Eleanor dominated that sitting room, so the Parkes family dominated the historical record of our family. We knew very little about the Winn side of my family and I liked the idea of redressing the balance.

      There are many biographical details about Roy in various psychoanalytical histories and First World War books but I thought his descendants deserved a fuller picture. All those who knew Roy well – his brothers, two wives, Nanny, children and friends – are now dead, but I had videotaped interviews of my father Dick, my uncle and aunt Murray and Evelyne Winn, and their first cousin Janet Winn, and I expected that these tapes would provide a good picture of what Roy was really like and how he thought, rather than just what he did.

      Despite long sessions over a number of days and notwithstanding their ability to recall specific incidents and activities, these interviews, frustratingly, provided little insight into his character, thinking or motivations. This should not have surprised me: most of the Winns I have known have tilted towards science and technology rather than the humanities, the rational rather than the emotional, the concrete rather than the speculative. Roy’s family could easily remember Winn telephone numbers and car registration plates, but could not so easily reflect on the nuances of Roy’s personality.

      I turned to Roy’s two small diaries of the war and immediate post-war years, but there is not a lot to be learned from them except chronology and the scope of his activity. Roy’s Gallipoli photograph album, as well as his poems, nonsense verse and medical musings provide texture but the big hole in all the available material was in understanding his psyche. Given his work as a pioneering doctor of the mind in Australia, it was a hole I felt I needed to fill.

      A handwritten document titled Men May Rise, which was found in Roy’s papers after his death, proved to be a treasure trove. It is an undated, unpublished novel written under the pseudonym John Truscott. All three of Roy’s children considered the novel to be largely autobiographical. My uncle Murray had typed copies made for family members in the late 1990s, which was fortunate, as the original manuscript has subsequently disappeared.

      Besides information about Roy’s involvement in the war, Men May Rise provided insights into Roy’s thoughts and feelings about this momentous time in his life – and in world history. It tells the story of a young man, Tas Selton, who leaves Australia with the Australian Army Medical Corps and is posted to Gallipoli in 1915. The young Tas had originally intended to become a medical missionary but, as he progressed through medical school, he came to doubt his suitability for that particular calling. The novel focuses on Tas’s war service and courtship, the severe depression and jealousy that

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