26 Friday Jun 2015
Posted in book review
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In this superb novel, everyone’s pain suddenly becomes illuminated and now to encounter people is to encounter them lit up where they hurt. Continue reading
12 Friday Jun 2015
Posted in link
As you may know, I have a separate biography blog, A Biographer in Perth, concerned with the life of Katharine Susannah Prichard and the art of biography, topics slightly more specialised than this present blog, which aims at a more general audience. But some topics fall between the stools, like perhaps Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career. You can read some stray thoughts on it from me, which add up to a partial review; and also a post on its connections with Katharine Susannah Prichard. There’s also a link on the other blog so you can follow it by email.
12 Friday Jun 2015
Katharine Susannah Prichard was seventeen in 1901 when My Brilliant Career was published, the same age as the main character, Sybylla. In a radio broadcast paying tribute to Franklin in 1944, Prichard remembered, “What a sensation it created! Most of the well known writers at that time were old, and here was a girl writing with vigour and realism which amazed everybody.” Continue reading
12 Friday Jun 2015
I’ve just finished reading Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901), a novel still fresh and intriguing 114 years later. It covers a few years in the life of Sybylla, a determined young woman trying to break free of the restraints of poverty and the expectations of marriage in rural New South Wales during the drought of the 1890s . Jill Roe writes, “It was undoubtedly the literary event of 1901, the only significant Australian novel in the year of Federation; and by now it is more or less recognised that in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, feminism and nationalism went together as radical forces.” (Stella Miles Franklin, epub edn, 133) Continue reading
07 Sunday Jun 2015
Posted in book review
Crow’s Breath is John Kinsella’s fine new collection of twenty-seven short, intense stories. It’s centred around the wheatbelt of Western Australia, with forays west to Fremantle, south to Pemberton and north to Carnavon. In about the middle, a character travels to London in “Statue” and the stories after this move with expatriates to Ireland and the USA as well. A common thread is the exploration of Australianness, the different ways of Australians living in this country and out of it. Kinsella shows an ability to inhabit a rich diversity of Australian characters. Continue reading
04 Thursday Jun 2015
Posted in archives and sources
The great diaries of Samuel Pepys weren’t discovered until a couple of centuries after his death. He expected them to be read one day, or at least his biographer Claire Tomalin thinks so. But they could have easily not been found and never been read. Imagine the diarist carefully recording their life, assuming they’ve preserved their days, only for them to be so terribly mistaken? The actual fate of their diaries is not the cherishment of future generations, but the moth or the flame. Continue reading
03 Wednesday Jun 2015
Posted in music
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My song of the moment is Bill Callahan’s “Small Plane”, a singer new to me. It sounds like a song Leonard Cohen might have recorded between Songs from a Room and Songs of Love and Hate if he had a gentler heart. I was playing it a lot last week in the midst of revising my novel. It’s a strange song, keeping quite strictly to its subject matter, the memories of flying a small plane with a lover or perhaps a parent. “You used to take me up; I watched and learned how to fly.” It reads as an extended metaphor which never fully declares itself, and thus stays elusive and richer. Continue reading
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 