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Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth

~ The life of Katharine Susannah Prichard, the art of biography, and other things

Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth

Category Archives: book review

Anger and Love by Justina Williams

02 Saturday Jun 2018

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review, Katharine Susannah Prichard's associates and connections, memoirs, politics and current affairs, Series: Saturday 10am, Western Australia

≈ 12 Comments

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Justina Williams

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Autobiography is an impossible genre. Memoir is easier – the writer is allowed to present an aspect of their life, to create a story out of one of its strands or seasons. Autobiography has to try to include them all. The desire to remember and record names, dates, and places is in the tension with the need to craft a narrative. And different phases of life require quite different types of writing which might not go together. The problems of autobiography are on show in Justina Williams’ Anger and Love (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993), but it’s an important, fascinating text. Continue reading →

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

16 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by Nathan Hobby in biographies, book review

≈ 6 Comments

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18th century, Australian history, Elizabeth Macarthur, Michelle Scott Tucker

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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.

Continue reading →

The Everlasting Sunday by Robert Lukins

24 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review, fiction

≈ 2 Comments

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Robert Lukins, The Everlasting Sunday

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Melbourne writer Robert Lukins’ debut, The Everlasting Sunday (UQP, 2018), is an elegant novel about seventeen-year-old Radford’s time at a home for troubled boys in England over the Big Freeze of 1962-1963. He finds friendship and brotherhood there among the other boys and their admired but mysterious mentor, Teddy, as the life of the home begins to fall apart. The novel is cinematic in its sumptuous visual narration, which is in tension with its careful avoidance of explanations. Even when we’re inside the head of Radford, we only see glimpses. This restraint gives the novel some of its distinctive tone; it is beautifully written. Perhaps its flipside is that the more dramatic events of the narrative took me too much by surprise – was the narrative working with a different logic to what I was used to, was it the fault of a somewhat lazy reader (quite likely), or could it have been strengthened by some foreshadowing or other changes? Setting the novel over the big freeze was a superb choice with its symbolic resonances and the way it gives a timeframe, a clock ticking over the course of the freeze as the characters – and the reader – wait for the inevitable thawing. It doesn’t read like a first novel and it’s probably not; ‘assured writing’ Lucy Treloar claims on the cover, and I agree. It’s also wise and haunting. I came to this novel through Lukins’ inspired Twitter presence; it’s not necessarily the tone or type of novel I expected from his tweets, but it’s every bit as good as I hoped.

 

 

Re-reading Coonardoo

16 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review, Katharine Susannah Prichard's writings

≈ 9 Comments

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Coonardoo

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I reviewed Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo back in 2014 and stand by most of my comments. I’ve just finished re-reading it, and want to add some further thoughts.

It’s inevitable that literature is read in terms of its social relevance, praised or blamed for its handling of issues that matter to us as a society now. It’s one of the functions of literature, and it’s a significant one, but it shouldn’t be the only one. It’s a two-edged sword, of course. When Coonardoo was serialised in the The Bulletin in 1928, some readers wrote in angrily about the fact it depicted miscegenation between whites and Aboriginals. (This is an oft-repeated statement; if I get time I’d like to get behind it and see if these and other negative reactions are preserved in the archives anywhere – certainly not in KSP’s papers.) Later, Coonardoo was praised for its progressiveness in representing Aboriginal characters more fully. Continue reading →

A generation X family chronicle: You Belong Here by Laurie Steed

03 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review, fiction, Western Australia

≈ 11 Comments

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Generation X, Laurie Steed, Mt Lawley, Perth, short stories, You Belong Here

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My friend Laurie Steed’s debut, You Belong Here, has just been published. It stretches from 1972 to 2015, beginning when two baby boomers fall in love and finishing with a poignant epilogue chapter from their first grandchild, but at its heart it’s a novel about Generation X, that forgotten generation that no-one seems to have talked about since the nineties. He-man toys in childhood, PJ Harvey on the stereo; reading it is a welcome respite from an internet world as the three Slater children – Alex, Emily, Jay – grow up on lolly bags at the deli, cricket and VHS at the end of the twentieth century. Continue reading →

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

25 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by Nathan Hobby in biographies, book review

≈ 4 Comments

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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 →

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

12 Tuesday Dec 2017

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

≈ 4 Comments

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Brenda Niall, Martin Boyd

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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 →

Working Bullocks by Katharine Susannah Prichard

24 Friday Nov 2017

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review, Katharine Susannah Prichard's writings

≈ 6 Comments

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Working Bullocks

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I reviewed Katharine Susannah Prichard’s fourth novel, Working Bullocks (1926), three years ago, and after reading it again, I largely agree with my first reading. It’s the story of the people of the timber country in the South-West of WA and follows a young man named Red Burke who has a way with horses and bullocks but not people, as he is torn between two women and struggles to make his way in that world. I have some new reflections – mostly biographical – to add: Continue reading →

Jane Grant’s Kylie Tennant: A Life and the art of short biography

03 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by Nathan Hobby in biographical method, biographies of writers, artists & musicians, book review

≈ 6 Comments

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Australian literature, Jane Grant, Kylie Tennant

Kylie-Tennant

What a character Kylie Tennant was. Her strength and distinctiveness leap out from the pages of Jane Grant’s biography, right from the opening where she walks 500 miles at age twenty during the Depression to visit her university friend Lewis Rodd. Impulsively, they marry.  Continue reading →

Adelaide by Kerryn Goldsworthy

30 Saturday Sep 2017

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review, creative nonfiction

≈ 10 Comments

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Adelaide, Kerryn Goldsworthy

adelaide

I’ve never lived in Adelaide, but it has a sense of home for me. It’s the city the Hobbys come from; my ancestor Thomas Hobby, who bears the same name as my son, was one of the early settlers of the suburb of Norwood in 1849. It’s also where my in-laws grew up and now they’ve returned there, we’ve visited quite a few times over the last decade. From them, I’ve learned some of the peculiarities and lore of the place and had a sense of the pride Adelaidians hold about their distinctiveness. Continue reading →

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