03 Monday Apr 2017
Posted in book review, Western Australia
John Kinsella Old Growth 254pp Transit Lounge, 2017. Review copy supplied by publisher.
John Kinsella’s new short story collection, Old Growth, is a wondrously Western Australian book, centred on the wheatbelt with regular trips to Fremantle, the suburbs around Bicton on the south of the river, and up to Geraldton. Yet its pleasures are not just in its sense of place, but its capturing of so many different ordinary lives lived in these places. Continue reading
15 Wednesday Mar 2017
Posted in autobiographical
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The Hobby family ca. 1935 in Meekathara, Joe and Annie (centre) with children Ivy (left) and Ron (right)
Today is the 100th birthday of my late grandfather, the Reverend Ron Hobby. He was a complex man, and since he died in 2006, I’ve spent a long time thinking about him.
Grandad’s parents weren’t married when he was born. A hundred years later, it’s not a big deal, but it was then. He never told his children or grandchildren, but I think he was painfully conscious of it and felt ashamed. I think he felt he had to prove himself to the world. He did this by working relentlessly. He was an Anglican minister and Granny used to tell the story of how the one time he had no engagements in the evening, he checked through the pew sheet to see if there were any meetings he could attend. He ended up heading off to the parish’s Mothers’ Union. Even if the story isn’t literally true, my dad says they didn’t see much of him when they were kids. So many people who have been around WA Anglican circles from the 1950s to the 1990s remember my grandad. He used to say he wasn’t much of a preacher, it was the other parts of ministry he was gifted in. He was energetic, determined, and caring.
Most of the stories about Grandad are too vague or disconnected in my memory. He lived in many places, mainly in Western Australia, and had many phases of life. He trained with the Claremont Football Club colts in the 1930s but gave football up to train for ministry. He worked as a miner to support his mother after his father died. He helped build a shell-brick chapel with his bare hands at Shark Bay. He went back to university in the 1970s and completed a bachelor of social science at WAIT, for which he liked to say he had to pretend to be a Marxist. He was tough. In his late seventies he went on a hike of a week or two by himself in Tasmania. He seemed to me like a pioneer, a connection to the settler days. He told the story of his mother or grandmother walking some great distance from Esperance – was it to Kalgoorlie? He told the story, too, of his great bike ride from Meekathara to somewhere across the desert. He liked anecdotes; I don’t think he was keen on self-reflection or confession.
I lived with my grandparents when I came to Perth to study in 1999. I look back with gratitude that I had a chance to get to know them. We talked a lot about politics and religion as my worldview shifted leftwards. After I moved out, Granny once said that I should come around more often, Grandad came more alive when he was debating me. I asked my uncle later about the debates he’d had with Grandad, but he said he never did. I may have been the only one who dared debate him, my uncle said. Grandad was fragile as well as tough. I wrote something on holy communion once which made him furious and, having inherited his stubbornness and conviction that nothing matters more than truth, I dug my heels in. We fell out again soon after over what occupation I should be doing. I would handle Grandad differently these days.
I had visions of writing a biography-memoir of Grandad in time for his centenary. It would be my way of keeping his memory alive and understanding him better. I’d combine my own memories with historical research. But now he’s one hundred and I haven’t written that book and I don’t see myself doing it anytime soon.
However, his WA-based descendants are gathering for a reunion on Saturday. And my dad, who has been working on family history for years, is putting together what he’s discovered about Grandad’s life for the day. There’ll be twenty-three of his thirty or so great-grandchildren. He only lived long enough to see one great-grandchild; he would be so pleased to see the herd of descendants now growing up. I hope in time my own son, Thomas, who bears Grandad’s surname, will be interested in my stories of him and can feel some sort of connection to him, dead as he is.
05 Sunday Mar 2017
Posted in autobiographical, Western Australia
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I moved to Perth from the country when I was eighteen to study and haven’t left. I’m thirty-six today, which means I’ve now been here half my life. I’ve lived in nine different suburbs from North Lake in the south to Lesmurdie in the hills, but it’s Victoria Park in the inner-city which has become home. My brother and I moved into a decaying weatherboard house in East Victoria Park in 2002. It was before the boom, and it cost $120 a week. There was a hole in the bedroom wall and the feel of the 1950s still in the old carpet and fittings and the overgrown quarter-acre backyard. We were shocked at the price – far beyond us – when it was put up for sale for $350,000 the next year. After a few years in share houses in East Victoria Park until I got married in 2006, it took six years to get back to the area, but Nicole and I had often thought we probably would, and now we’ve been back in Victoria Park for five years. Continue reading
01 Wednesday Mar 2017
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, news and events
Alas, blogging is one of the things which have fallen by the wayside as I try to keep up a gruelling (for me!) chapter-a-month. So far I’m on track. It’s complicated by the fact that several chapters, including February’s, have divided into two. I’ve given Hugo Throssell VC his own chapter to introduce him and describe how he met Katharine, his future wife, in 1915 after Gallipoli. It means Guido Baracchi, the perpetual student Katharine met at the end of the year, gets his own (shorter) introductory chapter too.
