10 Wednesday Feb 2016
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, links
This chapter from my biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard was published in Westerly late last year. It stands on its own as the story of Katharine’s childhood from 1887 to 1895, drawing particularly on the historical basis of her children’s novel, The Wild Oats of Han.
01 Friday Jan 2016
Both Bill and Lisa have written helpful reviews of a new biography, The Magnificent Life of Miss May Holman, Australia’s First Female Labor Parliamentarian by Lekkie Hopkins. Both reviews touch on the two concerns of this blog brought up by the biography – Katharine Susannah Prichard and the art of biography. I look forward to seeing how Hopkins has treated the conjectural relationship between Prichard and Holman, a WA Labor parliamentarian. I can’t offer an especially informed opinion on whether they would have known each other – my current biography stops at 1919 just before Prichard arrives in WA! The 1920s and 1930s are the most “silent” period of Prichard’s life for biographers. The weekly letters to her son Ric (covering 1944-1969) have not yet started; and Prichard’s own account of her early life in Child of the Hurricane basically stops at 1919, with a chapter postscript about the 1920s to 1930s written at the editor’s request (I discovered in the archives) and focused on her horse, when the rest of life was too painful to examine. I feel honoured to be quoted by both Bill and Lisa on what makes for good biography from one of my recent posts. As they mention, I wasn’t referring to the Holman biography when I made that observation; I’m yet to read it.
A review of The Magnificent Life of Miss May Holman, Australia’s First Female Labor Parliamentarian by Lekkie Hopkins.
Mary Alice (May) Holman was born in 1893 in Broken Hill, NSW to miner and unionist Jack Holman and his (very) new wife, the 17 yo Katherine. Jack had problems in Broken Hill as the mining companies attempted, successfully, to reduce workers’ pay and conditions during the recession, and moved to the goldfields around Cue in Western Australia, settling at Nannine – a thriving centre then, but these days not even a ghost town – where he was joined by his wife and daughter a couple of years later. Katherine returned to Broken Hill for the birth of their second daughter and when she came back her mother came too and lived with the family for the rest of her life.
Hopkins has Katherine travelling by coach between Nannine and Yalgoo (southwest…
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07 Monday Dec 2015
The Guardian has a fine trans-Atlantic review of the year’s best biographies, capturing some of the diversity of life-writing in 2015. Not an Australian in sight, but I suppose that’s understandable given the limits of how much one poor reviewer can read in a year. The Young Eliot is on my shortlist to read; T.S. Eliot and Prichard do not overlap in any significant way but are contemporaries and I also want to do some more thinking about the partial biography that tells only of a subject’s early life.
Enthralling Eliot, spellbinding Thatcher and Le Carré unmasked
27 Friday 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 Wednesday 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
30 Sunday Aug 2015
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Writer and priest, Ted Witham, has asked me to carry on a chain-blog. Ted’s post can be found here, giving interesting insight into his writing process. I think a walk along the beach first thing is a splendid idea, though would be a bit hard for me. I’m also looking forward to his feature article on Dorothea Angus.
What am I working on at the moment?
As readers of this blog know, I’m working on a biography of the early life of Katharine Susannah Prichard. I have a new title this week, taken from chapter two: “The Memory of a Storm: The Making of Katharine Susannah Prichard, 1883-1919”. It’s a phrase from her book The Wild Oats of Han, but it also refers nicely back to her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane, the foundation for my book. Continue reading
07 Friday Aug 2015
Congratulations to Philip Butterss, whose biography of CJ Dennis, An Unsentimental Bloke, won the National Biography Award of Australia on Monday. A battered old copy of CJ Dennis’s Sentimental Bloke sat on my family’s shelf when I was a child, and my unsuccessful efforts to read it immunised me against him, perhaps rather unfairly. Continue reading
03 Monday Aug 2015
Over on her blog in another amusing and insightful post, Laura Sewell Matter’s biographical quest takes her to the rubbish dump, the one named after the wife of her subject. What a meta-moment! As she says: “The research process has been largely about sifting through dusty old stuff in search of what remains useful. There are items that stink and items whose original use I cannot decipher, amidst all the metaphorical tuna cans and banana peels** (remnants of daily life), and a few real treasures that make it all worth the effort.”
09 Saturday May 2015
Posted in biographies of living subjects, links
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Keating wins his own history war.
HarperCollins Australia has apologised and agreed to pulp unsold copies of its flagship 2015 release – Paul Keating: The Biography by David Day – to settle a fierce legal battle with the former Labor prime minister.
08 Friday May 2015
Posted in biographical quests, links
Years ago, researching eccentric libraries for my novel The Remains, I stumbled across the remarkable story of Belle da Costa Greene (1879 or 1883-1950), the African-American woman “passing” as white who became the glamorous librarian to the wealthy Pierpont Morgan. Continue reading
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 