Category Archives: biography

Elizabeth Macarthur: A Life at the Edge of the World by Michelle Scott Tucker

16 Mon Apr 2018

Posted by in biography, book review

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The twelve-year journey to publication is over for my fellow biographer-blogger Michelle Scott Tucker – her book, Elizabeth Macarthur: A Life at the Edge of the World, is out. It’s an impressive debut, telling the life of a key Australian colonist as a compulsive story and handling adeptly the gaps in the archive and the jagged edges of an ambitious woman married to a difficult, impulsive man. In 1789, aged in her early twenties, Elizabeth left Britain for the fledgling New South Wales colony with her officer-husband, John, on the Second Fleet. She lived the rest of her long life in New South Wales, conscious of her position as one of the first ‘ladies’ in a convict colony and determinedly steering her family’s wool-growing business to success, despite John’s appalling feuds and vendettas which sabotaged their efforts.

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Biography workshop on 17 March 2018

28 Wed Feb 2018

Posted by in biographers, news and events

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 Biography is the art of human portrayal in words, and it is a noble and adventurous art.
– Leon Edel

My biography workshop at Peter Cowan Writers’ Centre is coming up fast. If you know anyone in Perth writing a biography, please let them know about it! I’d love to have a decent-sized group of biographers discuss our genre. The workshop is designed to be accessible for beginners but experienced biographers are welcome and should find much to appreciate as well as contributing their own wisdom.

Detective, Historian, Storyteller: The Arts of the Biographer
A biographer needs many hats – detective, unearthing sources that reveal a life more fully; historian, analysing and putting these sources into context; and storyteller, weaving it all into a compelling narrative. This workshop introduces these roles of the biographer and gives practical tips and exercises to help you develop your skills.

Saturday 17 March, 1:30pm – 4:30pm.
Cost: $38 for Members $48 for Non-Members
Venue: ECU Joondalup Campus, Edith Cowan House, Building 20, 270 Joondalup Drive, Joondalup WA
Register online

Download flyer for the Arts of Biographer workshopbiographer

 

Biography from a deep well: Martin Edmond’s Battarbee and Namatjira

25 Sun Feb 2018

Posted by in biography, book review

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One of Australia’s great biographers is a New Zealander. Long a resident of Australia, Martin Edmond’s new book, The Expatriates, is about four New Zealanders who made their mark in Europe. Before that, he tackled the most Australian of subjects in his 2014 dual biography on two great Northern Territory painters, Rex Battarbee and Albert Namatjira. Continue reading →

Biographers’ Forum on Facebook

06 Tue Feb 2018

Posted by in biography, link, news and events

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Image: Atelier Seidel, Archive of photographic images in the loft of the house.

Biographers are vastly outnumbered by novelists, poets, and probably playwrights. We need to stick together more. I’ve started a new Facebook group called Biographers’ Forum – ‘The art, the joys, and the woes of biography. A place for those writing researched biographies to converse and share resources, tips, reviews, stories, and news.’ It is already trans-Pacific with its first two members, Laura and me. Michelle and Janine and other biographers who read this blog – if you’re on Facebook it would be great to have you there! And for everyone else, if you know any biographers, please do invite them.

Missing the archives

02 Fri Feb 2018

Posted by in archives and sources, biography, My KSP biography

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Cataloguing a biography of Charles Spurgeon in my librarian job, I noticed this convolutedly-worded confession in the preface. The book is a comprehensive biography of 700 pages in two columns (such a strange layout) described by one reviewer as an ‘immense and monumental portrait’, yet the author did not manage to get to the major archives for his subject at all. I take this as a consolation for my lack of recent access to Katharine’s papers in Canberra; yet it seems an unforgivable hole in a biography.

In the first two years, I made four trips to Canberra and two to Melbourne. But still I fret over the archives, over the fact I may not make it again anytime soon and the thought of all the things I’ve missed. (I didn’t copy as much of the material beyond 1919, where the project was initially finishing.)

Not being able to get to Canberra has made me find work arounds. My university library has procured me copies of papers I have location numbers for. (I am waiting anxiously for them to tell me I’ve asked for too many!) Right here in Perth I recently stumbled across the boxes of material gathered by a previous PhD student attempting a biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard. It had some significant material I’d not copied and I’m so grateful for her foresight and generosity in leaving them to future scholars. I’ve gone back more carefully over the photographs I took from the archive and found whole folders I didn’t realise I had. And I’ve reached the Western Australian years and found many things at the State Library of WA, even an eyewitness account of Katharine’s death.

I’ve learned about an important paradox in writing a biography anyway: the hunger for archives is in tension with the readers’ patience. The biographer will usually have more material than the reader wants to read.

A biographical dilemma: trying to sell a trilogy, or not

14 Sun Jan 2018

Posted by in biography, My KSP biography

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‘Just one thing to make clear,’ she said, ‘I’d be astonished if any agent or publisher thought it was a good idea to write a trilogy on Katharine Susannah Prichard.’

I was hoping for something more like: I would be astonished if any agent or publisher turned down this manuscript. But I hired my editor for a manuscript assessment because of her frank and fearless advice and industry insight. I was glad to hear she considered it well written, but what stood out for her was my premise that the early life of KSP was worth an entire book. Did I provide some startling justification for this later in the manuscript? Did I have a better example of a similar undertaking other than Judith Wright? No and no. Continue reading →

2017: My year’s reading in biography

01 Mon Jan 2018

Posted by in biography, lists

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Of the biographies I read in 2017, I thought these six very good.

