11 Monday May 2026
Posted in autobiographical, life
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.
Continue reading22 Wednesday Apr 2026
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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.
Continue reading05 Friday Dec 2025
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, news and events
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.
02 Tuesday Dec 2025
Posted in book review, John Curtin, politics and current affairs
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.
Continue reading19 Friday Sep 2025
Posted in biographies, book review, John Curtin
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.
Continue reading03 Wednesday Sep 2025
Posted in book review, fiction
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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.
Continue reading29 Friday Aug 2025
Posted in autobiographical, Covid
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.
Continue reading22 Friday Aug 2025
Posted in biographical method, My KSP biography, news and events
My interview with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about The Red Witch and the art of biography has just been released on the Biographers in Conversation podcast here. This podcast series is now in its third season and features Australian and international biographers. I am grateful to Gabriella for her commitment to biographers and her talents in drawing out insights about biographical choices, which extends the work she did in her PhD thesis and her own biography, Breaking Through the Pain Barrier: the extraordinary life of Dr Michael J. Cousins. If you’re interested in biography, I encourage you to subscribe to Biographers in Conversation.
I did a public speaking seminar last year at work, and I didn’t think it had made much difference – but listening to my interview, I eliminated my ‘ums’, which was a big focus of the seminar. Success!
22 Sunday Jun 2025
Posted in fiction, television
Over several months, I rewatched The Mysterious Cities of Gold (1982) with my kids. It was my favourite show when I was nine; it is even stranger than I remember. In a quest for the seven cities of gold, two orphans with matching pendants – one of them apparently an Incan – lead a group of treasure hunters across South America in the sixteenth century. A joint French-Japanese production, it is a 39-episode serial, repetitious and veering between the predictable and the bizarre. In many episodes, the children solve an ancient puzzle or discover an artefact or a clue, only for the temple or other structure to collapse around them. Everything is designed for self-destruction in the path of the Spaniards. They find a solar-powered ship made of gold then, after it burns up, a flying condor made of gold, both of them the creations of an ancient vanished civilisation. But then it grows even stranger two-thirds through the season as they encounter alien humanoids with futuristic technology who are also in the hunt for the cities of gold.
Continue reading21 Saturday Jun 2025
For many weeks, my son asked me each day what I was doing at work, and each day the answer was the same: the exhibition! His anticipation built and I was relieved when I could finally tell him it was installed. (How long can it possibly take to do one exhibition?) Last weekend, I took him and the rest of the family to Curtin University to see it. Curated by the special collections co-ordinator, Sally Laming, and I, ‘1945: The Price of Peace’ commemorates the death of John Curtin and the end of the Second World War. The title is taken from the words of John Curtin in parliament a few months before his death: ‘There is a price the world must pay for peace … I shall not attempt to specify the price, but it does mean less nationalism, less selfishness, less race ambition.’
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Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 