There are not that many biographers’ blogs in the world, and I’ve been glad to come across two from Australia, both with interesting insights into the research process and the discipline of biography.

Adventures in Biography follows Michelle Scott Tucker as she writes a biography of Elizabeth Macarthur – in her spare time. Earlier this year, she had a chance to visit Elizabeth’s birth place and experience that strange sense of walking in the footsteps of your subject. There’s some great posts discussing books about biography and biographies themselves; I discovered today that “Bombay Anna” (fictionalised as the governess in The King and I) actually lived in Perth for a time.

The Resident Judge of Port Phillip follows PhD student Janine Rizzetti as she researches Justice John Walpole Willis through the nineteenth century from Melbourne to Upper Canada to British Guiana. I’ve had the uncanny sense of reading in Janine’s footsteps several times, as I check out what other people are writing about a book I’m reading, only to discover Resident Judge to be one of the top Google results. Her blog offers some great news and views on developments and conferences in the discipline of history, too. (I’m working out of English, yet biography is always in the overlap between the two disciplines.)

I have started a blogroll of links to these and other similar blogs on the sidebar.