As a child, a deep competitive impulse took hold of me. I had to win because being less than the best felt catastrophic! I only realised much later how unhealthy it was. When I got serious about writing, this impulse inevitably affected it. I had good reasons to write – I wanted to create worlds and beautiful sentences and, eventually, express the interiority of my life – but I also had one bad reason and that was this unhealthy ambition.
Prime Minister John Curtin’s signature has just sold on EBay for $750. It seems a great pity that the signature has been cut off a letter, detached from its original context. Someone in the provenance chain snipped it off like I used to take the stamps from envelopes. Autograph collectors’ priorities differ from archivists. I’ve seen presidential letters cut up into separate keywords.
The listing named the late collector who had been the previous owner and I realised that, strangely, he had also collected my autograph. He was a lawyer with a particular interest in Victoria Cross winners and he asked me to give a lecture to an RSL group on Hugo Throssell VC, Katharine Prichard’s husband. The collector was in poor health and had to discharge himself from hospital – probably against medical advice – to attend, the biggest effort anyone will ever make to hear me speak. Six months later, he called me several times, rather urgently needing me to come sign a copy of my book. I turned up at his townhouse in the dark. There were piles of good books on the floor, mementos and treasures everywhere. He fell over and I helped him back up, and I worried how he went the rest of the time. He had written out exactly what he wanted me to write in the book, commemorating his role in the lecture I’d given. I bristled slightly at being told what to write, but I did it because it was an intriguing situation, belonging thematically in a novel I once wrote. That was the last time I saw the collector. I will keep an eye out for my autographed book, selling for considerably less than $750.
In year 12 I had a dream in which I fell into a coma and woke years later, emaciated and fragile. My peers had left me behind and my good grades now meant nothing. The world went on and I was alive but no longer fully part of it.
In my dramatic moments, it now feels like a premonition of my middle age and the condition that has taken away a lot of my life in a quiet and invisible way the last few years.
It turns out I can’t leave behind Katharine Susannah Prichard and her world. I am honoured to have contributed an essay about Prichard’s husband, Hugo Throssell, to Challenging Anzac: Stories That Don’t Fit the Legend. The book, edited by Mia Martin Hobbs, Carolyn Holbrook and Joan Beaumont, was published this month by NewSouth in time for Anzac Day.
In my day job, I helped develop “John Curtin’s Vision”, an online credential on the life and prime-ministership of Curtin University’s namesake. One of the highlights was appearing in some videos using objects he owned to tell the story of his life – his cut-throat razors, engraved pocket watch, a file copy of the Westralian Worker marked up in blue pencil.
The challenge for me was thinking about John Curtin’s life and career in terms of relevance for today. (And, of course, I’m reflecting as always with my personal views as a biographer, not those of my employer.) I believe biography and history should exist for their own sake, as stories of our past. But our culture expects to apply lessons and maybe it’s a helpful process to make some comparisons to the present day. It’s easy enough when it comes to Curtin: he offers some lessons I endorse. We should look for unlikely leaders like him who are focused on the greater good rather than personal ambition. A cultivated mind and fine oratory are virtues we should celebrate in leaders. Plus the virtue of persistence – he lost four elections for a parliamentary seat but he never gave up and he never moved to a safe seat, even though it would have been the easy thing to do. Then there’s a possible lesson I’m ambivalent about, because it can be used to justify all sorts of things: the virtue of compromise. That needs its own blog post, once I’ve completed the prime ministerial years in my biographical research. These thoughts are only partially reflected in the course itself, but they are what comes to mind as I think about trying to learn from Curtin.
The course includes readings, activities and lectures and will take as long or as little time as you wish to give it. If you’re interested, you can enrol for free here.
Katharine Susannah Prichard turned 142 yesterday. It’s her annual birthday celebration at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre tomorrow, 6 December 2025, from 3pm to 6pm. I’ll be conducting a tour at about 4:45pm. Free tickets here.
If you’re looking for a Christmas present for someone into Australian literature or history, my biography of KSP, The Red Witch, is available at a ridiculously low price online from Readings at the moment. Get your copy here.
Photograph taken by John Gilchrist. Courtesy of SLWA.
What a treasure Quarterly Essay is. Great Australian essayists engaging with politics and culture in style. The 100th quarterly essay is by Sean Kelly, who wrote my favourite book about Australian politics, The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison. In this new book, The Good Fight: What does Labor stand for? he is engaging with an ally, Anthony Albanese, and I can imagine the anguish as an insider turned freelance writer must say the hard things. As always, Kelly brings a literary sensibility, starting with Kafka and ending with Ferrante.
Hector Harrison (1902-1978) was a prominent Presbyterian minister who led St Andrew’s Church in Canberra from 1940 until his death. He was friendly with Prime Minister John Curtin and Fred Whitlam, father of Gough Whitlam, who was a member of his congregation. There’s a striking scene from Harrison’s oral history at the National Library recounted in Dr Margaret McLeod’s new biography: Harrison is giving Whitlam senior a lift home from the 4th July celebrations at the American Embassy in 1945 and Whitlam reveals that the editor of the Canberra Times had just told him John Curtin wouldn’t last the night. Harrison walked across the paddocks to the Lodge and was, eventually, admitted to see Curtin, hours before his death. At Curtin’s request, Harrison conducted the funeral.
I’m honoured my family is the dedicatee of Tracy Ryan’s new novel, The War Within Me, published by Transit Lounge. It’s the second volume of the Queens of Navarre trilogy, each book told through the eyes of a successive 16th-century queen. This one is told by Jeanne d’Albret (1528-1572), fictionalising events as they happen from her teen years to the edge of her premature death, all against the backdrop of the French Wars of Religion.
I’ve found myself muted for three years now, unable to say as much as I used to. It’s partly because of my health and partly because of the great silence around the secret pandemic: I feel like I’m living in a different reality to most people. The visible sign of this is the n95 mask I wear when I’m indoors in public – my protection and my stigma.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 