27 Wednesday Mar 2024
Posted in John Curtin, Uncategorized
After much hesitation and over-thinking, I plunged into starting my new book one day in July last year. Progress has been slow until recent weeks – I’ve been unwell since I got covid again in September. But now it’s coming together – I think this book has momentum, I think it’s going to work.
Continue reading25 Wednesday Oct 2023
Posted in Uncategorized
Nick Gadd’s Melbourne Circle: Walking, Memory and Loss (Arcadia 2020) is a tender and beautiful book about the traces of the past in the suburbs of today. Over many months Gadd walked in a circle (sort of) around Melbourne with his wife. She died soon after they completed the circle and the book, poignantly, is addressed to her, interweaving a memoir of their lives together.
Continue reading20 Thursday Oct 2022
Posted in Uncategorized
Katharine regularly visited the art gallery in Melbourne as a young woman and in 1906, home from stints as a governess in Gippsland and the outback, she saw the newly acquired painting ‘The Pioneer’ by Frederick McCubbin. A decade later, writing her first (published) novel, The Pioneers, in a cold London flat, she grafted her experience of Gippsland onto a plot which follows the three panels of the triptych. The Pioneers’ opening scene describes her characters setting up camp in the uncleared bush; its body narrates the hard work of ‘pioneering’; and its epilogue evokes the third panel as the grandson of the original pioneer visits his ‘lichen-grown wooden cross’. I don’t know if she had a print to work from in London or if she was relying on her memory. The first edition of The Pioneers in 1915 has the painting as a frontispiece. When Katharine returned to Melbourne in 1916, her old journalist friends put on a lavish dinner in her honour at the Cafe Francais. (One of the reviewers of my manuscript wondered why on earth I include details of what they ate that night, but for me it is the wonder of biography to be able to re-create the particulars of a moment in time.) A special guest at the dinner was an aging Frederick McCubbin, who was to die the next year. I searched in vain for some record of the interaction between Katharine and McCubbin that night, but found nothing. Katharine’s novel and McCubbin’s painting are products of the celebratory patriotism of Federation Australia, remembering the pioneering generations who were now dying out, but not remembering the Indigenous people displaced and massacred. More of the story can be found in chapter 12 of The Red Witch, ‘Breaking Out’.
19 Sunday May 2019
Posted in poetry, politics and current affairs, Uncategorized
i.
Shorten conceding. He speaks in waves
And says the right words
Politicians have bigger selves than me
I’m only watching by accident
Having sworn off all politics a couple of hours ago
For years it’s taxed my time
And left me with a dry mouthful of shit
ii.
How many times do I learn the same lesson?
Salesmanship trumps substance
These are the things Australians choose:
Reality TV, franchise shopping, tabloid media, property speculation, the Liberal Party.
To be prime minister you need slogans and photo ops
You don’t need to answer questions
You don’t need policies
You don’t need to try to save the world
Let’s just carry on to hell as we were
iii.
Today I’ll turn off the news forever.
Today, tell me if you voted Liberal
So I can unfriend you and never speak to you again.
Today I’m retreating to aesthetics
I’ll look at paintings from long ago
And live for myself, it’s the Australian way now.
Today we’ll sell the house and go self-sufficient in Balingup.
Today we’ll gird our loins and replenish the armoury,
Planting seeds in the backyard with the kids
And saying you have to keep hoping no matter what.
06 Friday Oct 2017
Posted in biographers, link, Uncategorized
Over at “The Australian Legend”, Bill has an interesting interview with biographer Sarah Goldman, author of Caroline Chisholm: An Irresistible Force. I started out my biography in fear someone else would publish one on my subject before me; that actually happened to Goldman, and it was still okay, as she explains in answer to one of Bill’s questions.
Caroline Chisholm: An Irresistible Force by Sarah Goldman is the recently released biography of one of the most interesting and influential women in Australia’s early history. My review copy arrived with a letter suggesting Sarah would be happy to be interviewed, so I sent her some questions to which she has been kind enough to give extensive answers. I didn’t let on, but this is my first interview.
27 Sunday Aug 2017
Posted in politics and current affairs, Uncategorized
To my dear member of parliament,
I am very concerned by your government’s move to drug testing for welfare recipients. In 2003 when I graduated from university, I was on Newstart allowance for six months while I looked for work and I found dealing with Centrelink alienating and dehumanising. The attitude of the system toward welfare recipients already feels so harsh. I wasn’t on any drugs but the addition of testing would have increased my sense of disillusionment with a state which treated me with suspicion and heavy-handedness.
I can’t believe this measure comes the same week Tony Abbott admits to being too drunk to vote in a crucial bill. It feels to me that your government risks seeming hypocritical. I’m not convinced this measure is actually concerned with helping people with addiction problems – if this is your real concern, increase funding for addiction services.
Yours sincerely, Nathan Hobby.
I didn’t remind my MP of the fact that he was caught drink-driving without a licence two years ago. I don’t know why this testing measure bothers me so much, but it seems just a little fascist and also yet another move of a government which despises the underclass. There are no jobs for people to be getting at the moment. There are actually so many activities / classes of people who receive subsidies or concessions from the government – as someone tweeted, why aren’t the negative gearers being tested for drugs?
