03 Wed 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 Fri 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 Fri 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!
04 Fri Jul 2025
Posted in biographical method, John Curtin
Prime Minister John Curtin died 80 years ago on 5 July 1945 in an upstairs bedroom at the Lodge. He’d been taken up to the bedroom by stretcher on 22 May after leaving a small private hospital in Canberra. He never came back down those stairs. He died in his sleep at 4am with a nurse named Marjorie Sirl by his side. His wife Elsie was in an adjoining room, unable to sleep.
Or was she? The newspaper accounts of the time seem to have all used the same press release (I haven’t been able to find it in the archives though) which stated Elsie was also by his side when he died. But Elsie wrote a short memoir of Curtin as a series of articles published in Perth’s Daily News in 1950 and she states that the nurse came to her room to tell her he was dead. I trust her own account, five years after the event, over the reporting at the time which would not have come directly from her or Sirl. It’s a small detail but it dramatically changes the picture of Curtin’s last moment.
I’ve been writing my account of Curtin’s last months and death in my biography. Not because I’ve nearly finished – far from it – but I was working on an exhibition on this theme at work and so it seemed a good time to immerse myself in this period at home in my research.
Continue reading22 Sun 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 Sat 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.’
Continue reading10 Tue Jun 2025
Posted in books, Katharine Susannah Prichard
I’m only missing a few Katharine Susannah Prichard books from my collection and so these days filling in a gap is rare – and often expensive. I wasn’t expecting to come across a copy of Clovelly Verses, especially not at a price I could stretch to. But there it was in my Ebay alerts for $200.
Clovelly Verses was Katharine’s first book, a tiny pamphlet of conventional nature poems privately printed in 1913 while she was living in London. ‘Let me not forget / Each tiny floweret / Which in the hedgerow grows’. It was an undistinguished debut, if it could be considered that, but it pleased the dedicatee: her mother.
Katharine would hand copies out to friends and people she met. She gave one to the playboy socialist, Guido Baracchi, when she met him on the boat from Columbo to Australia in the last days of 1915. He thought it was brilliant and nearly 60 years later, after Katharine’s death, he told her son he would pay anything for a copy; his had been borrowed and not returned.
I’m not sure of this inscription in my copy – I think it will remain a mystery. Katharine has also made a couple of hand corrections to poems.
I’ve seen the book twice before. The first time, at the National Library, an uncatalogued copy was slipped in a file of other items. A secret copy to greet future researchers. The second was in a private library of the son of a friend of the family. It had a lengthy dedication and a letter from Katharine’s son slipped inside it.
A consequence of my acquisition: I’m now checking Ebay far too often, greeted by alerts from a seller eagerly relisting a 1980s KSP paperback each week.
19 Sun Jan 2025
Posted in biographical quests, creative nonfiction, news and events
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I came across Griff Watkins (1930-1969) for the first time in The Fremantle Press Anthology of WA Poetry, edited by John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan. It was a wonderful poem about a Perth heatwave in the 1960s which reminded me of W.H. Auden. The snippet of his biography intrigued me: he drowned himself in the Swan River at Claremont a couple of years after the publication of his debut novel, The Pleasure Bird. After that, I kept on running into him. I found out he’d taught at Collie Senior High School in the South-West, where I’d gone to school in the 1990s. I was visiting Murdoch University’s Special Collections and saw his papers on display. I read his novel and I loved it. I wondered if it would be possible to write a whole book about my quest for Griff, a book about posthumous obscurity, the more typical writerly life of moderate success and many failures, the hauntings of a literary ghost in Perth. But there wasn’t enough material and there wouldn’t be enough interest.
I was thinking of abandoning the project altogether when a PhD student named Mary asked me what I was working on. It turned out her mother, Betty, now in her late 90s, had taught with Griff in Collie. (Coincidentally, Mary’s sister, Pip, was also my mentee in the Four Centres Writing Program.) It was a sign. I interviewed Betty over the phone; she remembered Griff so sharply and insightfully. She had the beautiful photo, above, of Griff on a motorbike from his last visit in Kalgoorlie, and this painting of his (below) he had given her as a wedding present. The scale of my piece shifted: I would tell of my quest for Griff in a single creative non-fiction essay. It was published last year in Westerly 69.1 – my great achievement of 2024!
Some postscripts:
Mary read the piece to Betty, and said she enjoyed it. I was sad to hear of Betty’s death soon after.
I found out after I’d published that my great uncle, John Stanlake, going strong at 94 and an exact contemporary of Griff’s, had known him at Claremont Teachers’ College. I think the connections would keep piling up the longer I spent with Griff.
You can purchase Westerly 69.1 here. And you can read the manuscript version of ‘A Memorial Trail for Griff Watkins’ below.
Continue reading07 Tue Jan 2025
Posted in John Curtin
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05 Sun Jan 2025
Posted in book review, John Curtin, memoirs, politics and current affairs
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When Kim E. Beazley (father of the Labor leader) died in 2007, he left behind the manuscript of a memoir, Father of the House. It was published posthumously by Fremantle Press in 2009, edited by the wonderful Janet Blagg, who also worked on my first book. Beazley emerges in the pages of this memoir as a principled politician, and an uneasy Laborite. He succeeded John Curtin as the federal member for Fremantle after Curtin’s death in 1945; he was only 26 and he was to remain in parliament though the entire winter of opposition for Labor from 1949 to 1972, before finally retiring in 1977.
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Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 