08 Tue Dec 2015
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, Uncategorized
A speech for “Katharine’s Birthday,” Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre, Sunday 6 December 2015
In London a hundred years ago Katharine Susannah Prichard met Hugo Throssell in the shadow of World War I. The war brought them together and cost them both so dearly. The Great War radicalised them, leading them to reject militarism and the system which had caused such a disaster. Continue reading
04 Fri Dec 2015
Dear Katharine,
I think of you every day, of course, but I’m especially thinking of you today, on your 132nd birthday. It’s not as if I can imagine you at 132, it’s a decade beyond the reach of the greatest super-centenarian, so instead, I’m remembering your 32nd birthday one hundred years ago on 4 December 1915.
You were in Ceylon, on your way home from London after four years. You spent a some time with your pregnant sister, Beatrice Bridge, and her conservative husband, Patten. You’d missed their wedding the year before – I’m not sure how much that mattered to you. How did you celebrate your birthday that year? Sri Lankan food perhaps, though you wouldn’t have called it that. It was during this stay you visited the Buddhist temple you describe in Child of the Hurricane, and came as close to a spiritual experience as you ever would.
This photo is from much later, but has a connection to your birthday in 1915. It accompanied an article I found this week about your family’s long friendship with the Bridges, culminating in Bea marrying Pack. I had such high hopes for some new information, but it only repeated everything you said, somewhat unreliably, in Child of the Hurricane. It did have this photograph though, one I’ve never seen before and particularly like. You’re looking out of your writing cabin some time in the 1930s; I spent some glorious days in that cabin at the KSP Writers’ Centre earlier this year.
You had no idea what was about to hit you the year you were thirty-two, the year I’m immersed in right now. It was a big year, a year of such immense heartache for you. But there were many years like that. You survived it, like you survived every year but your last. It’s not like I can actually warn you, but please know I’ve seen, as much as anyone can from this distance, and I care.
Until next time, N.
02 Wed Dec 2015
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, news and events, Uncategorized
It’s a hundred years ago on Friday since King George V decorated Katharine Susannah Prichard’s future husband, Hugo Throssell, with a Victoria Cross, Western Australia’s first. To mark the occasion, I’ve been asked to give a speech at Katharine’s Birthday, the annual end-of-year celebration at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre, alongside Chris Horvath, a specialist on the 10th Light Horse. It’s an interesting assignment for a pacifist like me. Continue reading
27 Fri Nov 2015
Posted in academic, Katharine Susannah Prichard, links, news and events
Source: Westerly 60:2 – Westerly
My biography of the early years of Katharine Susannah Prichard is a couple of years from completion, but a modified version of chapter two has just been published in Westerly 60.2. My essay is called “‘The memory of a storm’: The Wild Oats of Han and the childhood of Katharine Susannah Prichard, 1887 to 1895.” Continue reading
28 Wed Oct 2015
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, links
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Imagine the thousands of years of work put into theses in the pre-digital era, only a copy or two ever printed. Last year, one university library told me they do not copy or lend theses, not even to other university libraries. Thankfully, most new PhD theses are now digitised and available online, and there’s even some digitising of older theses going on. Indeed, the thesis most important to my own work has just been digitised – Sandra Burchill’s “Katharine Susannah Prichard: Romance, Romanticism and Politics” (ADFA, 1988). It’s now available from UNSW’s institutional repository. Continue reading
14 Wed Oct 2015
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard
Today I thought I’d discovered a lost poem of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s, a sensual, slightly shocking poem which could be one of the great scoops of my biography. It’s called “Lips of My Love,” and it was mentioned in a 1914 Australian newspaper as having being published in English Review. This is the year before she won the Hodder and Stoughton Novel Competition and met her future husband, Hugo. It’s a sensual and frank poem about sexual enthrallment from a time Katharine was, by the vague account in her autobiography, still involved with the “Preux Chevalier,” a much-older journalist with three daughters who’d romanced her in Paris in 1908 and became increasingly possessive, threatening to kill himself if she ever married. Continue reading
02 Fri Oct 2015
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Katharine Susannah Prichard, the subject of my biography, became famous in March 1915. She was a journalist living in London and she’d been announced as the Australasian winner of the Hodder & Stoughton £1000 Novel Competition for The Pioneers. I’m jumping forward in my research to 1915 for a talk I’m giving later in the year, and today I’ve been “troving” this competition. Continue reading
21 Fri Aug 2015
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, news and events
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I started my PhD one year ago today. I’m sad a whole year is gone, because I don’t want this to end; I don’t think my career is going to get any better than being paid to research a biography for three years. Continue reading
01 Sat Aug 2015
My impression is that the history of journalists and newspapers in colonial Australia, and particularly Melbourne, is largely untapped. I wish someone had tracked more closely the movements of Frank “Critchley” Parker (1862-1944), as his life intersects in some significant ways with the childhood of Katharine Susannah Prichard. This is Critchley Parker Sr I’m talking about, as in recent times there has been interest in his son and his curious death; I’ll return to that. Continue reading
12 Fri Jun 2015
Katharine Susannah Prichard was seventeen in 1901 when My Brilliant Career was published, the same age as the main character, Sybylla. In a radio broadcast paying tribute to Franklin in 1944, Prichard remembered, “What a sensation it created! Most of the well known writers at that time were old, and here was a girl writing with vigour and realism which amazed everybody.” Continue reading