My reading from the biography at the KSP Writers’ Centre was a couple of weeks ago now. There were over thirty people who came, braving the extreme heat and the drive out into the hills. There were many people I knew and many I didn’t; I was grateful to them all for coming. It was so encouraging to see so much interest in the biography. I love engaging in discussion after a reading, and there were some perceptive questions. I need to come up with a concise answer to the question: “Why Katharine?”; there are good reasons, if not necessarily obvious ones. Novelist Jenny Ackland was at KSPWC for a writing retreat ahead of Perth Writers’ Festival and I was chuffed that she wrote about my talk and the centre on her blog.
13 Monday Feb 2017
Posted in politics and current affairs
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Dear Mr Irons,
We’re writing to you as our representative in parliament. The biggest issue for us is climate change, and we are so upset by the path your government is taking. We don’t feel that you’re committed to taking real action to reduce emissions. Coal is the worst possible energy source to be investing in at the moment. As new parents with a young son, we are deeply offended by Scott Morrison’s stunt with a lump of coal in parliament as Australia faces more extreme weather. Please, for the sake of our toddler and all of our futures, take some courageous action on climate change. We would welcome an emissions trading scheme and more renewables. We want to be proud of Australia leading the way for the world.
Yours sincerely, Nathan and Nicole Hobby
13 Monday Feb 2017
Posted in Uncategorized
In case you missed it on my other blog, here’s the details of a reading I’m giving on Sunday at KSP Writers’ Centre. Love to see you there!
Katharine ca. 1904, from her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane, p. 42.
Governess – Katharine Susannah Prichard at Yarram, 1904: a reading by Nathan Hobby
KSP Writers’ Centre Sunday Session
4:00pm – 5:30pm Sunday 19 February 2017
11 Old York Rd, Greenmount WA
$10 general entry / $5 members (proceeds to KSP Writers’ Centre)
Refreshments provided
https://www.facebook.com/events/709078175927574/
Patience is an important virtue in writing a biography—or any book—and realistically it’s going to be a couple of years before my biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard appears. In the meantime, I’m excited to have a chance to share a chapter at the KSP Writers’ Centre Sunday Session.
The writers’ centre is in the hills of Perth, in the house Katharine lived in from 1919 until her death in 1969. Being involved with the centre has put me in touch with a community of writers who care about Katharine and her legacy. It’s…
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07 Tuesday Feb 2017
The great Australian artist Tom Roberts volunteered to serve in a London military hospital during the Great War. He ended up serving as an unofficial batman to Katharine Susannah Prichard’s future husband, Hugo Throssell, who was being treated for war wounds. I picked up Humphrey McQueen’s comprehensive 1996 biography of Roberts and found a lively account of their friendship. Another biography I wish I had the time to read. Each chapter has the name of a literary work from “Such is Life” to “The Good Soldier”. I love this acknowledgement at the back:
Paul Kelly for offering me a column in the Weekend Australian. The $585 I earned each week for two days work during the almost three years was the equivalent of a literary fellowship, without which this book would still not be completed. Rupert Murdoch let us get away with it until the week before the first draft went to the publishers.
One must always look for creative ways to fund the writing of a book.
Another note: McQueen’s great account of Roberts and Throssell is quoted or paraphrased at length in John Hamilton’s biography of Throssell Price of Valour without referencing. Mcqueen’s book does appear in the bibliography, but I don’t think that’s enough. Even “popular” biographies owe it to other writers and to the readers to acknowledge their sources fully.
30 Monday Jan 2017
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, news and events, Uncategorized
Katharine ca. 1904, from her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane, p. 42.
Governess – Katharine Susannah Prichard at Yarram, 1904: a reading by Nathan Hobby
KSP Writers’ Centre Sunday Session
4:00pm – 5:30pm Sunday 19 February 2017
11 Old York Rd, Greenmount WA
$10 general entry / $5 members (proceeds to KSP Writers’ Centre)
Refreshments provided
https://www.facebook.com/events/709078175927574/
Patience is an important virtue in writing a biography—or any book—and realistically it’s going to be a couple of years before my biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard appears. In the meantime, I’m excited to have a chance to share a chapter at the KSP Writers’ Centre Sunday Session.
The writers’ centre is in the hills of Perth, in the house Katharine lived in from 1919 until her death in 1969. Being involved with the centre has put me in touch with a community of writers who care about Katharine and her legacy. It’s also given me the rare opportunity to spend time in my subject’s house. The centre has many writing groups across genres, demographics, and timeslots. If you are a Western Australian writer, I encourage you to join up and be involved in some way – it needs your support more than ever in these days of limited government funding.