13 Monday Feb 2017
Posted in Uncategorized
In case you missed it on my other blog, here’s the details of a reading I’m giving on Sunday at KSP Writers’ Centre. Love to see you there!
Katharine ca. 1904, from her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane, p. 42.
Governess – Katharine Susannah Prichard at Yarram, 1904: a reading by Nathan Hobby
KSP Writers’ Centre Sunday Session
4:00pm – 5:30pm Sunday 19 February 2017
11 Old York Rd, Greenmount WA
$10 general entry / $5 members (proceeds to KSP Writers’ Centre)
Refreshments provided
https://www.facebook.com/events/709078175927574/
Patience is an important virtue in writing a biography—or any book—and realistically it’s going to be a couple of years before my biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard appears. In the meantime, I’m excited to have a chance to share a chapter at the KSP Writers’ Centre Sunday Session.
The writers’ centre is in the hills of Perth, in the house Katharine lived in from 1919 until her death in 1969. Being involved with the centre has put me in touch with a community of writers who care about Katharine and her legacy. It’s…
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07 Tuesday Feb 2017
The great Australian artist Tom Roberts volunteered to serve in a London military hospital during the Great War. He ended up serving as an unofficial batman to Katharine Susannah Prichard’s future husband, Hugo Throssell, who was being treated for war wounds. I picked up Humphrey McQueen’s comprehensive 1996 biography of Roberts and found a lively account of their friendship. Another biography I wish I had the time to read. Each chapter has the name of a literary work from “Such is Life” to “The Good Soldier”. I love this acknowledgement at the back:
Paul Kelly for offering me a column in the Weekend Australian. The $585 I earned each week for two days work during the almost three years was the equivalent of a literary fellowship, without which this book would still not be completed. Rupert Murdoch let us get away with it until the week before the first draft went to the publishers.
One must always look for creative ways to fund the writing of a book.
Another note: McQueen’s great account of Roberts and Throssell is quoted or paraphrased at length in John Hamilton’s biography of Throssell Price of Valour without referencing. Mcqueen’s book does appear in the bibliography, but I don’t think that’s enough. Even “popular” biographies owe it to other writers and to the readers to acknowledge their sources fully.
30 Monday Jan 2017
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, news and events, Uncategorized
Katharine ca. 1904, from her autobiography, Child of the Hurricane, p. 42.
Governess – Katharine Susannah Prichard at Yarram, 1904: a reading by Nathan Hobby
KSP Writers’ Centre Sunday Session
4:00pm – 5:30pm Sunday 19 February 2017
11 Old York Rd, Greenmount WA
$10 general entry / $5 members (proceeds to KSP Writers’ Centre)
Refreshments provided
https://www.facebook.com/events/709078175927574/
Patience is an important virtue in writing a biography—or any book—and realistically it’s going to be a couple of years before my biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard appears. In the meantime, I’m excited to have a chance to share a chapter at the KSP Writers’ Centre Sunday Session.
The writers’ centre is in the hills of Perth, in the house Katharine lived in from 1919 until her death in 1969. Being involved with the centre has put me in touch with a community of writers who care about Katharine and her legacy. It’s also given me the rare opportunity to spend time in my subject’s house. The centre has many writing groups across genres, demographics, and timeslots. If you are a Western Australian writer, I encourage you to join up and be involved in some way – it needs your support more than ever in these days of limited government funding.
It’s chapter five I’ll be reading, “Governess,” the story of 1904 in Katharine’s life. I chose it because it’s a dramatic and largely unknown year of her life, as well as being quite self-contained as a narrative. Twenty-years-old and living away from home for the first time, Katharine set the tongues wagging in Yarram, a small country town in Gippsland. She beguiled several men, including a drug-addicted German doctor on the run from his wife. Starring in a play, she earned a new nickname. She gathered notes and impressions that she would turn into her first award-winning novel, The Pioneers, a decade later.
What better place to hear the story of this important year in Katharine’s life than at the house she lived in for fifty years? Tickets at the door.
06 Friday Jan 2017
Posted in Katharine Susannah Prichard, meta, news and events, Uncategorized
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The word count of my biography just hit 70,000, so I thought I’d pause to celebrate with this blog post. It’s a nice milestone, but it’s not altogether welcome. The paragraph I’m on concerns the outbreak of the Great War, so I’m in August 1914, which means I have 4.5 years to go, and the original aim was for an 80,000 word biography.
Back at the end of August I set a plan to write a chapter a month, taking me to the end of the biography during 2017. I’ve been meeting my targets, but I’ve become painfully aware of how naive my plan was. The years I’m writing about in Katharine’s life have proven to throw up far more intriguing stories, characters and events than I anticipated. A good problem to have, I realise. I’ve already added two chapters, and I expect to have to keep adding them.
Writers often get obsessed by word counts and I think it can be a trap; words are cheap, quality words are hard. But it’s a balancing act: measuring, celebrating output can be a necessary and powerful incentive along the way and I feel my ambitious and naive targets have energised me. So far. Most days.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 