World in Winter by John Christopher, stamped Stock Rd Book Exchange, probably located in the old Stock Rd Markets in Bibra Lake.Plaza Book Exchange in the rundown shopping centre in South Bunbury, very close to where I lived at 16.Naturaliste Books, the shop I wrote about in my last post.
When I wrote my previous post ‘The Death of Book Exchanges’ in 2000, I thought I was just coming to terms with their limited lives in the singular. I didn’t think the whole category of shop would face virtual extinction. But now, in 2026, few suburban book exchanges remain. I wonder if it reflects my grandparents’ generation dying off; they almost all read for recreation, especially the mass market paperbacks book exchanges specialised in. Another factor: I think public libraries started holding more of those books too – romance, westerns, science fiction. (I remember as a kid when ‘paperbacks’ at Collie library were a small separate section and not a proper part of the collection – uncatalogued, not covered and probably donated.) Then there’s rising shopping centre rents, driving out everything but the big chains. And, finally, in the 2010s many genre readers switched to Kindle.
As a child, a deep competitive impulse took hold of me. I had to win because being less than the best felt catastrophic! I only realised much later how unhealthy it was. When I got serious about writing, this impulse inevitably affected it. I had good reasons to write – I wanted to create worlds and beautiful sentences and, eventually, express the interiority of my life – but I also had one bad reason and that was this unhealthy ambition.
Prime Minister John Curtin’s signature has just sold on EBay for $750. It seems a great pity that the signature has been cut off a letter, detached from its original context. Someone in the provenance chain snipped it off like I used to take the stamps from envelopes. Autograph collectors’ priorities differ from archivists. I’ve seen presidential letters cut up into separate keywords.
The listing named the late collector who had been the previous owner and I realised that, strangely, he had also collected my autograph. He was a lawyer with a particular interest in Victoria Cross winners and he asked me to give a lecture to an RSL group on Hugo Throssell VC, Katharine Prichard’s husband. The collector was in poor health and had to discharge himself from hospital – probably against medical advice – to attend, the biggest effort anyone will ever make to hear me speak. Six months later, he called me several times, rather urgently needing me to come sign a copy of my book. I turned up at his townhouse in the dark. There were piles of good books on the floor, mementos and treasures everywhere. He fell over and I helped him back up, and I worried how he went the rest of the time. He had written out exactly what he wanted me to write in the book, commemorating his role in the lecture I’d given. I bristled slightly at being told what to write, but I did it because it was an intriguing situation, belonging thematically in a novel I once wrote. That was the last time I saw the collector. I will keep an eye out for my autographed book, selling for considerably less than $750.
In year 12 I had a dream in which I fell into a coma and woke years later, emaciated and fragile. My peers had left me behind and my good grades now meant nothing. The world went on and I was alive but no longer fully part of it.
In my dramatic moments, it now feels like a premonition of my middle age and the condition that has taken away a lot of my life in a quiet and invisible way the last few years.
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.
When I was fifteen, my grandmother sent me a photo of her father, Bert Sewell, in military uniform during the Great War. He was twenty but he looks younger. She was offering it to me because she thought I resembled him. Her attention was unpredictable and her true thoughts and feelings inscrutable; I felt honoured to have been chosen like this out of six grandsons. I placed the photo in the concertina folder I had for important documents, which also put it out of sight and out of mind for many years. I don’t remember my grandmother ever talking about him again. But when she died we found a correction she’d made in biro to Bert’s entry in a family history book.
Bert died on 9 December 1967 in Perth’s Hollywood Repatriation Hospital. Ten days later, his wife, Iris, died too. Their entry in the family history book claims, ‘An unfortunate accident followed by prolonged litigation brought about their hastened deaths’ (Sewell 167). My grandmother scribbled those lines out and wrote that Bert died of bladder cancer and Iris died ‘following a third stroke’. What my grandmother wrote is technically closer to the truth. But just before he died, Bert shot a man in the thigh and spent nine days in the Meekathara lockup. Although it wasn’t actually an accident and the litigation wasn’t prolonged, its proximity connects it to his death and Iris’s death. My dad was thirteen at the time; he was told about their deaths but not about the shooting.
Launch at UWA TavernThomas with the Beaufort St Books crewElizabeth Lewis, KSPWC chairperson, introducing the launch at Katharine’s Place with Glen Phillips seated. Photo by Lauren Pratt.It’s me on the verandah where Katharine used to hold her parties in the 1920s! Photo by Lauren Pratt.
It’s a year since The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard came out.
I’ll always remember the night of my book launch at the UWA Tavern, my family and friends and colleagues and KSP fans gathered together. There were speeches from my supervisors, Tony Hughes d’Aeth and Van Ikin, who had been there with me all those years I was writing it. To my disbelief, Norman Jorgensen handed me a signed copy of KSP’s seven inch record on which she reads two of her short stories. It was such a generous gift. It was a surreal night – just before the event was due to start, I had a job offer over the phone which threw me off balance. I had been going to say no, because I couldn’t work full time, but in that evening when I’d finally climbed the mountain of the book it felt like everything was changing, opening up and that I needed to say yes.