It’s chapter five I’ll be reading, “Governess,” the story of 1904 in Katharine’s life. I chose it because it’s a dramatic and largely unknown year of her life, as well as being quite self-contained as a narrative. Twenty-years-old and living away from home for the first time, Katharine set the tongues wagging in Yarram, a small country town in Gippsland. She beguiled several men, including a drug-addicted German doctor on the run from his wife. Starring in a play, she earned a new nickname. She gathered notes and impressions that she would turn into her first award-winning novel, The Pioneers, a decade later.
What better place to hear the story of this important year in Katharine’s life than at the house she lived in for fifty years? Tickets at the door.
06 Friday Jan 2017
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, meta, news and events, Uncategorized
Tags
The word count of my biography just hit 70,000, so I thought I’d pause to celebrate with this blog post. It’s a nice milestone, but it’s not altogether welcome. The paragraph I’m on concerns the outbreak of the Great War, so I’m in August 1914, which means I have 4.5 years to go, and the original aim was for an 80,000 word biography.
Back at the end of August I set a plan to write a chapter a month, taking me to the end of the biography during 2017. I’ve been meeting my targets, but I’ve become painfully aware of how naive my plan was. The years I’m writing about in Katharine’s life have proven to throw up far more intriguing stories, characters and events than I anticipated. A good problem to have, I realise. I’ve already added two chapters, and I expect to have to keep adding them.
Writers often get obsessed by word counts and I think it can be a trap; words are cheap, quality words are hard. But it’s a balancing act: measuring, celebrating output can be a necessary and powerful incentive along the way and I feel my ambitious and naive targets have energised me. So far. Most days.
31 Saturday Dec 2016
Posted in book review
Like many readers who are also writers and/or PhD candidates, my reading is driven by several imperatives. There’s things directly useful to the research, but they often don’t get read cover-to-cover. (“One of the joys,” writes Yvonne on Stumbling Through the Past, “after I finished my history degree was reading a book from cover to cover.”) There’s interesting books with some connection to my research, which make me feel I’m being slightly productive to read in my spare time. (And given I’m trying to master the art of biography, any accomplished biography could fit this category.) There’s books by friends and colleagues which I want to read after knowing them in person and seeing some of their creative or scholarly journey – and to encourage them! And then there’s books for fun. There’s actually a lot of overlap between the second, third, and fourth categories.
I was still in the midst of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (1997) when I summed up last year’s reading in biography. Lists are rather arbitrary; I had it at number three, but after finishing it in January and reflecting on it all year, I think it’s probably the best biography I’ve ever read.
I didn’t review Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, edited by Michael Bostridge, but it was the most enjoyable book I read this year. The volume was released to celebrate the publication of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography but that project is not a focus of the book. The thirty-three short tales reveal funny / sad / poignant / fascinating anecdotes about writing biography as well as reflections on the art and nature of the genre. Almost all the great British biographers are included, including two of my heroes, Claire Tomalin and Hermione Lee. Two contributions impressed me so much I looked up their biographies and both made it near the top of my favourites list for the year: Kate Summerscale and Frances Watson.
Somehow I didn’t review either of the two of Kate Summerscale’s books I read, even though I loved them. Both The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace are gripping narratives which combine biography, true crime, and cultural history into absorbing pictures of the Victorian era. In Mr Whicher, Summerscale tells the story of the original, quintessential detective and the most famous case of the age – the murder at Road Hill House. In Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace extraordinary extracts from an upper-class woman’s diary in the 1850s are preserved in trial records and form the core of a sad and vivid story of the hopes, angst and misery of a woman trapped in an unloving marriage. The breadth of both books is incredible; Summerscale gives the wider context of shifts in society and worldview. She shows a whole age better than a comprehensive history. And she does this with the narrative skill of good fiction. I still need to read That Wicked Boy, the book she actually published this year. She will be at the Perth Writers’ Festival in early 2017!
I reviewed three significant literary biographies from UWA Publishing this year. Sylvia Martin’s Ink in Her Veins is the pick of them for me, a great biography uncovering the life of Aileen Palmer, who lived an obscure life paradoxically near the centre of Australian literature. (Bill of The Australian Legend picked it as his book of the year.) Suzanne Falkiner’s Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow is a landmark volume, comprehensive and significant for literary scholarship. Georgina Arnott’s The Unknown Judith Wright is a well-argued revision of Wright’s early life. Another important Australian literary biography I reviewed is Philip Butterss’s An Unsentimental Bloke.
I read less fiction than ever this year (it used to be the main thing I read!), but one book stood out – Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (USA, 2010). I wrote on my general blog: “the novel gives a sense of the poignancy of all the remembered (and forgotten) people and events in any one’s life. It’s a novel which expands our appreciation of life, going beyond initial viewpoint characters and their present to reveal the past and future and inner lives of other characters.”
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 