  1. Our Man Elsewhere: In Search of Alan Moorehead / by Thornton McCamish (2016)
    “This is a biography which gives a vivid sense of life and culture in the mid-twentieth century. It reflects in an indirect but profound way on what makes life meaningful and how the past is present – or not – today. It didn’t leave me with a strong desire to read Moorehead’s work but it did leave me with a strong desire to read whatever book McCamish writes next.” – My review
  2. The Enigmatic Mr Deakin / Judith Brett (2017)
    “Brett’s biography is wise and compellingly readable. She captures the experience of living, the passing of years, the shifts in attitude and fortune, the development of character. Even if the promises of spiritualism were false and Deakin’s spirit cannot be summoned, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin brings him to life as much as a biography can hope to do. May it foster a wider understanding of a man worth remembering.” – My review
  3. The Boyds: A Family Biography / Brenda Niall (2002)
    A book that takes us through a couple of centuries of Australian life through the eyes of one family. It’s a superb example of a rare and difficult genre.
    – My review
  4. Capote / by Gerald Clarke (1988)
    “It reads so smoothly, so effortlessly in a way which only a great biographer can achieve and only then with much sweat. It follows Capote from his troubled childhood in Alabama and the wounds his selfish parents inflicted on him to his emergence as a literary wunderkind in New York and the successes of his early and mid-career to the tragic descent into writer’s block, alcoholism, and exile from the circles of the wealthy and celebrities he had moved in. It’s a tragedy and it’s told with a restraint, clarity, and insight which make it compelling.” – My review
  5. Kylie Tennant: A Life / by Jane Grant (2006)
    A compelling biography of a true character in Australian literature. I was impressed by how much Grant achieves in such a short book.
    – My review
  6.  A Life Discarded / by Alexander Masters (2016)
    Masters pieces together the life of an unknown person from the hundreds of diaries they left behind in a skip bin. It’s a page-turning biographical quest, intriguing and fun and both sad and heart-warming. But it also felt somewhat contrived to me, as Masters shapes his quest to eke out the suspense. (Not reviewed.)

An Australian family over time – The Boyds: A Family Biography by Brenda Niall and A Difficult Young Man by Martin Boyd

12 Tue Dec 2017

Posted by in biographies of writers, artists and musicians, book review

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Family biography makes sense: we live in families, we remember as families, we are formed by families. Whenever a biographer tries to write one individual’s life, they end up telling the story of a family. As a genre, family biography goes one step further and embraces these other, related stories. But it’s a rare genre because it’s a daunting task and there’s few families with enough interesting members who have left the archives. Brenda Niall has not only chosen the perfect family in The Boyds: A Family Biography (2002); she’s also executed a superb biography. Continue reading →

The stories that get left out

04 Mon Dec 2017

Posted by in biographical method, links

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Michelle Scott Tucker at Adventures in Biography and I both happen to be in the midst of cutting anecdotes and details from our biographies which distract from the main narrative. She has found a potential use for them: in author’s talks! It’s a good idea to try to give the audience something different.
I tweeted about my editing process on the weekend: “Criteria for keeping scenes in my biography: Does it connect to anything later on or is it an orphaned anecdote? Does it matter to my readers? Eg: sorry Madame Marchesi, you’re not connected & you’re not so famous as when KSP wrote her autobiography.”

Michelle Scott Tucker's avatarAdventures in Biography

Source: http://thomaswightman.co.uk/book-sculpture-drowning-from-obsession

What should biographers do with all the wonderful stories – or snippets – they discover along the way but can’t include in their books?

Many biographers do, of course, include them. But readers often don’t like it – for example wonderful reviewer Whispering Gums recently discussed a biography she enjoyed, but felt contained too much extraneous detail. And, I’ll confess, as a reader I feel the same way. I just want to read about the biographical subject, please.

But as a writer? Of course I want to include all the details! Because I’m assuming the reader is every bit as obsessed by the subject as I am – which is, tragically but patently, untrue. All those extra details, every little meandering away from the main subject, are crucial to the writer’s understanding but frankly unnecessary to the reader’s.

However, Nathan Hobby, A Biographer in Perth, raises…

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Australian literary biography in 2017

09 Thu Nov 2017

Posted by in biographies of writers, artists & musicians, books

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It’s nearing the end of 2017 and I’ve only noticed three Australian literary biographies published. I counted five last year, and thought that a low number; perhaps it was actually a bumper crop. The three I’ve noticed are Bernadette Brennan’s A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work (Text); Kerrie Davies’ A Wife’s Heart: The Untold Story of Bertha and Henry Lawson (UQP); and Janelle McCulloch Beyond the Rock: the Life of Joan Lindsay and the Mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Echo). What have I missed?

I haven’t read any of these yet but even at only three titles, they represent a good spread of Australian literature. Lawson must be the most covered biographical subject of any Australian writer, but Davies’ focus on Bertha is a new angle and apparently an innovative approach. The biography of Joan Lindsay gives us a solidly twentieth century writer; the title suggests the challenge of approaching (and marketing) a writer remembered for one book. And then Brennan’s biography is of a contemporary writer and sounds from the reviews as a work of biographical criticism, making it more possible to write while the subject is well and truly alive.