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.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 