That launch was the first of many events, a busy, giddy couple of months. I was even interviewed by Phillip Adams, something I’d long dreamed of. I’d been rather selfishly worried he would retire before the publication of my book. But it happened, an hour long special with me and Karen Throssell, KSP’s granddaughter. We pre-recorded in the morning but, alas, there was no cosy chat with Phillip before or after – he was in a hurry. The reviews started rolling in and there were so many of them! I was grateful to be met with astute and generous reviewers, some of them writers I admire greatly. I had an online launch, compered by Lisa Hill of ANZ Litlovers with Karen Throssell launching and my publisher, Nathan Hollier, also speaking. I had another launch at Katharine’s house itself in Greenmount, now the KSP Writers’ Centre, a place which had been so central to the journey. Fittingly, the centre’s patron, Glen Phillips, launched the book; he’s been writing about KSP for decades.You can see in the photographs the golden autumn light. It was a perfect afternoon.
As a bookend to the first launch, at the end of June the theological college where I’d worked for fourteen years had a combined farewell and launch for me and theologian Michael O’Neil spoke eloquently and appreciatively about my book.
I had a week off before I started my new job and a long list of things I was going to do but instead, I came down with covid and a severe case of a bad review. Since then I have been holding in a very juvenile desire to swear on my blog at the eminent historian Sheila Fitzpatrick. (Maybe an acrostic poem, Gwen Harwood style?) I’d always wanted to review for ABR and be reviewed in it. Professor Fitzpatrick’s review in the July issue came on day two of covid, when I was at my sickest. Confined to bed, I got up when I heard the postie. And there I was, finally in the ABR. Her review was disdainful and it seemed as if she didn’t understand the conventions of biography and what my biography was trying to do; she didn’t even consider it on its own terms. I’ve always been an outsider to the academy – I don’t come from an academic family and my work doesn’t fit neatly into a discipline – and I felt my eight years of research and writing were crushed by an insider who had all the power. But reviews should be honest and it was no doubt the honest opinion of an expert in Soviet history, an aspect of my book which isn’t its strong point – nor its focus. The thing is, it never looks good to respond to negative reviews. You end up looking thin-skinned and perhaps a little ridiculous. Of course, if I’m honest, I am thin-skinned and thereby temperamentally unsuited to the public exposure of publishing a book.
But other aspects of public exposure suit me. I love public speaking, love talking about my book and answering people’s questions. Due to the ongoing covid pandemic, I haven’t pushed hard to do more talks. I’m still wearing a n95 mask, trying to stave off repeat infections, and that’s something few people have sympathy with any more, let alone in a guest speaker. (If anyone is tolerating a masked speaker and can gather a few people to hear me talk about KSP, drop me a line!)
I wrote to a friend, ‘I had told myself that being published would be enough, but I think I had my fingers crossed.’ I thought there would be invitations to literary festivals (there was one – Mandurah, thank you!) and a shortlisting or two. But like most books, mine has largely missed out on these things.
A few years before I finished The Red Witch, a publisher told me that non-commercial Australian biographies sell between 200 and 1000 copies. It was a reality check and I was crestfallen. I read somewhere that David Marr’s biography of Patrick White sold 40,000 copies and there was a part of me setting that up as a benchmark. But here was this wise publisher recalibrating my expectations.
The thing about climbing a mountain is the dilemma of what to do next. ‘Climb another one’. A higher one? No chance. Or at least not right now. I’ve had two false starts on new books. Both foundered on the lack of rich archival material – personal letters – to bring the subjects alive. I’ve got two other ideas I’m spending a long time choosing between; both of them have promise and both of them have problems. I don’t want to commit to starting and then stop again. Also, I have no time. I do have an article celebrating Elizabeth Jolley’s centenary out next month in the State Library of NSW’s OpenBook magazine.
Thanks to everyone who has bought my book / read my book / come along to one of my talks / followed my blog – I appreciate it so much!
To celebrate the first birthday of The Red Witch, during May you can buy a signed copy directly from me at the discounted price of $45 with free postage (usually $10) to anywhere in Australia – the online shop is here.
Simon and Garfunkel were just playing in the car which reminded me of the rudest doctor I ever had. I can’t remember his name but it was 2003 and he was a middle-aged Brit who seemed a little bored. I’d finally got a job as a library officer after graduating from my BA into unemployment and I had to do a medical. It was my first appointment with him and he remarked, ‘Has anyone ever said you look like a chubby Art Garfunkel?’ No, actually, no-one had ever said that but years later when I told my wife, she thought that was hilarious and sometimes she has been known to call me ‘chubby Art Garfunkel’. This is mostly a compliment in her lexicon, as she likes Art Garfunkel and he was surely on the skinny side in his heyday. (Or this is what I tell myself.) He said working in a library wasn’t a very good job and I should be aiming higher. I wouldn’t be very busy and I could use my spare time to study for a real job. I am still studying, I told him, studying to be a librarian. As it turned out, working the front desk at one of WA’s busiest libraries did not give me any spare time at all.
That medical practice, still going today with one of the worst Google ratings in the city, was run really badly. It charged a fortune, had a rude receptionist and always kept people waiting inordinately. I usually saw another doctor, a delightful Polish fellow. He was jolly and I think he was good at his job, but he was always running about an hour behind. I would get so frustrated waiting and ready to tell him I was never coming back, but then he would be apologetic and funny and I would come back the next time right up until I moved away.
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.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 