05 Saturday Mar 2022
Posted in autobiographical, death
My best friend, Jonathan, took his own life a week ago. I hate that his whole story now seems to lead up to his end. If he’d been saved somehow, most people would never know and his life would have gone on, apparently with a completely different arc. I think of that moment in the movie Match Point when the ball could fall on either side. There are so many different, better ways this should have gone.
Continue reading04 Friday Jun 2021
Posted in autobiographical
In my suburb there’s a non-descript shopping centre café which smells a little greasy and sells quiche and bacon and eggs and is inexplicably busy, mostly with older people. It’s next to the bottle shop and every time I pass it I think of the professor because the last time I saw him, in 2003, he was seated at one of its outside tables waiting for his order. I called out his name and when I wasn’t sure he recognised me I reminded him of how I’d been in his classes and he brusquely assured me he remembered me. Was I an unwelcome intruder? I must have spoken to him for a while because I recall showing off to him that my novel had just won an award and would be published. He told me what a bad state publishing was in and how his own novel had been rejected. To my surprise, it was a thriller with some connection to 9/11. The other thing I remember telling him was that I’d recently moved into the area, into a haunted house. What I meant by that was that I was living in a rundown house from the 1950s full of traces of the people who had lived there before, from the vintage stinking carpets to the rusty bedframe in the backyard under the decaying tree-house. But I said it was haunted because I knew he was into parapsychology and there’s a stirrer in me that people are slow to recognise. He took the bait and said something like, ‘When you say haunted, I hope you realise there are many haunted houses in this city.’ If he elaborated—and I would have been hoping he did—I’ve forgotten what else he said.
Continue reading28 Friday May 2021
Posted in autobiographical, My KSP biography
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It’s not easy knowing how to start a biography. The preface to my biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard went through a number of versions. Talking to a respected literary figure, she advised I write about why I had written the book because people would want to know. I don’t appear at all in the body of the biography, but it is a long-standing convention to tell something of the biographer’s quest in the preface, so it seemed like good advice and I followed it. I was quite happy with it as an introduction to a biography for a general readership. But one of the anonymous peer reviewers felt it didn’t work: ‘the preface draws tenuous links between the life of the subject and that of the author, and admits (no doubt unintentionally) a kind of obsessiveness, not unlike that asserted with regard to [certain figures in the biography]. I understand that with this gesture the author is attempting to acknowledge his standpoint, but it doesn’t work.’ Maybe the reviewer is right, and/or maybe it was a little mean to call me obsessive when that’s what biographers do, and my tone is more whimsical or self-deprecating than seems to be appreciated. Whatever the case, the published book – when it finally comes out in April 2022 (yes, the date has been pushed back) – will have a quite different preface, which makes a case for Katharine’s significance and outlines the approach I have taken. I’m very happy with that preface too. But for what it’s worth, here’s one of my lost prefaces that is possibly obsessive and self-indulgent in laying out why a non-communist male (somewhat) Anglican is writing the story of a long-dead female communist.
Continue reading11 Tuesday May 2021
Posted in autobiographical, Series: Corona Diary
What do you even remember about the pandemic years? Are you aware of how much they’ve affected you? Do you still obsessively wash your hands, Sarah? This last year, if we can’t find you, there’s a fair chance you’ve slipped into the bathroom to stand on the step-stool and bathe your hands in liquid soap with the water running, sometimes until the soap dispenser is empty. It’s not likely you’ll remember the ‘before’; you were eighteen-months old in March, that weekend the prime-minister said the lockdown was coming but he was heading to the footy one last time. And Thomas, maybe your memories will start with with this time, the ‘before’ fading out until it seems all your first six years or more were lived in the shadow of coronavirus. I hope not, I hope all the different seasons remain distinct in your memories. I keep asking you about your past to try to keep alive as many of them as I can.
Continue reading23 Friday Apr 2021
Posted in autobiographical, writing
In an obituary for her friend, Sumner Locke, Katharine Susannah Prichard said, ‘She could write anyhow and anywhere. I remember her telling a young man that when he came to her wailing about his uncongenial surroundings, and that he could not find a suitable place to work in at his boarding house “Man,” Sumner said to him, “you could write on the edge of a bath, if you wanted to.”‘ I think of that sometimes as either a goad or an encouragement. I also think of Kate Grenville saying somewhere – I’m not sure where – how the only writing time she had was when her mother looked after her young children and so she would park her car by the beach and write in the backseat leaning on a kickboard balanced over her knees. I’m sure I’ve got the details slightly wrong but I’ve taken inspiration from her during Covid and parked by the river with my laptop on my knees until it runs out of batteries – I only get an hour and a half out of it these days. (Alas, once I left my lights on and another battery ran out too; on that occasion waiting for the RAC to arrive I had some extra thinking time, the laptop already dead.)
Continue reading30 Wednesday Sep 2020
Posted in autobiographical, books
I try to teach my kids to be careful with books but it doesn’t work with two-year-old Sarah. She has a very physical relationship with books. The ones she loves best she bends their covers until they break (Favourite Fairy Tales), tears out the lift-the-flaps (Hop Little Bunnies), scribbles on the faces of the characters (That’s Not My Llama). ‘She’s getting the paperbacks!’ her brother called out urgently once.
Continue reading20 Friday Dec 2019
Posted in academic, autobiographical
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Today, I finished off the decade by picking up the bound copies of my PhD thesis. The university library doesn’t collect hard copies any longer, only electronic files. I hope their server is backed up well; I bet it’s not fail-safe. I’m glad to have something to hold at the end. Continue reading
12 Saturday Oct 2019
Posted in autobiographical, politics and current affairs
I was one of those despicable climate protestors blocking the Perth CBD yesterday. I hate inconveniencing people, but this is an emergency. I was feeling dread in the days leading up to the protest. For security reasons, there weren’t many details given out to rank-and-file protestors like me about what we were going to do. And you never know how the police are going to act. They can be fair and respectful to protestors or they can play hardball and be unpredictable. And who was going to look after the kids if we both got arrested? Continue reading
23 Monday Sep 2019
Posted in autobiographical, politics and current affairs
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It was humbling to be led by school students, born this century, in the Global Climate Strike on Friday. But also inspiring. The turnout in Perth was estimated at 10,000, and Forrest Place was filled to the brim. Even this impressive turnout was overtaken by smaller cities, Hobart and Canberra, but that’s just a sign of how big this day was, how many people are concerned enough to make a stand. Continue reading
21 Wednesday Aug 2019
Posted in academic, autobiographical, My KSP biography, news and events
You can’t really see it, but I’m holding a copy of my thesis and the “PhinisheD” mug on the day of my submission. Of course, I’m not really finished – not even the thesis, which will probably come back with corrections after examination!
It’s five years today since I officially started my biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard. This is starting to be a long time. The decade was young when I began and now it’s finishing. In fact, I was beginning just at the start of the centenary of the Great War, and I submitted my PhD thesis on Katharine’s early life in late June, just before the centenary of Armistice. My thesis lasted the length of the Great War; the whole biography – extending the story to the end of her life – will take somewhat longer. Continue reading
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 