I’ve started writing a new biography but I still have some doubts, so I’m not ready to announce it yet. But I’ve re-read Nigel Hamilton’s How To Do Biography: A Primer (2008) as part of my process. I first read it just as I began writing the Katharine Prichard biography and it’s been a great refresher a decade later. One of the joys of this book is his dedication to the art of biography and his strong rebuttal of the criticisms which are made of the genre. There’s a sense of having a well-armed ally on my side.
Drink Against Drunkenness: The Life and Times of Sasha Soldatow Inez Baranay 2022, 508pp, RRP $39.99.
Last year I chanced upon a newspaper clipping from 1990 about the writer and activist Sasha Soldatow (1947-2006) suing the Australia Council over him not being awarded a fellowship despite many applications. It led me to David Marr’s intriguing obituary for the man. ‘To fall in with Sasha at this time was a life-shaking experience. He marched and drank under the banner of Liberty… The deal he offered was this: place yourself in my hands, and I will set you free.’ I commented on Twitter that someone should write Soldatow’s biography. It turns out someone had been! Drink Against Drunkenness: The Life and Times of Sasha Soldatow is a labour of love by his friend, the writer Inez Baranay, author of 14 previous books.
Griffith Watkins (1930-1969) caught my attention in 2017 with his brilliant poem “Heatwave” selected by Tracy Ryan and John Kinsella for The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry. I was drawn to the tragic outline of his life: a promising writer and popular art teacher who drowned himself in the Swan River two years after the publication of his debut novel. I’ve been meaning to read that novel for years and now I finally have.
The Pleasure Bird (1967) is an existential novel set in Perth. The novel’s hero, Brenton, is a teacher in his twenties obsessed with art, boxing, sex and death. Watkins piles tragedies onto Brenton’s shoulders. At age 12, he found his war veteran, former boxing champion father hanging in the shed. His mother became a cleaner to provide for Brenton and his brother, Frank, before her early death from cancer. A year before the novel begins, Frank is killed in the boxing ring when his opponent, Mick Gabriel, fights dirty. Mick Gabriel went to prison for three months; he’s out now and Brenton is determined to have his revenge.
Some brief notes on Leaping into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears (Allen and Unwin, 2021), Bernadette Brennan’s excellent, fast paced biography of Australian writer Gillian Mears (1964-2017):
Today is the 51st anniversary of Katharine Prichard’s death. As part of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary last year, the KSP Writers’ Centre published an anthology called Kaleidoscope, collecting creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry about Katharine, her husband Hugo Throssell, and their house in the hills of Perth, now the home of the centre. The published pieces were the best entries in a competition; Shey Marque judged the poetry and I judged the non-fiction and fiction. The standard was high and the collection is a significant interpretation of Katharine and her legacy, as well as a good read. I wrote in the judge’s report, ‘
Katharine was a complex person with many aspects to her life and a writer with a diverse oeuvre. This multi-voiced anthology captures some of that diversity and honours her political commitment to the collective. It moves across genres, across countries, across decades, beyond the span of her own long life into the fifty years since her death and even into the future.
It includes a moving fictionalisation of Hugo’s last moments through his eyes, the story of a mother giving birth in Fiji, where Katharine was born, and Denise Faithfull’s intriguing account of her literary pilgrimages in the footsteps of James Joyce and Katharine. I contributed a brief biography of Katharine’s life as an introduction. Katharine’s granddaughter, Karen Throssell, launched the book and her wonderful speech can be read here.
It’s a hard book to get hold of, but worth the effort. The first print run sold out on the launch day, but I believe there has been a second print run. To buy a copy, you can contact Wild Weeds Press at the KSP Writers’ Centre – wwp-admin@wildweedspress.com. Not sure of the price, but $20 or $30 plus postage, I think.
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.
Art Was Their Weapon: The History of the Perth Workers’ Art Guild by Dylan Hyde (Fremantle Press 2019)
What a labour of love Dylan Hyde’s Art Was Their Weapon is. The interviews for this history of the Perth Workers’ Art Guild in the 1930s go right back to 1993. Many of the key players from the guild were still alive then, and lucid. None of them are still with us today, and so in his extensive interviews, Hyde has preserved the voices of a generation of radicals and a fascinating milieu. Continue reading →
I spent my childhood, from ages two to fifteen, in Collie and it seems like a dream. I’m not really in touch with anyone who lives there and I’ve only returned a handful of times. The rest of my family lives only fifty kilometres west in Bunbury, but there’s no passing through Collie; it’s not on the way to anything else. It’s a coal mining town in a valley, surrounded by bush on all sides. Continue reading →
James Atlas The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (Scribner, 2017, 400pp)
I’m drawn to biography’s sweet melancholy about mortality and recovering fragments of the past. Biographer James Atlas’s excellent memoir The Shadow in the Garden captures the mood I feel about biography. Continue reading →
Kenneth (Seaforth) Mackenzie’s The Young Desire It is a beautiful prose-poem, a novel about adolescence which amazed me again and again with its evocation of states of mind and the experience of landscape. It tells of a year in the life of fourteen-year-old Charlie Fox, as he begins at a boarding school in Perth, with interludes at his mother’s farm in the South-West where he falls in love with a neighbour’s visiting niece. It’s shocking to read in 2019, with the sexual assault of Charlie by the other students as a hazing ritual in the novel’s opening and the grooming by a paedophile teacher presented as a normal part of school life. Continue reading →